The Cupertino, Calif., computermaker is adamant that no one person should take the credit for the company's greatest leap forward since the original Macintosh. Not even, say, Avie Tevanian, chief software engineering guru throughout OS X's long and difficult development. And on this point, there seems very little room for argument.
Menus are transparent, and colors look clean and rich enough to eat.
But more important than the flashy exterior is what's under the hood. That means Apple is letting any amateur bug hunter look at the system's innards and suggest fixes. Because Tevanian and his team made some very smart choices early on. They set up the system memory so that if one application crashes, it doesn't drag the rest down with it. And while they ditched most of the code from previous Mac systems, they made sure all your old stuff will continue to work.