NewsFactor: Mac OS X ‘has come a long way in two short years’

“If you have not checked out Apple’s OS X lately, you might be surprised by what you find — it has come a long way in two short years. From the official launch of OS X in 2001 to last year’s debut of Jaguar — its third major release — the system has undergone a rapid maturation process that puts it on par with offerings from other vendors. And the company is not sitting still. It plans to put a preview version of 10.3 in the hands of Mac developers in June. ‘That’s an extrordinarily quick pace [for operating system development],’ said Brian Croll, senior director of OS product marketing for Apple.,” writes Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier in a Special Report on “The State of OS X” for the NewsFactor Network.

“The absence of QuarkXPress notwithstanding, Apple has managed to wrangle quite a few applications for its new operating system in the past two years. While it may not rival Microsoft Windows in packaged commercial software, OS X supports a wealth of applications written for Unix and Linux that do not run on Windows. In fact, with more than 5,000 native applications, Croll says that OS X has become ‘an application magnet.’ OS X also is proving popular with Java developers, he noted. And Apple has pitched in considerably in the two-year lifespan of OS X, with the Safari Web browser, the ‘iLife’ suite of apps that allow users to work with digital media, and the Rendezvous automatic network-configuration software,” Brockmeier writes.

Brockmeier also takes a look at the state of Mac OS X Server in the article here.

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