Forwarding Address: OS X

Monday, May 06, 2002

Looks like this year's Apple World Wide Developer's Confernece was a doozy. Especially interesting is Jaguar/Jagwire, a service that autodetects nearby enabled machines and adds their shared files to your filesystem, so that as you wander into and out of range of your friends, you automatically see their shared directories. Also included: AOL Instant Messenger client, rack-mount servers (!), and major performance improvements (much needed, frankly) in OSX. All coming with OS X.2, coming this summer.
"You want computers to discover each other and just share stuff" said Jobs, which will bring Apple into conflict with the RIAA, but will give it a popular USP. Apple actually thought its new AIM-compatible messaging client, based off official AOL-TW, was worth higher billing: as it merited its own press release. Fine though it is, Jagwire's Rendezvous features are ground breaking for any consumer appliance, and a spur to the rest of the industry to make such obvious, end-user functionality so easy.
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