Jaguar is Over

Steve Jobs announced the end of Jaguar, and the newness of Panther, today at his WWDC keynote address. Panther is to be available as a preview release now, and by the end of the year retail, for $129. Mac OS X 10.3 / Panther has 100 major new features, according to Jobs. Lower-level enhancements include NFS file locking, built-in X11, FreeBSD 5.0, IPsec-based VPN, and various SMB and Active Directory enhancements.

The Panther Finder is brand-new, with a new brushed metal appearance, and enhanced column view, with the items used most commonly in the far left column. Searching is "live" and a lot faster, and is more user-centric instead of computer-centric.

The Finder now has labels, and icons can resize with window resizing.

The iDisk now caches itself locally, so it can be used offline, and the user can copy to and from it more efficiently (with the real copies happening in the background).

A new feature called Expose allows minimizing into a smaller window, all open windows, to temporarily move everything out of the way, sort of like workspaces.

File Vault can encrypt a user directory and decrypt it "on the fly."

Faxing is now built-in, and available system-wide.

Pixlet is a new compression codec that does video compression without noticable artifacts, for 48 bits per pixel: at 960x540 and 24 fps, can be decoded on a 1GHz Power Mac.

Preview is significantly faster, with searching, and PS to PDF conversion.

Panther features fast user switching, a feature in Windows XP, allowing under-one-second (on the demo machine) switching between two different users.

FontBook is a new "pro" app for font management.

iChat AV is an update to iChat that does audio and video conferencing in addition to text, that works with any built-in or USB mic, and any DV video camera, connecting using only a user's screen name. It is going to beta today, and will be included in Panther, and will be sold for $29 to Jaguar users. Apple will sell iSight for $149, a small camera that does audio and video over FireWire.

Apple is preparing a new set of developer tools called XCode, which works with GCC 3.3, does distributed compiles (using available resources on the network), and has other cool stuff. It is fast, it has improved searching (like the Finder, and over entire projects), and it looks like an iApp (though it isn't metal). It removes the need to link; onnly link objects you need to launch. It starts compiling while you are editing, cutting the time you need to compile drastically. It can modify the program while it is running.

Comments

Where are the G5?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are the G5s?

Once again, Apple has blew it.

Re:thankyousirmayihaveanother?

[jkeyes]

But you forget this is Apple and they're allowed to have a monopoly on their own hardware and give deliberately monopolistic terms on their Operating System (not permitted on non Apple Hardware anyone?) and force upgrades every year at $129. When MS released Windows 98 SE they allowed Windows 98 users to upgrade for $20 if they wanted to, it wasn't even forced. (If you paid the $20 MS sent you an upgrade disc)

Re:This will be another solid update

[Mikey-San]

You're the troll, dork.

7.5 is eight years old, and nowhere NEAR current. The difference between Apple and Microsoft is that in eight years, Apple's OS has matured far past the point of being noticeably different, while Microsoft /will always/ support eight-year-old OSes because they only release major updates every three years or so.

Apple has released the following major updates since 1995:

8.0
8.1 (HFS+ introduction)
8.5
9
X 10.0
X 10.1
X 10.2
And later this year, X 10.3.

Compare this to Microsoft:

Win95
Win98
Win2000 (and ME in the same time period, with ME not really being "moving forward" by the accounts of ME users)
WinXP

Eight versus four. It's easy to support an OS that's eight years old if you've only released a few big revisions since then.

I'll take "progress" for three hundred, Alex.

a feature in Windows XP

[ONOIML8]

"a feature in Windows XP"

Oh, then we gotta have it. Quick, get a development team on it post haste.

Somebody else go get a copy of XP and see what else it has. If it's got it then we need it.

And how's our BSOD development team doing?

If it does, Apple is dead

[jocknerd]

They've been saying that they won't be like Microsoft but if they go that route, I won't buy anything else from them again.

Jealousy

[Anonymous Coward]

"A new feature called Expose allows minimizing into a smaller window, all open windows, to temporarily move everything out of the way, sort of like workspaces."

Have you seen the demos of it? Knock it all you want, it's nothing like workspaces. It's a flashy new feature that nobody has ever seen before. And of course, the Linux d00dz must express their jealousy by trying to put it down. "Oh, that's not so special." Well actually, it is very new, cool, and imaginative, and I expect to seem some pale imitations of it in KDE/Gnome after a while. And you know what they say about imitation and flattery.