Apple sweats Mac OS X details
While Apple Computer's plethora of high-profile hardware announcements hold pride of place at this week's Macworld Expo here, CEO Steve Jobs' keynote update on the status of Mac OS X will prove at least as strategically significant to the future of the platform.
Not only has Apple refined the new OS -- now scheduled to ship for $129 on March 24 and to come pre-loaded on all Macs beginning this summer -- the latest round of modifications demonstrates that the company has taken the concerns of longtime Mac users to heart.
Since the release of the public beta at September's Apple Expo in Paris, Apple has been actively soliciting feedback from OS X beta testers. During his keynote presentation, Jobs said Apple has acted on thousands of the responses it has received. As reported earlier, the feature set has been frozen, and development efforts have shifted to delivering the final product in seven different languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish) in time for the first commercial release.
Jobs briefly touched on some new features, including AirPort, printing and font management and gave detailed descriptions of some of the other features that have been added to make the new operating system more familiar and useful to current OS 9 users. This screen shot shows six of the changes to the Desktop and the Finder under OS X.
The result of the tweaks: The oft-maligned Dock is a much more useful tool, combining the functions of several beloved OS 9 interface utilities, including the Application Launcher, the Control Strip and pop-up folders.
These are only some of the modifications to OS X since the release of the public beta. On 24 March, full details of the new OS will be available, and a new era of Macintosh computing will begin. For more information on Mac OS X, visit http://www.apple.com/macosx/.
See full coverage at the Macworld Expo Roundup.
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