Apple Drops Mac OS 9

Eugenia Loli writes "MacCentral has the up-to-the-minute updates on the Apple WorldWide Developer Conference. The first big news is that Apple drops Mac OS 9. 'It's time to drop OS 9,' Steve Jobs said. 'We can do things in X that we just can't do in 9... a hundred percent of what we're doing is X only. [...] Mac OS 9 isn't dead for our customers, but it is for developers. Today we say goodbye to Mac OS 9 for all future development,' said Jobs." We all expected this to happen sooner or later, more sooner than later. There's been no new Apple development for Mac OS 9 in some time; only maintenance updates. But I won't stop Mac OS 9 development. You can't stop me! Muahahahaha! Update: 05/06 18:31 GMT by P : More news from WWDC continues to roll in. Eugenia Loli writes "Probably the really big news is with Jaguar, the codename for Mac OS X 10.2. There is handwriting recognition technology that will be recognized by any application that uses text. Apple also introduced Quartz Extreme, which takes the compositing engine in Quartz, and accelerates it in graphics cards, and combines 2D, 3D and video in one hardware pipeline via OpenGL. 'Everything on the screen is being drawn in hardware by OpenGL.' It requires AGP 2x and 32MB of video RAM. It is not possible on older graphics cards like RAGE 128 cards, said Jobs -- that means it'll work on newer iMacs and eMacs, but not on older machines, he emphasized. Jobs said this puts Apple two years ahead of 'the other guys.'"

Update: 05/06 18:46 GMT by P : An anonymous user writes: "Apple is releasing Mac OS X Rackmount Servers. Also releasing AIM-compatible messaging called iChat; you can create buddy lists of anyone on the local network, and you can use your mac.com username to log in to it."

Comments

Heh.

[hism]

About time.

Re:goodbye beige

[tps12]

Another poster already covered this sort of, but... how is shutting down your computer "special"?

Sorry, my original post was actually tongue-in-cheek. My real reaction to this is "good riddance to bad UI design." I can't believe Apple stuck with the Apple-File-Edit-View-Label-Special menu layout for 9 versions (basically). IMO, it makes no sense.

The Apple menu was originally a hack to get around the absence of multitasking. When MultiFinder got rolled into the system, desk accessories became a thing of the past, but for some reason the Apple menu stayed. The File menu was complete nonsense, as it was understood to be used for manipulating documents in every program except the Finder, which has no "documents" per se. Labels were always nonsense. And the Special menu was incredible...I can't believe they got away with that.

And then they called it the "Finder", when it was really just a file browser. So when they actually wrote a program that finds stuff they had to call it..."Sherlock." Holy lord.

So, yeah, sorry for the confusion. I don't know where Apple got a reputation for having intuitive UIs. Even if you let them slide on the icons (and you really shouldn't) and the root menubar (another pre-multitasking holdover from the 9" screen days), they have held interface design back for a long time.

As much as I dislike Winders, I have to say that Win95 was a good thing for desktop UIs. Apple is finally volleying the shot with OS X (which is at least new, if not better). I think Gnome and KDE have each caught up with Windows as well, so maybe we will see some real innovation in UIs. I hope so.

May the Chooser rest in peace.