On July 22, Apple is scheduled to release MacOS 8.0. At a recent conference I had a chance to play with the new operating system (OS), so I thought I'd share with you.

The neatest new feature for me will be that the Finder (the application that controls the Mac's desktop) will be fully multithreaded. This means that it will be able to handle more than one operation at a time. So, we will now be able to copy files, while downloading files from the Internet, while conducting other work in another application, all concurrently. No more waiting for one thing to finish before moving on to something else. This will be a real time saver.

For those of you who have been using the Aaron shareware product, you've already gotten used to many of the new look and feel features of MacOS 8. Icons will be 3-D now.

For others of you who have been using another shareware product like Décor to display full screen photos for your desktop background, you'll be pleased to know that MacOS 8 has now built-in this feature.

Users familiar with Windows 95 know that when windows are minimized their title bar appears at the bottom of the screen, to be easily reopened by clicking on them. Mac Windows dragged to the bottom of the screen under MacOS 8 will now be reduced to tabs along the bottom of the screen.

Have you ever wished your menus would stay down when you clicked on them, similar to those in Windows 95? Well, now you have both. A "quick" click on a menu will "stick" the menu open, while the normal "click and wait for a moment for it to pop down" menus will be available for you.

Also, you will now be able to option-click on an item in a window and have a mini-menu pop down with some common functions available to you, such as moving the item to the trash, duplicating it, opening it, and the like.

All in all, a pretty neat upgrade, and one I'm quite looking forward to. Oh, I should also share that the new OS didn't crash once while I was playing with it. We'll see how that translates into real world work. I've attached a screen shot for you to see how this all looks, so check it out! Later...

- Dave Marsh