MacOS 9, formerly code-named Sonata, continues the evolution toward Carbon API compatibility. It includes an enhanced 2.0 version of Apple's Sherlock "metasearch engine" that includes LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol) address book support, allowing you to search for people across the Internet, plus an e-commerce-oriented search facility that shows products, prices and availability of products for Internet shoppers. Apple says its goal is to make the Mac OS the easiest way to search for information, people or products on the Internet. The new Sherlock features the same sort of interface stylings as Apple's recently released QuickTime 4 player (the icon-heavy interface of which not everyone likes, due to its omission of classic Mac window controls such as minimize buttons and so on).
Also appearing in MacOS 9 is the recently missing-in-action "keychain," a feature present in System 7.5 that Apple has now refashioned into a network login (complete with a "voiceprint login" option) manager that allows different users to each have their own preferences, desktop settings, default web browser, document folders, and other settings. Network login features have been a part of the Windows environment (and the Apple education community) for years; it's good to see Apple provide this functionality to its base of Mac users, many of whom share a single computer between classmates or multiple family members.
Apple iCEO Steve Jobs demonstrated Mac OS 9 at the Seybold Publishing Conference on Aug. 31st, where he announced that Mac OS 9 will be available for US$99 in October.
Mac OS 9, explained Jobs as he used the new OS' voiceprint login feature to gain access to the machine and unlock a "keychain" of all other passwords, is the result of the company's effort at creating an "Internet co-pilot," with an improved, e-commerce savvy version of the Sherlock search engine first released in MacOS 8.5. Now dubbed Sherlock 2, the new release features not only the ability to search a myriad of search engines (with the ability to add your own plug-ins to search new collections of data), but also the ability to search for prices and in-stock status details, as an Internet shopping assistant. Jobs and VP of worldwide sales Phil Schiller demonstrated Sherlock 2 by looking up Apollo 11 memorabilia for sale at auction sites and retail stores around the world. ($150 for an autographed picture of the moonwalk by Buzz Aldrin himself? What a deal!)
During the demo, Jobs also invited IBM's Ozzie Osborne (no, not the rock star!) to demo the recently announced IBM Via Voice for Mac. The demo, although impressive in its ability to enter text and transfer it to Microsoft Word with simple voice commands, produced a few recognition errors that betray the main complaint we've had with IBM's offering, compared to Dragon NaturallySpeaking and other voice recognition solutions on the PC platform -- lower accuracy than we'd like. Still, it's great to see this class of productivity application on the Mac at last.
Mac OS 9 also features a few other key improvements. AppleScript can now be used over TCP/IP, leading to the tantalizing possibility of automating publishing tasks over the Internet. This was, in fact, demonstrated during a killer demo by Phil Schiller, who showed one Mac in San Francisco delivering data from a FileMaker database, while AppleScript controlled another Mac, ostensibly in New York, retrieving images from a collection, resizing them in Photoshop, and sending them over the Internet to machine #1's AppleScript, which assembled them and the database text onto a page produced in Adobe's just-released InDesign publishing program. The new OS also provides the ability to update itself over the Internet.
One of the biggest concerns for many Mac graphics and publishing enthusiasts is the incompatibility of OS9 with many versions of Adobe Type Manager. As detailed at www.macobserver.com, the new OS disables all versions of ATM released before it. If ATM is installed on a machine running OS9, say testers, the machine will crash at boot time when it encounters the ATM control panel INIT. Adobe Type Reunion was also incompatible with OS 9; it subsequently released patches for these issues.
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