Three Times a Charm for Mac OS X?

Software Magazine, June, 2000 by John K. Waters

Developers see new features and get Preview CD-ROMs for Apple's next-gen and much-awaited OS

APPLE COMPUTER CEO Steve Jobs in mid-May kicked off the company's annual Worldwide Developers Forum with promises of an early 2001 release of the longa-waited Mac OS X next-generation operating system, and demos of some features and refinements of the OS.

A veritable stampede of programmers sprinted into the San Jose Convention Center conference hail for Jobs' morning speech, leaving standing room only. Dressed in his familiar jeans and black knit shirt, Jobs welcomed the crowd and declared that the Mac OS X was "the most important thing we are going to do in the next 10 years."

Apple has made Darwin, the core of the new operating system, publicly available as open source software. The system's user interface, however, is a proprietary animated interface code-named Aqua. Carbon is Apple's new development environment that allows programmers to revamp existing programs--to "carbonize" them--so that they can run on OS X. Cocoa is Apple's advanced object-oriented development environment.

The conference drew an estimated 3,600 developers, Jobs said, which is approximately double the 1998 attendance. This is roughly the third year in a row that Jobs and company have announced the impending release of OS X. Some attendees voiced frustration at the delays, but most were thrilled by the keynote demos.

Some of the biggest ooh's and ah's from the crowd accompanied Jobs' demo of Aqua's "dock," a kind of sophisticated toolbar that runs along the bottom of the desktop screen, much like the Windows Taskbar. The OS X dock holds one-click shortcut icons that launch frequently used applications or open often-accessed files.

OS X's file manager, called "Finder," has been redesigned to display previews of virtually any document type, including 2-D graphics files, QuickTime movies, MP3 music files, and 3D QuickTime VR panoramas.

Jobs also demonstrated OS X's advanced graphics capabilities, including a particularly woweezowee feature: the ability to paste a two-dimensional picture onto a 3D object running in a different program, and manipulate that image in real time. The new OS will come with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5 browser, Sun Microsystems' Java 2 technology, and Adobe's InDesign page layout software.

Get Busy and Create

Although the final version of the new OS won't be available until January, conference attendees were given Developer Preview 4 CD-ROMs that include the final API specs required by developers to complete upgrades to applications written to the latest Mac OS, an Apple spokesperson said.

"Ninety-nine percent of you will find 100 percent of what you need," Jobs said.

Apple needs developers to create apps for the new OS, and it is beginning to get them. The announcement during the keynote of a pending Mac port of Alias Wavefront's Maya 3-D animation program nearly brought down the house. Alias executives took the stage and described a grassroots campaign among Maya users to get the company to create a Mac version. According to Apple, more than 200 developers have committed to delivering products for Mac OS X.

Clearly, Apple needs products for its computers. Jobs urged the assembled developers to get busy creating applications for the new Mac OS, implying that Apple would be "throwing co-marketing dollars" behind the earliest releases.