Apples Schiller Pushes Printing With 10.2

SAN FRANCISCO—In a keynote address here Tuesday at Seybold San Francisco 2002, which was largely devoid of new announcements, Apple Senior Vice President Phillip Schiller spent an hour teasing out the new "print, publishing and design" features of Apples recently released OS X 10.2 operating system.

While there was some news—Schiller mentioned new support for Apples Rendevous device discovery technology from Philips, Canon, Xerox, Sybase and World Book—the keynote shed no new light on the timing or availability of Carbonized versions of vital publishing applications such as Quark Xpress.

Schiller stated only that Apple was on its way to achieving its goal of 5,000 OS X-native applications by years end, with around 3,900 applications currently written for or ported to the new platform.

Schiller did, however, confirm reports that come January 2003, all shipping Mac systems will only boot into OS X, although users will continue to be able to run most OS 9 applications through OS Xs "Classic" mode. (Read eWeeks exclusive coverage of the plan.)

Also announced at the show was availability of the open source printer driver package, GIMP-print, for download direct from Apple. GIMP-print, which works alongside the open source CUPS 1.1 (Common UNIX Printing System) that ships in OS X 10.2, provides users with a range of drivers for printers previously unsupported in the OS.

Schiller and his associates ran through a list of print and design-related features first announced at the launch of OS X 10.2, including improved PDF support, Inkwell handwriting recognition, color handling, and new Applescript functionality.

Schiller also touted Apples QuickTime 6 media platform, which he described as the first media architecture built on open standards. "When I buy a TV set I dont buy a set based on what channel I want to watch," Schiller said. "And thats not the way it should be for digital media either."

The most exciting part of this feature rundown for the Seybold keynote crowd seemed to be the demonstration of OS Xs Quartz Extreme graphics subsystem, which Schiller described as "years ahead of anything the PC has to offer." Backing up this claim, OS X Product Marketing Manager Chris Bourdon played two high-resolution video clips, overlaid with a transparent UNIX terminal window that Bourdon dragged back and forth across the screen – a considerable graphics load that showed off the impressive compositing capabilities of OS X, as well as garnered applause from the audience.

Technical Analyst Jason Brooks can be reached at jason_brooks@ziffdavis.com.

Related Stories:

Next Mac OS X Upgrade: Panther

Reader Comments: Apples Schiller Pushes Printing With 10.2 >>> Be the FIRST to comment on this article!

>>> More Application Development Articles          >>> More By Jason Brooks