Jordan Hubbard, Apple’s Unix Technology Group director and author of “Absolute BSD: The Ultimate Guide to FreeBSD“, recently gave a presentation on the evolution of Mac OS X. It has some interesting information on the under-the-hood developments of OS X and where it will move in the future.
Mac OS X has been my favorite OS since I fell in love with the public beta in the fall of 2000. It’s a great UNIX combined with the nicest user interface I know of.
Yesterday PGP announced the availability of their Whole Disk Encryption (WDE) product for OS X next month. Although disk encryption products for the Mac currently exist (like TrueCrypt and FileVault), these solutions only encrypt part of a hard drive, such as a user’s home directory.
Full disk encryption (which is what WDE provides), on the other hand, encrypts every bit on a hard drive—in used or free space. This is important, because forensics products such as EnCase and FTK are very good at finding traces of sensitive information in unused disk space and temporary files like the swap. With full disk encryption, EnCase and FTK are ineffective if an encrypted machine is powered off.
Another reason why PGP WDE for Mac is exciting is because PGP is a highly respected security company and it’s WDE has been tested by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to meet its Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 (FIPS 140-2). Both the reputation of PGP and the FIPS-140 certification indicate that encryption algorithms employed in WDE have been implemented correctly. This is crucial because even secure encryption algorithms can be easily broken if implemented poorly.
Full disk encryption is a great tool for any organization to protect sensitive information. In the next year, Georgia State University will require that PGP Whole Disk Encryption be installed on every laptop, workstation, or server that stores sensitive information. If every organization followed a similar policiy, privacy breaches would not be the almost-weekly security farce that they are today.
I had heard that Apple’s new operating system, OS X Leopard, will support resolution independence, but I haven’t seen anything recently online about whether this feature is still supported.
However, I found confirmation of resolution independence in Leopard in a description of one of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference sessions:
If your application uses custom controls or artwork, make this session a top priority. Modern displays vary in size and pixels per inch. Find out how to design a rich, scalable user interface for your application. The session will discuss guidelines for revising icons and artwork, new functions to adopt, testing strategies, performance concerns, as well as common problems and solutions.
There is also a video introducing the topic on iTunes here (Apple Developer Connection account needed).
From time to time students ask me about the various software application icons I have in my dock, Mac OS X’s excellent application launcher. Below are some of my favorite OS X applications that I regularly use. In reviewing the list I was surprised that the majority of these applications are open source.
SSHKeychain is a great open source tool that integrates SSH keys into Apple’s Keychain password management application. SSH private keys are used in lieu of passwords to eliminate weaknesses surrounding password authentication and the inconvenience of typing a password to login to a server. However, SSH keys are usualy protected with a passphrase so that if stolen, a thief would not have automatic access to servers that accept the SSH key.
Unfortunately, a good passphrase is even more cumbersome than a password. Using SSHKeychain, all I have to remember is Keychain’s single-sign-on password and all of my SSH keys are unlocked as needed. And SSHKeychain has just been released as a Universal binary.
Skim is a great open source PDF viewer that amoung other things allows one to highlight and anotate PDF’s in a variety of ways. As a researcher, I’m constantly reading and reviewing scientific papers. Skim can mark up documents much more ably than Apple’s Preview or Adobe Reader, and has a nice range of other features to boot.
Burn is a an open source CD/DVD burning and authoring program. Besides being a versatile disk burner, it can easily convert quicktime, DivX, Xvid, and other media formats into a DVD-compatible MPEG file and then burn the file to DVD.
Cyberduck is a useful open source GUI FTP/SFTP client which allows one to open any remote file using a local application. It also supports SSH keys for password-less sign-on to remote servers.
Firefox is my favorite web browser for any platform and is famously open source. No other browser can match its extensibility. I have plugins to enhance Google’s functionality, block ads and Flash, block javascript (if I want).
Another great Firefox feature is the ability to search using keywords in the address bar. For example, if I want to look up an article in Google Scholar, I simple type “SC” and then the keywords I am searching for in the address bar, and then Firefox takes me directly to Google Scholar’s search results.. Very fast.
Gimp is an open source image editor comparable to PhotoShop. Although not as feature-rich as PhotoShop, I find that it has far more features than I need and is quite powerful.
Google Earth is a great application/service that gets better all the time as Google continues to improve its satelite imaging and more plug-ins are created. A fantastic application.
Handbrake is an open source DVD ripping application that makes converting entire DVD movies into 300 MB files a snap.
iCal is Apple’s great calendaring program. Much nicer than MS Outlook.
Kismet (KisMac for OS X) is a passive wireless sniffer that can also detect wireless networks that do not broadcast their SSID. Open source.
Apple Mail is my favorite email client for any platform. It offers very fast searching and nice integration with OS X. Additionally, Hawkwings.net is a neat site with a lot of tips to increase Mail’s functionality.
Nessus is a very powerful vulnerability scanner. Very useful for assessing the security of servers I manage.
