Apple's Next Operating System

There will be a lot to like about Apple's next operating system, OS X 10.4, aka "Tiger", when it comes out sometime next year. In his keynote today at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs said Apple will be moving the bar further ahead of Microsoft. The only hardware announcement was several new displays -- as usual, great industrial design at reasonably affordable prices. I'm very tempted by the new 20-inch model that will be on sale next month. But this gathering is for software developers, and the bulk of the talk was about the operating system. There's plenty of interesting stuff here. The best feature for average users will be the built-in search, something MIcrosoft is also working to improve in its next OS, called Longhorn. Assuming it works as advertised, what Apple calls "Spotlight" make much shorter work of a common woe for computer users: finding what's on our hard disk. The ability to hold video conferences with up to four people at once, and audio with up to 10, is another nice upcoming feature. The multimedia folks at Apple have been busy. Jobs spent a fair amount of time talking about the native inclusion of RSS into an upcoming version of the Safari browers, and a "personal clipping" service. There's a special search function just for RSS; I'm not clear on whether it's searching via one of the main RSS search engines, whether Apple will write its own or whether it's only searching your designated feeds. More on that later. I was dazzled by a real advance in scripting: Automator, an application that will make it much easier for regular folks to wire together various functions from various appliations. Great stuff. There's lots more, of course, but the main thing to remember is that this product could be as much as a year (or more) away. Apple's announcements today, so far ahead of the actual release of the software, are designed to get the software developers excited enough to build of these features natively in their own applications. I hope they do.

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[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]