The Apple Macintosh has set a well-known standard for a consistent, convenient windowing interface. System 7, released in May 1989, is the newest major revision of the system software. It includes new features for interapplication communication, font handling, network support, and virtual memory. This book is intended to familiarize new or prospective users of System 7 with its capabilities. The book describes the human interface only; it does not provide programming information.
In order to use System 7 with the help of this book, the reader will need to understand System 6 first. The book covers only the differences between Systems 6 and 7. If you want to change the desktop pattern, for example, the procedure is the same as in System 6 and is therefore not given. The control panel is accessed differently in System 7, however, so the procedure for finding and opening it is described.
Despite the clear prerequisite of System 6 familiarity, the book begins with a 26-page chapter on “System Software Basics,” which seems to be for someone who has never used a Macintosh and might have picked the book up to help decide whether to buy one. The rest of the book is fairly consistently addressed to a System 6 user, albeit one who simply runs applications and wants homespun advice on how to organize the desktop. Personally, I would rather not be told to put a “.STNY” suffix on the names of my stationery files, both because I believe I am old enough to make my own choice, and because that particular suggestion has a non-Macintosh flavor.
A lot is new in System 7, and the book covers the innovations thoroughly, if sometimes with more point-and-click detail than necessary. The new features of the finder, such as hierarchical views and other display selections, are covered. The author includes a few more arcane tips and tricks, like customizing icons and seeing the historical Finder 1.0 “about” box. The folder menu in a window’s title bar pops up on a command-click rather than an option-click as the book states, however. Aliases are discussed, and Danuloff notes the convenience of aliasing remote volumes. The new organization of the system folder is presented, along with the “helping hand” that makes inspecting and installing apple menu items, fonts, and sounds easy. Multitasking is easier in System 7, though the author does not mention that one can bring up the finder simply by clicking on the desktop background.
Some of the new System 7 features show up only when System 7–savvy applications take advantage of them. The book describes the way applications are expected to incorporate the edition manager, with “publish” and “subscribe” commands for live sharing of text and graphic elements.
Although fonts are handled much more easily in System 7, that fact does not come across clearly in the fonts chapter, because it includes too much historical and motivational material from the past morass of font implementations, together with a discussion of PostScript issues and Microsoft’s “TrueImage,” which are not really System 7 topics, though they may be of interest to someone involved in desktop publishing.
A chapter discusses how to set up file sharing, with remote user access privileges, and includes further information about accessing volumes and files remotely over a network. Program linking is mentioned, with a clear explanation of how to set it up but no insight at all into what it is. Virtual memory and 32-bit addressing are covered at a good level of detail. System 7 installation procedures are covered in an appendix. Oddly enough, a bare-bones description of the Quicktime (movie) extension, which might be considered a significant System 7 innovation, is also relegated to an appendix.
All in all, the book covers the essential topics. It has a gee-whiz tone and gives more advice than it should on how to manage one’s desktop life, though the tone improves about halfway through. It moves slowly, taking many pages to say simple things, and repeating paragraphs and figures here and there in a way that makes one wonder whether it could have been organized better. A practicing programmer and computer scientist would wish for more insight into how the various features are implemented, even without programming detail.
