Today we'll talk about the Utilities folder of Mac OS X. There are 21 utilities included (plus all the hidden BSD programs of course). First is the Apple System Profiler, a tool Apple started shipping with Mac OS 9 (or maybe 8.5). It now has a Frameworks tab, a framework being a library or set of library files in Mac OS X. You can see the version of each framework and whether it's an Apple framework or not (few are). The Extensions tab is also different, probably because extensions are different in Mac OS X. It counted 202+ extensions installed, all with a .kext filename extension. Once again you can see the version number, the get info string, and whether it's an Apple extension. Surprisingly, now some of the entries have Is Apple set to 'no' rather than being blank, as I thought it was from looking at the Frameworks tab. The last tab is Applications, of which I have 269 installed. Actually, most don't seem to be Mac OS X applications, so it must be picking up the Mac OS 9 applications. The other two tabs are the standard System Profile and Devices and Volumes. In the preferences there is a 'Gather Applications information at launch' option, I wonder what it does.

Up next is the Applet Launcher, which brings up a bar where you can type or choose the (presumably) JAva Applet to launch. Darn, couldn't get it to run one of my Applets. I'll have to figure out what happened later. ColorSync Utility has only one module, Profile First Aid. You can use it to check the ColorSync profiles for corrupted profiles. The Console utility shows you the console log as default, but you can open other log files. Useful if you're a Unix admin, but I couldn't understand the output. CPU Monitor shows you the CPU usage, which you can see as an instantaneous bar or a little histogram (or both at the same time, or one replacing the CPU Monitor icon in the dock). There is also a menu shortcut that runs /usr/bin/top in a window. I can see that I have 36 total processes, only two of them running; about a 0.5 load; 53.4 MB wired memory, 42.1 MB active, 94.3 MB inactive; 820+ MB Virtual Memory and 10950 pageins (no pageouts though so that's probably program loading). Actually CPU Monitor opened the Terminal and ran top on it, a possiblity for scripting.

Our next utility is DigitalColor Meter. This brings up a small window. The window has a small panel that displays the area under the cursor, magnified. It also has a crosshair and whatever you have under the crosshair you get the RGB values for, either as a percentage, absolute, or hex. There are also options to get the values as CIE or Tristimulus but they didn't work when I tried them. You can copy the color value to the clipboard and it looks like this: "#DE0000".

Directory Setup is used to configure your parent directory servers, either NetInfo or LDAP. This information is used for logging in users over the network. Since I don't have a NetInfo server, I turned this off so it wouldn't fruitlessly search for one. Following the current Apple policy with Mac OS X, Disk Copy has been simplified. It only mounts images now, I don't see any way to create disk images, which is considerably more complicated for a user than just mounting an image. Maybe there is another utility for creating disk images.

Disk Utility incorporates both Disk First Aid and Drive Setup. Nothing new here. Drive Setup doesn't allow you to mess with the boot drive, so I can't even look at the partitions that have been set up. Display Calibrator is the utility called from the Displays System Preference. Grab is an improvement over Mac OS 9 picture capturing capabilities. You can capture a selection or the whole screen and even start a timer that captures the whole screena after 10 seconds. Images are captured in TIFF format and you can view the image size and bit depth information.

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