OpenStep 4.0 for Mach

I was fortunate enough to be able to try out an early prerelease of OpenStep 4.0 for Mach (formerly known as NEXTSTEP). Unfortunately, it turns out that I didn't keep a copy of my report. If you have any questions, just send me email. The highlights were:

The tabbed shelf is cool. You can hide it at the bottom of the screen, and it pops up / disappears just by flicking the mouse toward / away from it, even if it's covered by windows. Used in this way, it replaces the Workspace shelf and the Dock while taking up almost no screen real estate.

The NeXT icon, the Documents icon, and the Recycler appear on every tabbed shelf.

The NeXT icon (showing running apps) and the Documents icon (showing open docs) eliminate the rows of tiles that appear at the bottom of the screen when you have a lot of running apps and open documents, thus saving even more screen space. "Miniaturizing" a doc window now just makes it disappear.

The Documents icon shows open docs organized by file type (RTF, RTFD, TIFF, Workspace viewer, etc.).

The small document icon on the far right of the tabbed shelf should allow you to drag your shelf into mail messages and the like, but that feature wasn't yet working in this release.

The FileManager(? What's wrong with FileViewer?) buttons can be hidden.

The Clock has, for some reason, been separated from Preferences.app.

Opening a document (I think this was in Edit or in Librarian) opens the window before it finishes loading the content, resizing the scroll bar as it goes, a la Netscape.

The title bar color is indeed ugly and MS-like, and is apparently not settable.

The close and mini buttons are very ugly.

Notice the patterned background in the screenshot. You can set a solid background color from Preferences, but once changed, we couldn't figure out how to get a patterned background again. I'm sure that this is a temporary situation.

Considering the early state of this release, it was surprisingly stable, with only a few apparent bugs and some documentation left to work out.

All in all, only very minor quibbles about look, and raves about functionality.

Go to NeXT's OpenStep site, which has screenshots of OpenStep running on Windows 95 and Windows NT. Good ideas from the cross-platform compatibility standpoint, and probably good for NeXT's treasury, but you'll never see me using them if I have anything to say about it.

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