Parallels is a great virtualization product that allows me to run Windows XP, Vista, and Linux at near-native speeds. It would be hard to go back to a system that can’t run another operating system on top of it. With Parallels, I have easy access to programs on every major platform.
Quicksilver is an open source application launcher that makes programs, documents, and folders accessible with a quick keystroke.
Textwrangler is a full-featured, free text editor. It is not as feature-rich as BBEdit or TextMate, but it does have a surprising range of capabilities for a free product.
VirtureDesktops is a great open source tool that gives me quick access to virtual desktops, allowing me to virtually increase my screen real estate. I use it in combination with Parallels to dedicate one desktop to Windows or Linux and another to OS X.
Transmission is my favorite BitTorrent client for OS X. It’s not as powerful as Azureus, but does 95% of what I need very simply. Open source.
VLC is an open source media player. It can play almost any media files.
Cisco VPN is a pretty generic VPN client, but it is an indispensable security tool for a mobile user. With a VPN I can securely access the Internet from whatever public Wi-Fi network I may be connected to.
Terminal is a Unix shell that is closely integrated with OS X. UNIX is my favorite aspect of OS X and I use the command line all the time. I use DarwinPorts (and to a lesser extent Fink) to install a lot of great GNU/Linux, BSD, and otherwise open source command-line tools.
X11 allows graphical UNIX programs to run within OS X.
Every once in a while a killer app debuts, a software application so useful that it alone justifies the purchase of the supporting hardware. Witness Parallels Desktop for Mac, a virtual machine software that allows multiple operating systems to be installed on a single machine. This means a Mac running OS X can now also run Windows at the same time.
This is a huge boon for people wanting to switch to Macintosh but who have been forced to stick with Windows because of one or two critically important programs that only run on Windows. Parallels makes use of virtualization technology in Intel’s new Core Duo processors so that Windows runs next to OS X at near- native speeds. Essentially a Mac with Parallels is equivelent to two laptops–one a Mac and the other a PC. This is what makes Parallels a killer app.
However, Parallels can run many more operating systems than Windows XP. Parallels can also run Linux, OS/2, Solaris, FreeBSD, NeXTStep, Windows 3.1?virtually anthing that runs on x86 hardware.
On my laptop, I can run OS X side-by-side with Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. Further, thanks to an open source program called VirtueDesktops, I can switch simultaneously between these three operating systems. To see how cool this is, check out this video.
I recently moved from Ubuntu Linux on a Dell Inspiron to Mac OS X on a MacBook. Interestingly, the day before I made my purchase, Tim O’Reilly observed that a few long-time Mac-using programers had recently moved from Mac OS X to Ubuntu Linux. Because I was about to make the swich the other way, I posted the following reponse on O’Reilly’s blog:
Tim, I think your radar sense is on to something again. However, I’d like to offer myself as a counter example in that I am moving from Ubuntu to OS X this weekend when I purchase a MacBook.Ubuntu has impressed me as the most polished and feature-rich Linux distro I’ve used so far (among SUSE, Fedora, Debian, and Mandriva). I love that it improves on the robust Debian distro, offering fast development releases and an emphasis on usability. Ubuntu has improved a great deal in just its first two years of existence, and I fully expect alpha geeks and savvy tech users to adopt Ubuntu in favor of Mac OS X in the future. However, there are still several limitations to Ubuntu and Linux in general that are prompting me to move to OS X.
First, I find that Linux still requires a large degree of administration to work properly. I use several applications that require a kernel recompile every time a new version of the Linux kernel is released. Although I like the freedom of compiling my own kernel, the necessity of compiling the kernel in order to use the applications I need can be very frustrating.
Second, Linux lags behind Mac OS X and Windows in multimedia. Great strides have been made in recent years, but managing multimedia content is still difficult. Video editing and DVD authoring are especially salient sore points. Aside from the newly released Picasa for Linux, even managing photo albums is not as simple as it should be. Further, although Linux is so far DRM-free, this also means that Linux is shutout from online media content vendors such as iTunes and other music download services, and Warner Bros, Vongo, and others’ new movie download services.
Third, although software integration has improved, the large majority of software for Linux continues to feel disjointed and fragmentary when taken as a whole. Most applications don’t interoperate well with others. Simple things like dragging an image from a web page to an office document don’t work. As a result, the Linux desktop is a patchwork of powerful individual applications that never quite coordinate well enough to provide a satisfying user experience.
Fourth, neither Gnome nor KDE are as usable or as graphically appealing as Mac OS X or even Windows. I recognize that UI aesthetics and usability are not important for everyone, but I along with others note that the Linux UI is in many ways inferior to that of Windows XP, much less Vista or Mac OS X. Yes, XGL is becoming widely available, but XGL strikes me as a 3D-rendering novelty without good underlying usability justification.
I could list more complaints and others could doubtlessly add their own Linux quibbles as well. In sum, although I expect Ubuntu in time to become the power user’s distro of choice, Mac OS X still remains an unparalleled combination of UNIX and polished user experience.