Schiller Pitches Pros on Jaguar at Seybold
By Daniel Drew Turner, September 11, 2002
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SAN FRANCISCO – As predicted by ThinkSecret, eWeek and other Mac-centric publications, there were no surprises – no “one more thing,” no new hardware or software – at today’s Seybold Seminars San Francisco keynote speech by Apple Computer’s Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller. Instead, Schiller took advantage of the professional composition of the crowd to focus more closely on graphic creation, font and printing features new to the recently released Mac OS X 10.2, pitching the product and the tag line “Made on a Mac.”
“We’re not going to talk about hardware today,” Schiller said early to the near-capacity crowd, though partitions had decreased the hall size significantly compared to when it was used for keynotes at previous Macworld Expos. Instead, Schiller said he would give more details on Jaguar features targeted at professionals but glossed over in consumer-oriented presentations.
It’s Not Midnight Yet
Though Schiller did not revive the clock metaphor previously used to track progress of Apple’s migration to Mac OS X, he did present the same update given by his boss at Macworld Expo Paris this week.
Claiming that the move to Mac OS X represented “the fastest transition in history” (though he did not mention whether the gun went off with the shrink-wrapped release of Mac OS X, with the first public beta or at some other point), Schiller said that Apple is predicting that over 20 percent of the Mac user base, or five million people, will be on Mac OS X by next January (he did not elaborate as to whether this meant these users will be Mac OS X-only, work in a dual-boot situation or otherwise). Currently, he said, the number of Mac OS X users stands at three million. In addition, he said, Apple is confident that by January the number of Mac OS X-native applications will reach 5,000, up from approximately 3,900 today.
“Some companies are still not there,” Schiller said, sparking audience murmurs that sounded something like “Quark.” For those applications, Schiller said, there’s always the Classic environment. However, he did not offer a solution for software, such as many professional audio tools, that require direct hardware support and cannot function in Classic. This problem will come to a head next January; after which, Apple said recently, Macs will no longer boot into Mac OS 9.
To the Extreme
First up was Quartz Extreme, the new compositing engine for screen display. In addition to running a demo similar to those shown before, with a transparent Terminal window being shaken over two QuickTime movies that played with no slowdown, Schiller explained a few more details than had been previously mentioned.
In particular, Schiller said that Mac OS X 10.2 includes support for the PDF 1.3 standard plus some extensions from the upcoming 1.4 version. As a result, PDFs in Mac OS X 10.2 support transparency as well as SMP and Velocity Engine acceleration. In addition, users will be able to make secure (read-only as well as password-protected) documents from the desktop. Also, the Print function in Mac OS X 10.2 will include a “Save as PDF” option, similar to the functionality provided by the shareware PrintToPDF utility.
Turning to QuickTime 6, Schiller announced Mac OS support for the JPEG 2000 ISO/IEC standard, complete with discrete wavelet transform (DWT) algorithms and an option for lossy or lossless compression.
Though the Image Capture technology and iPhoto (which uses Image Capture as its engine) have both been mentioned in consumer overviews, Schiller pointed out that with Mac OS X 10.2, Apple has added scanner support to both – a “loudly requested feature,” Schiller said. Also new is that both supply a framework for industry-standard TWAIN drivers. In addition, both iPhoto and Image Capture can embed ColorSync profiles into all images.
ColorSync itself received a few tweaks in Mac OS 10.2, gaining Velocity Engine support, accurate RGB-to-CMYK conversions and a new ColorSync utility that can display color spaces in real-time 3D.
Fonts, Fonts, Baby
Ragged cheers erupted from the design-conscious crowd as Schiller introduced the topic of fonts and font support in Mac OS X 10.2.
In addition to support for TrueType, PostScript and OpenType (as well as Multiple Master) fonts, Schiller said, Mac OS X 10.2 includes the new ability to organize fonts in subfolders, allowing per-job grouping of assets.
Also, the updated OS adds support for Unicode 3.2, over 32,000 glyphs, an updated Font Panel and the new Character Palette, which was called “Key Caps grown up.”
As for printing, Schiller demonstrated features of the new Unix-based CUPS printing engine. (Separate from this change, Mac OS X 10.2 will also now be able to print to custom paper sizes and save multiple custom print settings.)
Schiller noted that though not all companies and all printers have Mac OS X drivers available, it is possible to download the open-source Gimp-Print which would enable printing with almost any product and, with the free GhostScript interpreter, would even enable PostScript printing to most inkjets.
“It’s easier than in Unix,” Schiller said.