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

Re:blowing your load early?

[imadork]

Wanna wait for him to finish first?

Of course not, this is slashdot, after all.

And BTW, the lone gunmen died, in case you haven't heard yet...

Re:Had to say it...

[Joseph Wharton]

Two words: Tempest 2000

And it did have the best version of Doom, as far as consoles go.

Mean while...

[fred911]

Ford Motors Cars FINALY admitted that acquisition of Jaguar Motors Cars marked the begining of the end....

Re:Had to say it...

[Cyclopedian]

While the system was crappy due to the lack of strong third-party support, there were some good games.

One game, I would rate as excellent and quite possibly the best of the Jaguar's lineup: Aliens Vs Predator.

Now, THAT was a great game! If you played the Colonial Marine, the atmosphere of the corridors was eerily silent and you heard nothing more than your footsteps, the radar pings, the air ducts, and the occasional alien scream far off in the distance. I had tons of fun playing that character.

You also could play the Predator, and the Alien as well. The Predator was tons of fun too, with its invisibility technology, and the visible/infrared/uv/x-ray viewer. I didn't like playing the Alien that much, mostly because it didn't feel all that pleasant that I was part of the hive and was just one of many.

Ahh...time for me to stop reminescing and to get back to work...*loads Strongbad email*

-Cyc

OT: I bet your "realtime" MPEG is nowhere near...

[Sleepy]

[ OT ]

>My x86 PC does that trivially. It's a 2-year-old Athlon 1400. I record TV realtime in mpeg4 (2500kbit) and mp3 (160kbit) with 30-40% CPU to spare.

You seem to have lost the key point-- "without noticable artifacts".

Does your *realtime* MPEG4 encoder do realtime, without noticible artifacts? I think not.

For the record, it's possible to get "realtime" MPEG4 encoding that looks good.. but it still won't be artifact-free. That is what they are claiming here.

Lossless and "near lossless" codecs are extremely CPU-bound.

The Mac CPU has struggled to keep up with Intel in terms of MHz, but their "vector processor" is very highly regarded. It runs circles around Intel's SSE by a wide margin. Even with a clockspeed advantage, if SSE2 can theoretically process data as quickly as AltiVec, that would be news to me.

Of course a good VPU system does not automatically mean better quality. But like we saw when MMX arrived... software can all of a sudden do things performance-wise that just was not possible using integer of FPU code.

Existing codecs have been re-fitted and optomized for AltiVec. The next logical question was, if you start FROM SCRATCH... can you design a codec that targets and completely exploits AltiVec? If so, then you have the headroom to do things no one can try on today's CPU and software (for example: use interpolation to completely remove banding and artifacting).

The answer to better quality is not always to throw more MHz at it, or tweak existing codecs. Sometimes a new design is needed.

Having not seen the video quality or the codec in action, I can only guess. The claim to have eliminated artifacting however is very significant.