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by Jason Snell

(IDG) -- Sometimes it's hard to see the future until it smacks you in the face. For the past two years, Apple has been telling us that Mac OS X is on the horizon, and that when it arrives it'll be a revolutionary development that will change the Macintosh experience forever. But like the year 2000, the arrival of OS X always felt like a distant eventuality.

Suddenly, the future is now. Shortly after the calendar clicked over to 2000, Apple unveiled Mac OS X's brand-new interface, named Aqua, giving the world its first glimpse of how we'll all interact with our Macs for years to come. And for all the hand-wringing and online carping about Apple's plans to remake the Mac interface, the changes Mac OS X will bring are more likely to delight than to disappoint.

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Mac Compatible?

While most Mac users will initially notice the new interface elements Apple is adding in OS X, it's important to note that the most significant changes are happening behind the scenes. There, you'll find that Mac OS X is a fully modern operating system, with features such as preemptive multitasking and protected memory to make the hearts of computer geeks go piddy-pat. You may not care about those buzzwords, but you will care about how the technology behind them will improve your Mac experience.

The transition begins

Currently, Mac developers are using a preview version of OS X, one that doesn't include the new Aqua interface. This spring, those developers should receive the final prerelease version of Mac OS X for compatibility testing. The next step will be OS X's public release, which Apple says will happen this summer. (Apple has yet to address the question of this substantial upgrade's cost.)

During the latter part of 2000, Mac OS X will likely be included with new Mac models as they're introduced; this period will culminate in the final date on Apple's OS X rollout calendar, January 2001. The company says that after that point all new Macs will ship with Mac OS X, not Mac OS 9, on their hard drives.

So whether you're planning on buying OS X this summer, or waiting until you buy a new Mac next year, chances are that sooner or later you'll be using Mac OS X.

Catch the wave

But if you give Aqua a closer examination, you'll discover a host of artistic touches that elevate this new interface above its predecessors. That's not to disparage the current Mac interface today's technology allows Apple to make enhancements that simply couldn't be included before now.

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The first thing you notice when you look at Aqua is, of course, the color silver with blue highlights. Most colored items have a shiny, 3-D appearance that makes them look as if they're made of polished glass. Aqua's blue progress bar undulates as it moves from left to right across the screen. Brightly colored sliders stand out against windows' silver backgrounds. Even scroll bars look like fragile blue-glass objects.

In the current Mac interface, buttons that can be pushed by pressing the return key stand out because they have a thick line drawn around them. Most longtime Mac users have figured this out, but it's an interface convention lost on many novice users. In Mac OS X, you can't miss the default button it's blue, and it throbs brighter and darker while waiting for your command.

Windows

Next to the red circle is a yellow one, which fills with a minus sign click on it and you'll minimize the window, making it disappear from the screen and move to Mac OS X's new Dock area at the bottom of the screen (more on the Dock follows). Clicking on the green button, which fills with a plus sign, maximizes the window, expanding it to fill the screen.

These circles also help you keep track of which window is active. They're filled with color only when they're in the frontmost window if a window isn't currently active, the circles are transparent.

Each window's top right corner contains another button, this one with a dot inside. Clicking on this button leads you into something called Single Window Mode, in which only one window is visible at a time. Whenever you open another window, the currently active window is minimized automatically and sent to the Dock.

Shadows and fog

Subtle shading is everywhere in the Aqua interface. Every pull-down menu and dialog box is partially transparent, showing a hint of what's behind it. When you let go of your mouse, menus don't simply disappear they fade away. And all Mac OS X text is antialiased, featuring smooth edges that are much easier on the eye than is the old-fashioned jaggy type.

The ability to feature hazy shadows, to display smooth-edged type, and to create transparent dialog boxes is pervasive in Mac OS X thanks to Quartz, a new graphics system derived from Adobe's PDF technology. But this new graphics power isn't used just for transparent effects: just about everything you do with your mouse in Mac OS X has an immediate response. If you drag a window around, the entire contents of that window move.

That doesn't sound like much, but keep in mind that when you move a window in the current Mac OS, all you really move is a gray outline of that window. The actual window only moves once you've released your mouse button. Similarly, when you resize a window, you actually see the size of the window change as you're dragging.

Finder

Those concerns weren't baseless. Mac OS X does indeed offer a very different sort of Finder, one that will undoubtedly appeal to many Mac users and repel others. But it also provides all the functionality of the old Finder. And that means that those who prefer today's method of finding and copying files will be able to continue using their Mac more or less as they have. By default, however, the new Finder keeps to itself. When you double-click on a folder, the Finder window updates to display the contents of that folder.

Whether you prefer the old method or the new, here's what the new Finder will look like: the Finder's window has a row of buttons at the top, reminiscent of Mac OS 9's Sherlock 2 interface. If you click on one of these buttons, you'll be taken to a specific location on your Mac: the Computer button shows available drives and your network connection; Home takes you to your home folder (especially important if your Mac is used by several different people); Apps leads you to the home of all your programs; Docs to where you store your documents; Favorites to a collection of commonly visited parts of your Mac; and People to the folders of all the people with whom you share your Mac.

Next to these buttons is a View button, which lets you switch among three different ways of viewing the contents of a Finder window: List, Icon, and Browser. The List and Icon views are basically the same sorts of view your Finder has today; the Browser view is a multicolumn window that lets you view several levels of a hard drive at once. When you click on a folder in a column list, the contents of that folder are displayed in the next column to the right. If you click on a file, the Finder will try to display a preview of what's in that file a fast way of seeing if that JPEG image on your disk is the photograph you think it is.

Finally, at the top right of a Finder window is a Search box similar to those on Web pages at long last integrating search capability in the Finder rather than forcing users to launch a separate application in order to find items on their hard drives. (After all, what good is a Finder that can't find files?)

Below the row of large buttons is a blue "back" button that functions just like its equivalent in a Web browser: it lets you go back to where you've just been. Next to it is a pop-up menu that displays your current location; if you click on it, it displays other locations you've viewed recently.

The dock

The Dock can contain anything you want not just images representing minimized windows but also items you drag into it. That means folders, applications, documents even links to Web sites. Each item stored in the Dock has its own icon, which can be a thumbnail view of the contents of that item. Applications can also use a Dock icon to show information about the status of a window for example, a mail program's Dock icon could appear differently if you had new mail waiting. Clicking on an item in the Dock automatically opens its window in your workspace.

The last word

It will take time for these changes to catch on, and only time will tell how favorably or how quickly the industry will respond. For now, however, the future looks very, very good.