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

Let me be the first to say...

[jocknerd]

What about an upgrade price for Panther? I just spent $129 last fall for Jaguar.

This will be another solid update

[dtolton]

Microsoft should (but won't) take a page from Apple's book. You can as a company, co-exist peacefully with the Open Source community. Apple has put themselves in a great position IMO for the future. Their releases add actual features, making people *want* to upgrade instead of forcing them to. It's a beautiful thing, because you can still use OS 10.0 if you want to, but they add so many features, bells, whistles and in general cool stuff - people really want to get the newest version of their software.

Kudos to Apple for that.

Re:This will be another solid update

[BitGeek]

The idea that Apple hasn't given BSD credit is absurd.

Hell, they're getting sued for having the "Based on unix" graphic on their pages!

They have regularly acknowledged ths situation ,and given back by releasing darwin.

The idea that all they are doing is selling other peoples improvementis is also absurd (its a troll really).

They developed a really nice new IO system and released it into darwin, for instance, along with a thousand other things.

And they develop useful apps and sell a OS that has features that Linux and BSD aren't matching yet-- they make money from the value add, while contributing back to the base open source OS.

ITs a win-win business model.

You guys need to get over your bitterness that someone somewhere is selling software and start being realistic.

Aw, frickin' crud ...

[WCityMike]

Dear Mr. Jobs:

Iâ(TM)m not saying I donâ(TM)t want to pay you guys when you upgrade the OS. You guys put a lot of features in every release, and your staff deserves to get paid for it. Panther looks pretty damn cool, for the most part. Just do me a favor. Reward me, even with a paltry amount, for being a customer who likes to keep his OS up-to-date.

Knock $40 off the price and call it a $89 upgrade fee. Hell, even $30, and $99, would be somewhat palatable. Thatâ(TM)s really not that much to ask, considering the discounts one can find elsewhere on the OS after a few months.

Itâ(TM)s a bit more palatable than the pure psychological âoeF--K YOUâ of making me buy the operating system over and over and over again with every new release.

Longhorn users may be waiting until 2005 for their next release, but I doubt theyâ(TM)ll have spent $460 or $690 by that point on keeping their OS up to date.

Sincerely,

Quite Unpleased Customer Who's About to Get His Ass Handed to Him By Fellow Mac Loyalists for Even Daring to Question the Wielder of the Reality Distortion Field

P.S. To all those who decide to flame instead of intelligently reply ... please use a flame more creative than "whiner." Obliged.

Re:Steve Jobs plan

[WIAKywbfatw]

Why do people constantly bitch (yes, bitch) when someone dares to charge for software that they can do without?

The release od Panther doesn't make your copy of Jaguar any less useful - it doesn't detract from Jaguar's functionality, ease of use or anything else.

If you like what Panther has to offer and can't live without it then buy it. If you don't think it has anything significant to offer or that it's poor value for money then don't. It's that simple.

Nobody forced you to upgrade from OS 9 to OS X and nobody forced you to upgrade from OS X 10.0 to Jaguar. Similarly, nobody's got a gun to your head forcing you to fork over your cash for Panther.

You don't expect free upgrades for life do you?