OSNews

Everywhere I look in OS X, smooth integration is the operative phrase. One of the smoothest examples of this is in CD burning. Stick in a blank CD and OS X asks if you want to make an ISO, HFS+, or audio CD. If you choose ISO or HFS+, the disc mounts on the desktop. Drag what you want onto the volume, then drag it toward the Trash. As soon as you begin to drag, the Trash icon turns into a burn icon (thus mitigating the old complaint that it makes no sense to trash a volume you wish to eject). Click burn, let it rip, and it's done. No 3rd-party software required.

If you want to make an audio CD, iTunes is launched automatically. Drag stuff from your music library onto a playlist entry, click Burn, and that's it. Again, no 3rd-party software required. No ambiguity, no wrestling, no coasters. While Be's CDBurner application shares pretty much the same ease of use when creating audio CDs, burning data CDs in BeOS was never a particularly elegant affair. And I never succeeded in making anything but coasters in Linux, either with the GUI tools bundled in Mandrake or with the command line cdrecord, use of which I had already mastered in BeOS. In OS X, this stuff "just works."

In BeOS, I had learned to create disk images with dd, mkisofs and mkfbs, and to mount them in the Tracker. The process was useful in some instances, but far from painless. With OS X, Apple has "institutionalized" the use of disk images. Many OS X software downloads are .dmg files; opening one causes it to be check-summed and mounted in the Finder. It's an elegant way for developers to distribute software, and for users to create backups of disk volumes, including CDs they own. By masking the complexities of disk image creation, mounting, and unmounting, Apple's DiskCopy utility makes it easy to generate bit-perfect copies of hard drives, data CDs, and audio CDs (regardless of file system).

One inconsistency worth noting: To burn a data CD, you drag the volume toward the Trash. To burn an audio CD, you don't. The reason is that iTunes doesn't show the mounted volume. Instead, you simply make playlists and burn them. A minor quibble.

One of the more interesting innovations in OS X is the fact that PDF technology is pervasive in the operating system -- the Quartz display engine is built on top of Display PostScript, as was NeXTStep's. This means it's possible to output from any application that can print directly to PDF. Select Print, then click Preview. The document is rendered to PDF and displayed in the built-in Preview application. Do a Save As... and you've got your PDF. No need to purchase or install Acrobat, and no need for 3rd party software to integrate with particular applications. It's just there. Very nice.

The printable version of this document was created with this technique.

1. "Out of the Frying Pan..."
2. "... And Into the Fire..."
3. "Smells Like Home Cookin"
4. "A Lot To Like, First Impressions"
5. "Networking Nirvana"
6. "CD Burning, Disk Images"
7. "Applications"
8. "iMovie, iDVD"
9. "Browsers and E-Mail"
10. "Power Editors"
11. "Community"
12. "The Bad and The Ugly"
13. "File System Shoot-Out"
14. "Application-Binding Policies"
15. "Alien Filesystems"
16. "Miscellaneous Moans and Groans"
17. "All Told, Life Is Good"