Steve Jobs, at the Apple WorldWide Developer Conference, said in his keynote address that they are dropping developer support for Mac OS 9.
Jobs calls the next step "X only". "It"s time to drop OS 9," he said. "We can do things in X that we just can"t do in 9 ... a hundred percent of what we"re doing is X only. Mac OS 9 isn"t dead for our customers, but it is for [developers]. Today we say goodbye to Mac OS 9 for all future development". This event was marked on stage by Jobs opening up a coffin which had inside a boxed copy of Mac OS 9!
Jobs also announced that "Jaguar", Mac OS X 10.2 would have some very innovative features :-
- Finder improvements -- integrated search, multithreading support, automatic thumbnail creation, spring loaded folders.
- Quicktime 6, "Integrated into Jaguar." Highest quality video, open standard. AAC audio, invented by Dolby. Instant on streaming, free QuickTime broadcaster.
- Universal Access. Zooming supported via Quartz. Screenreader -- cursor over text will read it to you. Full keyboard access. Visual notification.
- Quartz Extreme: Takes the compositing engine in Quartz, and accelerates it in graphics cards. Combines 2D, 3D and video in one hardware pipeline via OpenGL. "Everything on the screen is being drawn in hardware by OpenGL." Requires AGP 2x and 32MB of video RAM.
- Inkwell. Handwriting recognition technology. Recognized by any application that uses text, even basic UNIX applications like Terminal.
- Rendezvous. Dynamic IP discovery. Lets computers "dynamically discover each other and share them." Proposing as a new industry standard. Jobs cited example of multiple Macs working at home sharing MP3 files with iTunes between multiple computers.
- iChat: AIM-compatible messaging built in to Jaguar. Can create buddy list of anyone on the local network, as well. You can use your Mac.com name and don"t need AOL account. Sorting. "First time AOL has let anyone under the tent," said Jobs (although others have reversed-engineered AIM compatible chat apps).