WWDC 2000 is Huge

Mac OS X -- the schedule has slipped another 6 months with the final version release appearing in January 2001. A public beta is planned to come out this summer. A Developer Preview 4 was released yesterday to WWDC attendees and to Apple's registered developers. Macs Only! will report on it as soon as its copy is received if it is not accompanied by an NDA. The DP4 version has final application programming interfaces (APIs), support for Java 2.0 (the latest) and a bundled carbonized Internet Explorer 5. Over 200 major developers have committed to Mac OS X. According to Apple, Mac OS X is designed to run on all Macintosh computers using PowerPC G3 and G4 processor chips, and requires a minimum of 64 MB of memory. It doesn't say Power Mac G3s so this hopefully means that older Power Macs upgraded to G3 or G4 processors will be supported. Here is the full Mac OS X press release, the IE5 announcement with screenshot and the developer commitment press release. MacWEEK posted a description of the DP4 interface which indicates that it is more Mac OS-like than DP3.

Other announcements included a giant price reduction for a WebObjects single server license from $50,000 to $699 and that the next version will be written in Java. Also, QuickTime has been downloaded over 50 million times and the next version due out this summer will include MPEG 1 and 2 encoding, speedy G4 optimized sound encoding, Flash 4 and enhanced VR. Finally, Apple announced that it is expanding its professional training/consulting services, termed iServices. For more information on Apples expanded Professional Services Organization please visit Apple's iServices web site."