All-New PowerBooks, Web Browser Featured at Macworld

Apple CEO Steve Jobs once again introduced the new PowerBooks new and upgraded software to a throng of adoring fans at the annual Macworld Expo San Francisco, including a new web browser, new versions of the "iLife" applications (iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD), and presentation software (which Steve himself has been "beta testing" at every Macworld keynote since 2002). The PowerBook has been extended in two directions, with screens up to 17" and down to 12". Both feature a new material for the casing, aluminum (anodized, not painted), with AirPort antennas in the screen. The AirPort range of the PowerBook now equals the iBook. It will no longer boot into Mac OS, only into Mac OS X.

The 17" model is 1440x900 resolution, 16:10 aspect ratio, G4/1GHz, SuperDrive, GeForce4 440 Go/64MB, and all the same ports, with the addition of line in and FireWire 800 (in addition to FireWire 400). It is less than 1" thin, and 6.8 lbs., and has fiber-optic lightning for the keyboard activated by ambient light sensors. It will be available next month for $3,300.

The 12" version is 4.6 lbs., and is smaller than the iBook in every dimension. It's 1024x768, G4/867, GeForce4 420 Go/32MB, and is AirPort-ready ($99 extra). It is $1,800 for a combo drive model, $2,000 for a SuperDrive model, and will be available in two weeks.

Both models sport the new AirPort Extreme (802.11g), which is 54Mbps, up from the 11Mbps of AirPort (802.11b). The base stations and clients are fully compatible with the old AirPort, handle 50 users, and support both wireless bridging (to extend the range by adding more stations) and can act as a USB printer server.

Jobs also introduced Safari, a new Mac OS X browser based on the KHTML rendering engine from KDE (and Apple will publish changes they've made to it). There's nothing especially great about it -- it's a web browser -- except that, unlike most other browsers, it is expected to be fast and work properly, as well as be fully integrated into Mac OS X. The web is a killer app, but pretty much all web browsers suck; Apple hopes to give us something that doesn't suck in Safari. It is a free download for the beta, starting today. This story was posted using Safari. W00p.

iPhoto 2 has been revamped, with iTunes integration (access to playlists, tracks, even searching) for slide shows; one-click enhance of photos; a retouch brush; archiving to CD/DVD; and more. iMovie 3 has added chapters, the "Ken Burns Effect" (panning through still images), and precise audio editing. iDVD 3 has added a ton of quite cool themes, which will look great the first few times you see them.

They are -- along with iTunes -- bundled with all new Macs beginning January 25 as "iLife". All but iDVD will be freely available online, contrary to previously published reports. The entire bundle of four apps will be available for retail purchase for $50.

For sale today at $99 is another new app, Keynote, which is the presentation software Jobs has been using for over a year for his own presentations. It includes all sorts of flashy features like textures and Quartz-powered 3D transitions, and can import and export PowerPoint, as well as export to PDF and QuickTime. It has an open file format (using XML).

Jobs also introduced Final Cut Express, a stripped-down version of Final Cut Pro, for $300, and noted other prominent third-party software recently released for Mac OS X: QuickBooks, Director, and DigiDesign Pro Tools (later this month). He noted that the number of native apps for Mac OS X jumped from 2,000 to 5,000 in 2002.

Meanwhile, the number of users of the OS went from 1.2 million to 5 million last year, and he expects the number to jump to 9 or 10 million in 2003.

Update: 01/07 19:37 GMT by Jamie (also posted with Safari): And thanks to the several Slashdot readers who pointed out a great but unannounced product: X11 (aka the X Windows System) for Mac OS X. It's in Public Beta right now. Great to see this, an Apple-supported X is greatly needed. I don't know why Jobs didn't at least mention this, it would have gotten quite the round of applause I'm sure.

Comments

Not bad

[Lebannen]

Fascinating.

It's officially the 'year of the notebook' - so that's how Apple is coping with slow processors then!

Very nice new powerbooks though - especially the 17-incher, with glowing keyboards and ambient light detection. It also adjusts the screen brightness, mmmm :)

Safari, the web browser, is actually based of KHTML - KDE's HTML library. Not bad, especially seeing as they're going to give the 'orders of magnitude' speedups back in the way of the source code.

And digs at Quark. And the rumors sites were practically all wrong. Hah. Best keynote in ages.

Re:Not bad

[kitzilla]

Actually, MacRumors.com was quite close last night. They had the 12" and 17" (good Lord!) Powerbooks; the iApp bundle at the correct price; Apple's amazing new Airport; the new Firewire; and the browser. Nobody saw the presentation software coming, but it was the least of Jobs' announcements. Nobody predicted an Apple-branded X11 port.

No video iPods, no all-in-one networking appliance (though the new Airport is certainly a step forward).

Re:Safari

[EccentricAnomaly]

Put it does block pop-up ads!

Re:Why KHTML rather than Gecko?

[owenc]

I think since QT was ported to OS X, it's easier to use native widgets with KHTML rather than gecko. Chimera for instance does not use real aqua text entry and widgets within the web page, but a theme that looks like they are.

Re:Why KHTML rather than Gecko?

[Rob Kaper]

Here's why.

Quote:
"When we were evaluating technologies over a year
ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an
excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also
less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of
development within that code made it a better choice for us than other
open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus."

Re:Why KHTML rather than Gecko?

[King Babar]

This choice sounds utterly insane to me. With the greatest respect, khtml is nowhere near as good as Gecko in terms of it standards support or behaviour or stability especially when dealing with some of the crap sites out there in the world. Run it through a few random sites involving nested tables, CSS or frames and it quickly screws up rendering.

Well, I'd noticed it seemed to be doing okay on most CSS pages I'd tried, so I was *going* to say, "nyah, nyah", but then I figured I go to the ever-useful CSS1 test suite pages.

