OS X Jaguar

The Apple Developer’s Conference is full of cool announcements. First, and most importantly, is the impending release of OS X 10.2, called Jaguar. Apple has a A Look Inside Jaguar covering the major points. The most exciting is Quartz Extreme:

“Jaguar dramatically improves the performance of Mac OS X with Quartz Extreme hardware-based graphics acceleration. Quartz Extreme takes advantage of the OpenGL 3D graphics engine to make the entire desktop a fully accelerated OpenGL scene. A supported* video card can then render the drawing of the desktop, just like it would a 3D game.”

Any modern video card with 32MB of VRAM is recommended for ‘optimal’ performance. There are a whole bunch of other features, involving Windows connectivity, application upgrades and other stuff (spring-loaded folders make a comeback), but that one is the most important, I feel. That’s one of the main stumbling blocks for OS X right now; it’s a nice-looking, simple interface, but it moves slowly. The user is forced to sacrifice performance for looks. Leveraging the video card is a great move. Also included in the graphics upgrade is Quicktime 6, with support for MPEG-4, all integrated into the system.