An Apple A Day…
Jun 24th, 2003 by mark
Yesterday was the keynote address at the World Wide Developers Conference Apple is hosting in San Francisco. During his two hour presentation Steve Jobs offered up these new goodies:
iChat AV Public Beta and the iSight video camera.
The iChat upgrade adds both audio and video chats to iChat’s abilities — allowing users to communicate with friends and family over long distances. The sofware supports Apple’s new iSight video camera which provides 640×480 Full Motion video at up to 30 Frames Per Second.
The camera also has a microphone and interfaces to your Macintosh via Firewire.
The public Beta of iChat AV is available now. The final iChat version which supports Jaguar will be sold for $29.95. Users upgrade to Panther, however, will get the final iChat AV version included.
PowerMac G5: World’s Fastest Desktop Computer
Today, Apple officially announced the PowerMac G5 — dubbed the “world’s fastest personal computer” as well as the first 64-bit personal computer.
$1,999: Single 1.6GHz G5, 800MHz Bus, SuperDrive, 3 PCI, 80GB S-ATA HD
$2,399: Single 1.8GHz G5, 900MHz Bus, SuperDrive, 3 PCI-X, 160GB S-ATA HD
$2,999: Dual 2.0GHz G5, 1GHz Bus, SuperDrive, 3 PCI-X, 160GB S-ATA HD
The revamped machine contains all new hardware and subsystems… providing dramatic performance improvements over current systems. Systems will not be available until August 2003, according to Jobs.
Safari 1.0
Apple released Safari 1.0 Today.
The final version of Apple’s Web Browser provides the following new features:
- Safari is Mac OS X default browser
- AutoTab loads folders quickly
- Sync your bookmarks with iSync
- Available in all Mac OS X languages
- More AppleScripts available
- Increased standards compatibility
WWDC Panther Preview
Apple demonstrated Panther for the first time today. Jobs touched upon a number of new features in Panther:
Finder - Now metal with a “user-centric” model. Screenshots depiced a new area for volumes/iDisks/folders on the left hand side. The action menu gives you access to labels and other contextual comamnds.
Exposé provides an easy way for users to find windows in their clutered screens. The demo of Exposé drew oohs and aahs from the crowd as the windows move out of the way in a fluid motion.
Fast User Switching - lets you switch between accounts without quitting running applications. It also adds a bit of Apple Flare - with your old screen rotating out on a 3d cube.
Mail - the new version can organize by “threads” rather then individual emails. Performance is also improved.
FileVault - offers security for your home directory.
Preview - is noted to be the fastested PDF viewer around - which would be a significant improvement over the current incarnation. Fast text searching also included.
Font Book - the new Foot Book lets you install, preview, search, activate and deactivate fonts you need.
Faxing support throughout Panther.
Xcode - for developers - faster build times, predictive compile, distributed building, and more…
