Attendees at the Toronto Comdex this past week in July had the
chance of a
sneek peek of an early build of Mac OS 8.
The demo was done under very tight constaints (no commercial software
was run, just a modified SimpleText) and only the working parts were
shown.
The user interface was demo'd to a large extent. A couple of
"Themes" were
shown, the base 3D default look and the garish "t-theme or Kids Theme"
was shown as well. The t-theme had quite a bit of animation in it as
the
menus did flip and check boxes in dialogs flipped. The sound manager
was
not implemented as yet. The user spaces were also demo'd.
The multithreading was demonstrated as well doing a copy and trash
empty
simultaneously in the finder. The tip manager and experts were
demonstrated as well using a modified version of SimpleText.
The current build of Mac OS 8 was running on an 8100 very slowly. Apple
techs told me the version was not optimized and only ran on 8100's
and was
far from final as cosmetic defects in the UI were present.
Apple believes that work is progressing and a DR1 release is about
"2 weeks
away".
After the demo I had a chance to take a sneek peek in the Mac OS 8
"System
Folder" and it IS genuine as it contained a lot of debuggers and
multiple
folders filled chock full of plain-looking files with names like
"systemkernelOS, DesktopAnimation Manager, memorymanagerLeach.api"
and so on...
Apple is starting to market this stuff as they handed out lots of
Mac OS 8
Tour CD-ROMS and gave demos of live code twice-daily. The code that was
running did not crash during the 2 demos I sat in on my day there.
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