Opinion

Leopard "Preview" - Starting Up Mac OS X

Unfortunately, there's no screenshot here. And that's because there is no screenshot to post. The "Starting up Mac OS X…" window that we're all used to seeing since Tiger, Panther, Jaguar, Puma and Cheetah is now gone after being simplified in Tiger to the purpose of just being a countdown timer (as it wasn't actually a progress bar). In Leopard, you'll go straight from the Apple logo to the login window (or not, if you're using Automatic Login).

But yeah, we all saw this coming, especially since the time spent watching that window's progress bar go from left to right has been significantly reduced with each new software and hardware update, and now with the Intel Macs, that window is hardly on screen for 3 seconds - so it made perfect sense to be rid of it. 

Comments (5) Posted on at  ∞

  • » Actually, the progress bar isn't anything but a timed bar. It doesn't measure how far the OS has loaded, as John Gruber found out:
    "The pace of the progress bar isn’t measuring anything — it’s just a guess as to how long it will take until loginwindow is ready. When loginwindow appears, it kills the WaitingForLoginWindow process. When it exits, WaitingForLoginWindow stores the number of seconds it ran in a text file"
    By Blogger dino, at 10:47 am, September 02, 2006   
  • » Me and my stupid not-reading-ness. Sorry about that. I didn't see this part of your post:
    "after being simplified in Tiger to the purpose of just being a countdown timer (as it wasn't actually a progress bar)."
    Sorry about that.
    By Blogger dino, at 10:48 am, September 02, 2006   
  • » Well to be fair, in Panther, it was a proper progress bar, and the system actually told you what it was doing at each step.

    The thing is, I actually preferred this approach - I like the extra feedback. Although as you say, boot times are now pretty quick (except straight after an OS update).
    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2:20 pm, September 02, 2006   
  • » True, Panther is soon going to be the last OS X to show a true "Rundown of Startup Activities". Nothing revolutionary has been done in Leopard of course. There's just a process called WaitingForLoginWindow that no longer runs; so, although it will feel tangibly different, there is little change at the code level.
    By Blogger Karan, at 8:20 pm, September 02, 2006   
  • » good thing.

    who needs that level of informations ?

    NOBODY wanting to ONLY use the computer

    experts and students wil be able to use a keybord touch at boot to show details or read the logs.
    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 4:07 am, September 03, 2006   
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