Aqua: The Movie

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

The best thing that ever happened to Apple was Steve Jobs' leaving. His years of exile in the desert--where he founded the doomed NeXT computer system and bought the successful Pixar Animation Studios--filled him with so many great ideas that the Apple he's resurrecting could end up being stronger than the Apple he quit. The effects of his sabbatical are especially apparent in Aqua, the front end to the forthcoming operating-system upgrade known as Mac OS X.

If a user interface could be described as dramatic--in the Hollywood sense--this is it. Jelly-colored onscreen buttons pulsate as if alive. Menu borders are translucent, allowing you to see the documents under them. Sliders glow luminously. And there's animation: dismiss an unneeded window with a mouse click, and it disappears in a blur like Casper the Friendly Ghost being sucked up a chimney.

If OS X works the way it's supposed to when it's delivered in early summer, I might go back to using a Mac at home. I say "if" because reporters were only permitted to see Aqua demoed under the steely-eyed supervision of Apple's p.r. department. No taking it home to crash test it under real working conditions. So it hardly seems fair to compare it with Millennium, Microsoft's upcoming revision of Windows 98, which I've been running on three machines for the past six weeks.

Oh, but the hell with fair...

The truth is, Millennium won't be winning any prizes at Cannes. At this point in its development--it's also scheduled to ship by summer--it has no flash and little innovation. Where Aqua has rethought the way Mac users interact with applications--using something called a "dock" that behaves like the Windows task bar, only with intelligence and flair--Millennium looks almost identical to Windows 98. The main differences are under the hood. One thing I liked: bugs that plagued my home network magically disappeared after installing Millennium, thanks to its emphasis on home networking. But while Millennium is designed to be more stable than previous Windows, my home PC still crashes daily. Millennium is also supposed to speed up the time it takes your computer to start up. If it did, I couldn't tell.

The way Millennium handles software conflicts is interesting--especially compared with OS X's new approach. Have you ever installed a program only to find out that Mr. Computer doesn't like it? That happened to me recently with Quake3. When I installed the game, it apparently screwed up the driver for my sound card, silencing my PC. I tried uninstalling the program, but that didn't help. I finally had to reinstall the sound-card driver. Millennium behaves like a time machine so you can easily roll your system back to the day before whatever trouble you're experiencing began. Naturally, it didn't work for me. After installing Millennium on a PC in my office, the modem suddenly stopped resetting itself. I rolled the system back. No change.

So how does OS X handle software problems? When you try to install a program that conflicts with any other program, the Mac simply won't allow you to run it. Presumably, OS X users will never suffer from software conflicts again. Sure sounds cool. If it works.

To learn more about Apple's Aqua and OS X, go to apple.com Got questions for Josh? You can e-mail him at jquit@well.com