Jaguar preview offers peeks at new OS X features
May 06, '02 03:57:44PM
Contributed by: robg
In case you were sleeping late today, here's a brief update on Jaguar (the next major OS X update) news:
A couple of my thoughts on the preview. Firstly, it looks incredibly cool with tons of great new features. Too many new features, in fact, to call it 10.2. If you'll read Apple's pages, they do not call it 10.2 anywhere. My guess is that it will ship as OS X 10.5, similar to the 8.1 -> 8.5 jump a few years back. This also means we'll pay for it, but the features make that a no brainer decision for me. They also claim a "late summer" ship date. I won't repeat everything you can read for yourself, but the coolest things to me are:- Quartz Extreme to accelerate all aspects of the GUI (32mb VRAM and an Nvidia or ATI Radeon card required). This should help the GUI speed tremendously.
- The multithreaded Finder should reduce the spinning 'beach ball' problem.
- Sherlock is no longer the file searching engine, it's become Watson (and from the screenshots, it looks like it is Watson!).
- A new search function integrated into the Finder.
- Mail.app gains rules and global searching.
- USB Printer sharing and spring loaded folders return.
One interesting observation on the Jaguar product page has to do with screenshots. The AddressBook and Sherlock images are both "metallic" themed, whereas they are clearly "Aqua" apps in OS X 10.1. Mail and the Finder, however, are Aqua. This seems to be a disparity to me -- why would they change the interface on Sherlock and the Address Book while leaving Mail and the Finder alone? Is it possible that Jaguar will feature alternative non-Aqua themes? If not, why would they have two such dramatically different looks for Mail and Address book?
I'm not sure when we'll see this ("late summer" to me means September or October, so anything before that is a bonus!), but it looks like a must-have upgrade, even if I do need to send Apple some money for it (I'm guessing it will be $29.95 or $39.95 ... answer the new poll and share what you'd be willing to pay for the added functionality).
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