Apple's Jaguar Blinks at Seybold SF
By
Mike Pasini, The Imaging Resource
(Tuesday, September 10, 2002 - 16:06 EDT)
Newsletter editor Mike Pasini is prowling the floor Expo looking for the special imaging features touted in today's special keynote on OS X v. 10.2.
SAN FRANCISCO -- With Apple's premier presenter Steve Jobs stuck in Paris, the Seybold special keynote today was delivered by Philip Schiller, senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing.
He took the opportunity to go through the imaging advances packed into Apple's latest version of OS X, nicknamed Jaguar.
Among the highlights:
- The Quarz Exteme imaging engine offloads the intense graphics processing of the "compositing operating system" to graphics hardware in newer Macintoshes;
- Quartz natively supports PDF (and Print dialogs include a new PDF button);
- QuickTime 6, built on open standards like MPEG4, employs the latest audio codecs (AAC), instant streaming and support for JPEG 2000;
- Inkwell adds Newton's handwriting recognition to any tablet-equipped Mac;
- Image Capture is now scanner aware (with a number of Epson drivers preinstalled in OS X) and includes a 'Take Picture' button to remotely run your tethered digicam;
- Color Sync, built into the OS, features a 3D graphing profiler in the new Color Sync Utility;
- AppleScript no longer needs the finder to handle files and includes AppleScript Studio, a professional authoring environment;
- The release ships iwth $10,000 worth of fonts, many for non-Roman languages.
- Rendevous provides automatic device configuration with printer discovery and service discover that finds the printer for you and tells you all about it; and
- Printing has been radically improved with CUPS 1.1, the Common UNIX Printing System, including browser-based administration and custom page sizes.
Later, on the show floor, we caught a demo of the new Image Capture running an Epson scanner. But when we asked to have the image saved in JPEG 2000 format, we found that although J2K is built into the OS, the applications shipping with it don't yet support it. In fact, the scan could only be saved as a TIFF. And neither QuickTime, iPhoto nor Image Capture could be persuaded to save it as a JP2K.
Sacre blu! we thought.
We'll have more to report from Seybold SF in our next newsletter, Sept. 20.
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