At the recent Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, programmers were encouraged to exhume the Mac OS X’s innate potential and bring out more native apps.
“It’s a race to the top,” said Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs to an audience of Mac-crazy developers. “The person who gets the native apps out first will win.”
OS X’s first three months has already seen the release of 600 native applications but Jobs insisted that there was still a mountain of new, as yet undiscovered, possibilities awaiting developers.
A survey conducted of late by Macworld Magazine, revealed that 82 percent of Mac users would upgrade to OS X-enhanced versions of existing software as soon as those versions were released.
“The impatience for Mac OS X will surpass brand loyalty,” Jobs claimed, “more than half of Mac users would switch from one application to a competing program if the competitor released an X-version first.”
Aside from urging Mac developers to create more apps for X, Jobs announced a new “industrial-strength” server version of X designed to host websites and video services. A revamped WebObjects, Apple’s popular Web publishing tool, was also scheduled for imminent circulation.
Jobs waved aside the clutch of bad-press that surrounded the release of OS X. “OS X is indeed far from perfect,” he acknowledged, “but I think we’ve had a tremendous start nonetheless.”
Moreover, he informed assembled coders, a thousand Apple software engineers were currently at labour to improve the system’s performance and advanced audio capabilities.
To convince unbelievers about X’s refined development potential, Jobs slapped together a digital movie editor in under three minutes — using only a few lines of custom code and a few clicks through the new-fangled OS. Seven minutes later Jobs had edited a snazzy video replete with audio.
“If I can do that with X in 10 minutes, imagine what you can do in 90 days,” he told developers, exhorting them to dig their claws into X’s potential without further ado.
