Dunepilot said:
Again, could you please explain a little more about what features it has that make it so appealing?
Well, in the beginning (right after Apple acquired NeXT) I started using NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP to get familiar with the foundations of what the next version of the Mac OS was going to be based on. And I didn't want to just
play with the stuff, I wanted to be as good at using those operating systems as I was at using the Mac OS.
This required figuring out how to do things I would normally do on a Mac in NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP. This wasn't too hard as I had spent time on NeXT systems before and there were applications out there for most of what I needed to do.
When I got my first copy of Rhapsody (around 1999) I knew that Mac OS X was coming soon and I was just starting out servicing Macs. Well, I really needed to know more about what Apple had changed so I decided that the best thing to do was to remove OPENSTEP from my ThinkPad and put Rhapsody on it... and then make that system the one I used while in the field.
The idea was that away from home I would only have Rhapsody to rely on (as it was the only OS on that system) to get my work done (as all my Apple documentation was also on that system). If something went wrong, I needed to be able to fix it to keep working, and the fixes would most likely be similar to those I would need to be able to do in Mac OS X.
Even though I had Mac OS X Developer Preview 4 and the Public Beta, those were on systems which had Mac OS 9 on them, which meant I could always slip back to a safe environment rather than figuring out how to get the job done in Mac OS X. On my ThinkPad there was only Rhapsody to fall back on.
As it turned out, Apple
really deconstructed Rhapsody quite a bit to make Mac OS X. Some of the early developer previews were as bad as the first Rhapsody developer release (just not a fun environment to work in). And the progress was pretty slow on Mac OS X compared to Rhapsody. Rhapsody was pretty much finished by Rhapsody 5.1, which was released to help developers get apps ready for the first public release.
Well, after spending a lot of time in Rhapsody I got really productive using that system. As with any operating system, no matter how good the OS is, it is only as productive as the applications that run on it. In the case of Rhapsody I got very good with the available apps.
And when Mac OS X v10.0 was released, I wasn't all that impressed. In fact, other than trouble shooting other people's issues, I rarely used Mac OS X 10.0/10.1. I was still using Mac OS 8.6 for my high end pro apps and Rhapsody (by this point Mac OS X Server 1.2 on a PowerBook G3 Wallstreet) for everything else. My usage was 60:30:10 (Rhapsody:Mac OS 8.6:Mac OS X) at that time. And I did have apps (many of the same ones I used in Rhapsody) for Mac OS X, it just wasn't the system for me.
So in August of 2002 Apple released Mac OS X v10.2. I had a spare hard drive and wanted to learn the new OS (which was quite different than 10.1) so I pulled the drive with Rhapsody on it out of my Wallstreet and put the other one in with 10.2 on it. I was running it on the condition that if it has to be shutdown or restarted
at all over the next two weeks I would pull that drive and put my old Rhapsody drive back in.
Honestly, it wasn't really a fair test. I let my wife use it a ton and then let a friend from out of town use it for a couple days.
At the end of three weeks the system had an uptime of 21 days and a few hours. It had been running continuously (even when out of my possession) all that time. I put my old hard drive back in, backed up the data, wiped Rhapsody and installed 10.2 on that system.
The PowerBook quickly became my primary computer... which made it a bad choice for caring around with me in the field. So this put my ThinkPad (which was still running Rhapsody and still had all my Apple documentation on it) back into full time service.
This was about the time that I decided to do my
Rhapsody Resource Page. I was doing a lot of installations on people's systems which means watching a lot of progress bars. So what better system to make a Rhapsody site on than Rhapsody. It would give me an answer to that question I always get
"what can you do in Rhapsody?"
So my Rhapsody site has been made only using Rhapsody native apps (with a little help early on from ImageReady to get image sizes down) on systems running Rhapsody.
It turned out great... so I thought
why not do it again with OPENSTEP for a NeXT site? Well, as it turns out, Apple made quite a few advances (and so did third part developers in their apps) that I enjoyed using in Rhapsody. So consequently, most of the
NEXTSTEP & OPENSTEP Resource Page is made in Rhapsody too (with a few pages made in Mac OS X and OPENSTEP).
Also my set up has evolved.
When I started the Rhapsody page the only Rhapsody system I had running was my ThinkPad. The thing is, while nice, Rhapsody for Intel didn't have many of the same apps that Rhapsody for PowerPC did... and I
really started missing those apps from when I was using Rhapsody on my Wallstreet.
So one of my clients gave me a PowerMac 7500 and I added some parts I had to it to make it into a great little Rhapsody system. Then another client gave me an 8600/300, which is just about perfect for Rhapsody, and that is the system I spend most of my time on today.
This is a current screen shot of my 8600 and the project I'm working on on it right now...
So the obvious question is
what does it take to be productive in Rhapsody?
Well, a word processor is nice, and I've learned how to get the most out of
every version of TextEdit. And because I use it so much, I replaced Apple's Java version with an Objective C version of TextEdit (makes it much nicer to work with).
Then I also needed to do page layout, illustration and web design, all of those areas are actually covered by Stone Design's Create. In the screen shot above Create 10.0 is the app in front. This is usually the main app I spend my productive time in.
Even with web pages made by Create, they aren't really ready for the web just yet. OmniWeb in Rhapsody has the same source code editor as in the current version of OmniWeb (which I also use in Mac OS X as my primary browser). I can open a page, edit and redisplay that page within OmniWeb. It also colors tags and highlights errors... so that is how I polish off a page before putting it up.
Putting up a page in Rhapsody is pretty much the same as putting up a page in Mac OS X for me. I use RBrowser in both systems as my FTP client.
Image editing can be done in TIFFany3 (which I have) but I can actually get most of what I need done with ToyViewer, PixelNhance, CuttingRoom and ToyAlbum (an image browser).
I used to use
MailViewer for e-mail, but I really like proofing what I write with text-to-speech, so most of my writing (and mailing) is done in 10.2 these days (I don't care for the accent in 10.3/10.4).
And unlike Mac OS X, PDF is not built into Rhapsody. But there are some very nice PDF solutions for Rhapsody (which I cover on a page
here).
And then on top of all that, Mac OS 8.6 runs better in Blue Box than by itself on a system. In Blue Box memory management is handed over to Rhapsody. I just finished a splash animation using Flash 5 in Blue Box on my 8600 (I don't have a Mac OS X version of Flash) for a client. Plus I can run my old math apps in Blue Box (at pretty good speeds as can be seen
here)
I think that sort of gives an idea as to what I can do using Rhapsody, and how I can be very productive in it. And the other thing is that it is nice to have a platform all to myself.
