Hardcore geeks rejoice-- and the rest of you should feel pretty good, too. While the full, honest-to-goodness, 1.0 shipping version of Mac OS X isn't slated to arrive until next year (assuming that Apple doesn't decide to delay it again for the umpteenth time), the public beta of this lickable new operating system is scheduled for a release "this summer." Those of you northern hemisphere denizens who actually set foot outdoors occasionally are well aware that it's summer now; the rest of us climate-controlled, junk-food-swilling, 200-channels-and-a-Mac couch jockeys know it because of all the reruns and the way that MTV keeps showing the "House of Style Sexy Summer Layout." The point is, a publicly available preview of Mac OS X is no more than three months away. If Apple can pull its bits together, the beta may even be handed out on CD-ROM at Macworld Expo in just a few short weeks-- though we'd consider a live Steve Jobs/Larry Ellison karaoke duet of "I Got You Babe" during the keynote a marginally more likely occurrence. (This Scary Visual™ brought to you by the International Order of Release Date Pessimists and the number 6.)

Now, some of you may be somewhat shocked by how soon we all might be messing with Mac OS X betas; we know we are. After all, it's been a long and rocky haul since Apple first announced its acquisition of NeXT and the plan to use NeXTSTEP as the foundation for a modern Mac OS. We've been waiting for this thing for so long, we can scarcely remember how not to wait for it. And while lots of basic Mac OS X questions have been answered by NDA-flouting scofflaws and their more-than-welcome web reviews of Developer Previews, there are just certain things about the final version that can't be addressed accurately by anyone other than Apple itself. So the eternal question of whether or not Mac OS X would reveal its Unixy guts by retaining a command line interface, even in the consumer version, remained unanswered-- until now.

According to MacWEEK, Apple has finally come clean on the subject; Steve Glass, the veep of Mac OS 9 and Software Services, just announced to the assembled geeks at MacHack that the company indeed "plans to add a Unix-style command line to Mac OS X, but does not want the average consumer to see anything but the Aqua interface." With that statement, Mac OS X officially gains the best of both interface paradigms-- the GUI for the average user more comfortable with point-and-click, and the CLI for power users who occasionally want or need more direct control. (For those poor Windows users among you, it's sort of like being able to slip into DOS mode, only hopefully without sucking.) Sacrilege? Hardly. Despite what Apple may or may not have been saying for the past sixteen years, a command line interface is by no means useless, and for certain tasks it's faster and more flexible than a GUI. That's not sacrilege, that's just good sense. So here's hoping that the wait is drawing to a close, and that soon those of us who blithely and recklessly endanger our computing routines via the imprudent use of beta software will be able to bathe in Mac OS X's glory. Beta glory, sure, but glory nonetheless.