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Windows Features
Authored by: newbill123 on Jun 07, '07 04:00:24PM
moukkis wrote:
It could be something to do with running Windows/Linux in a far less cumbersome way than dual boot. How they do it, that remains to see,...
I strongly agree with this thought. After all, if they are Windows secrets, the wouldn't be to keep Apple Developers or Users in the dark, but to make sure Microsoft has as little time as possible to "move the goalposts" between the time of the announcements and the software going on sale. These are just educated guesses, but here are my predictions:

A Windows Friendly API layer built on Core Foundation
Like Carbon, and Cocoa, (and sort-of Quicktime), Apple likes the arrangement of putting the underlying functionality into Core Foundation and making an evolutionary API which appeals to a group of programmers it wants to make native products for OS X. That's a simplified explanation and not how it actually evolved. I can't see Apple adopting Wine or rewriting the Windows APIs from scratch, but I can see Apple writing an API that's very Windows friendly but which calls Core Foundation underneath. If this is the case, no doubt a development team that's been working with Apple in secret (Intuit? Adobe?) will come on stage and demo how a port of their Windows version to the new Mac OS X api required only changing 10 lines of code and was mostly done (except for the IB work) in a fortnight. Or some such big explanation. Like booting into OS 9, using "classic", or using Carbon apps, users will have the same choices for Windows.

An Extensible Security Framework
This would be a system that could support virus scanning and malware detection in OS X. Why do it if there's little malware in the wild now? To be prepared in case something breaks out. To get security products to move to Mac with as little effort as possible since Windows users need those brands to feel safe. To get the security products to use Apple frameworks at the low levels instead of writing their own (for reasons of stability and security). My guess is that Plug-in packs will be available if you want to scan your system for Windows malware. After all, in the world of virtualization and running Windows apps, you may not be booted into Windows but still need to detect if there might be problems out there. Oh yeah, and it'll also shut up the security researches who say don't move to Mac since it doesn't have the scaffolding to respond to a major virus outbreak when it occurs in the future.

Outlook killing features
If there is a single app that ties people and corporations to Windows, it's the calendaring and workgroup features of Outlook. Whether it's a just a major overhaul of existing tech in Mac OS X to make it competitive, or actually adding features to interact with Outlook servers, I don't know. My suspicion is that an overhaul to iCal, dot Mac, and building in features into Mac OS X server are going to be the baseline. Maybe more to come in the future though.

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