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Since Apple's purchase of NeXT the Mac OS has been slowly adopting NEXTSTEP like features and ideas. Once such place is control panels. The Mac OS has traditionally treated control panels as parts of the system itself. When launched, they ran within the system's memory space. This meant that a misbehaving control panel would essentially cause the Mac OS to bomb thus forcing the user to restart. Not good at all.
NEXTSTEP, on the other hand, runs all control panels in a single application know as Preferences.app. This application is started up in hidden mode when the OS boots but is always accessible as the Dock clock. Quitting this app will cause the Dock clock to revert to a generic prefs tile. Starting with Mac OS 8 and continuing with all Mac OS' after; Apple has been converting control panels into individual apps. This means if a control panel misbehaves it's far more likely to quit with a memory related error then crash the computer. The later is still possible due to the Mac OS' lack of modern features but the chances are greatly reduced.
Now that you know how the two OS' treat panels allow me tell you how you work with them. With the Mac OS you have a control panels folder within the system folder. Adding control panels is as easy as dropping them onto a closed system folder and restarting. To access control panels you open the control panels folder and double click the one you want to access. Apple simplified the process further by making an alias to the control panels folder available in the Apple menu so accessing your controls is as easy and convenient as selecting from a list of panel names.
Accessing controls in NEXSTEP is also very easy. All one needs to do is double click on the Dock clock and, because preferences.app was pre-loaded when you started-up, the prefs pop up instantly. Once the app is on screen you select which "panel" you want to access by clicking on a row of unlabeled icons across the top of the app window. The icons represent their purpose quite well without the use of labels. A speaker for sound, a mouse for mouse settings etc.. Still, one may wonder what a menu on a tray means until they click on it. It's the customization panel for the Services menu in case you're wondering. When you click on an icon it's configurations appear in the lower half of the app window. Under emulation there is a slight delay for some "panels" to appear. The one thing that eludes me about NeXT's preferences.app is where the individual panels themselves are stored and how I'd go about adding or removing an unwanted or unneeded panel from the list. I can't seem to find any indication of a central storage folder.
I think the NeXT method is better when you don't know exactly what panel you need or you just want to browse to see what your options are. The Mac OS method is more efficient when you know exactly what panel you need but if you have to go looking through multiple panels it becomes a hassle of open panel, check contents of panel, close panel and repeat until you find the correct one. If I had to choose a method I'd probably take the NeXT style just because I happen to like it's appearance and "control center" concept.
