SAN JOSE, California -- Apple CEO Steve Jobs presided over an elaborate mock-funeral for OS 9 on Monday, burying the company's old operating system in a large silver coffin and wishing it well as it enters "the bit bucket in the sky."
He then offered programmers at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference a "sneak peek" at Jaguar, which is the code-name for the company's next version of its current operating system, OS X.
Jaguar -- due to be released in "late summer" -- will feature some minor improvements on the current version of OS X and several new additions, including an instant-messaging client built into the operating system and a networking protocol that lets computers automatically "discover" each other as they come into close contact.
The instant messaging, called iChat, is compatible with AOL Instant Messenger, meaning that people who use iChat can chat with people who use AIM.
With 140 million users, AIM is the most popular instant messaging system in the world, and although many other companies have created AIM-compatible chatters, Apple is the first company to get "AOL's blessing" in its efforts, Jobs said. (AOL says that programs that do not receive its blessing to connect with AIM users are "hacking" into its system, and the company actively tries to keep them from the AIM network.)
According to the brief demonstration, iChat seems like a standard chat program with a few handy features not available in other clients. The most useful of these is the program's "local buddy list," which creates a chat list of all the people available on a network.
No longer is it necessary, Jobs said, to ask everyone in your office for their IM handle -- just connect your computer to the network and iChat will automatically find all the people who are available to talk.
The interface is more elaborate than that of other clients, with thumbnail pictures of each person chatting and cartoonish bubble-dialog boxes. While these boxes looked nice, a few people in the media seats remarked that they could become cumbersome.
The chat system is also integrated into Jaguar's e-mail application, indicating whether an e-mailer is available for instant messages.
Jobs also unveiled Rendezvous, a networking system that lets Macs close to each other automatically connect without any user intervention. In a demonstration, he showed how two computers with wireless network capabilities automatically shared each other's MP3s. Apple is proposing Rendezvous as an industry standard, Jobs said, urging that it be put in network devices developed by other companies.
Jobs told the programmers that Apple is now only creating software for OS X, and he urged them to follow suit.
To make that move easier, he showed a host of developer tools for Jaguar that will make programming and system management easier. These include better compatibility with Windows networks and version 4.4 of FreeBSD, the Unix system that underlies OS X.
Jaguar will also take advantage of the fast video cards to add "hardware acceleration" to its graphic engine, allowing developers to create better-looking programs, Jobs said.
Finally, offering a teaser to the Mac fans here, Jobs said that in one week Apple will make a big announcement regarding its lineup of servers. "I don't have any details," he said, "but it will be our first dedicated server in a long time."