Oops...on the very first test, it fails to display even the test page correctly and the dialog tells me it's choking on the illegal mimetype text/html. Very ungood.

Well, it's beta, and Apple has never seen a wheel it didn't want to re-invent at some point...

Re:Safari

[daeley]

Erm, it does have type ahead -- I just used that feature. And the 'throbbing' is done in the background of the location bar -- watch for the blue progress bar, which you might miss since it's so bloody fast. :)

Re:The new X11 from Apple

[bnenning]

Abandoning all common sense, I just installed Apple's X11 over the top of fink. Both want to dump stuff in /usr/X11R6, but since fink uses /sw for almost everything else I figured it would be ok, which it is so far. Upon firing up X11.app, it tried to read my .xinitrc file, which I have set up in fink to start Gnome with the sawfish window manager. It came up fine, but I wanted to use Apple's window manager that's integrated with the Dock, so I commented out my .xinitrc and restarted X11. This gave me an xterm window with no WM, oops. Fortunately I found "quartz-wm" installed in /usr/X11R6/bin and running that gave me a window manager with Aqua titlebars and buttons, and it even minimizes to the dock exactly like native OS X apps. I then renamed ~/.xinitrc so it wouldn't be found at all, and now when I start X11.app I get an xterm with quartz-wm already running, which is what I want. I've only tried a couple of X (er, X11) apps from my fink installation, but so far they've all worked flawlessly.

Why KHTML (from the KDE mailing list)

[hysterion]

----- Forwarded message from Don Melton @apple.com -----

From: Don Melton @apple.com
Subject: Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 11:31:10 -0800

Hi,

I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser built upon KHTML and KJS. I'm sending you this email to thank you for
making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my development team. I also wish to explain why and how we've used your
excellent technology. It's important that you know we're committed to open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back to you, the original developers. Hopefully this will begin a dialogue among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.

I've "cc"-ed my team on this email so you know their names and contact information. Perhaps you already recognize some of those names. Back
in '98 I was one of the people who took Mozilla open source. David Hyatt is not only the originator of the Chimera web browser project but
also the inventor of XBL. Darin Adler is the former lead of the Nautilus file manager. Darin, Maciej Stachowiak, John Sullivan, Ken Kocienda, and I are all Eazel veterans.

The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year
ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other
open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup
performance as you can see reflected in the data at http://www.apple.com/safari/ .

How did we do it? As you know, KJS is very portable and independent. The Sherlock team is already using it on Mac OS X in the framework my
team prepared called JavaScriptCore. But because KHTML requires other components from KDE and Qt, we wrote our own adapter library called KWQ
(and pronounced "quack") that replaces these other components. KHTML and KWQ have been encapsulated in a framework called WebCore. We've also made significant enhancements, bug fixes, and performance improvements to KHTML and KJS.

Both WebCore and JavaScriptCore, which account for a little over half the code in Safari, are being released as open source today. They should be available at http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore / very soon. Also, we'll be sending you another email soon which details our changes and
additions to KHTML and KJS. I hope the detailed list in that email will help you understand what we've done a little better. We'd also
like to send this information to the appropriate KDE mailing list. Please advise us on which one to use.

We look forward to your comments. We'd also like to speak to you and we'd be happy to set up a conference call at our expense for this purpose.

Thank you again for making KHTML and KJS.

Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.

--
Don Melton
Safari Engineering Manager
Apple Computer

----- Forwarded message from Dirk Mueller @kde.org -----

From: Dirk Mueller @kde.org
Subject: Re: Greetings from the Safari team at Apple Computer
To: Don Melton @apple.com
[......]
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 21:18:19 +0100

On Die, 07 Jan 2003, Don Melton wrote:

> I'm the engineering manager of Safari, Apple Computer's new web browser
> built upon KHTML and KJS. I'm sending you this email to thank you for
> making such a great open source project and introduce myself and my
> development team. I also wish to explain why and how we've used your
> excellent technology. It's important that you know we're committed to
> open source and contributing our changes, now and in the future, back
> to you, the original developers. Hopefully this will begin a dialogue
> among ourselves for the benefit of both of our projects.

I hope so too. I'm deeply impressed by your detailed changelog and by
the changes. A few of the changes have already happened in "our" developing
version and many of them were on our TODOs. For example just about this
weekend I was working on improving the kjs garbage collector and now I read
that you apparently already fixed the issues I had with it. Seems to me like
a huge christmas gift. Thank you. Thanks a lot.

Especially I'd like to hope that we could set up a mailing list where we
could exchange ideas, patches and bug reports. Also a common testsuite for
regressions would be nice and probably help us a lot in developing KHTML and
KJS further. Ideally the plan should be, and I hope you agree, to use a
common codebase for the backend.

> Please forward this email to any contributor whom I may have missed.

We've forwarded it to kfm-devel @kde.org.

Apple X11 for Fink users

[ChrisDolan]

If you use X11 under Fink, you can do this:

dpkg -r --force-depends xfree86-base
dpkg -r --force-depends xfree86-base-shlibs
[install the SDK from apple - http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/ ]
[install the user install from apple - http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/download/ ]
fink install system-xfree86

(courtesy of Ben Hines on the fink-devel list)

You may have to manually edit your $HOME/.xinitrc file to add the "exec quartz-wm" line in place of any other "exec" lines.

Other than that, it works great for me. The new Quartz WM is good.

Re:Safari

[entrox]

I'm curious how they're boasting such impressive page load speeds compared to the other browsers

Oh that's easy, considering the amount of code involved. You see, one of the main arguments in favour of KHTML was its small size - like 140.000 lines of code. I'm guessing, but that's probably a fifth of the Gecko codebase. Read it up in this mail to the kfm-devel mailing list.