Steve Jobs on Mac OS 8.5: Sherlock, Speed, and Scriptability

But no sooner had we rolled out this and people said, "Well, that's fine, you survive, you have a really good product strategy, but now what about the Mac OS? Isn't that, I mean, how does that compare with Windows? Why don't you run Windows?" And we said, "Well, because we have something better, and it's called the Mac OS." And the Mac OS, what's remarkable is that some people have forgotten that Apple owns one of only two high-volume operating systems in the whole world. That's amazing. That's an amazing position to be in, and we happen to own the best one even if it's not the most popular one.

Today, so what can we do to make it even better so that it becomes even more popular? And today we have Mac OS 8, which is a very good release. Abby Tivanian, who runs software, he and his team have been coming out with a great release every year like clockwork, and System Aids and 8.1 have been very, very good. We're making them even better with System 8.5. Mac OS 8.5 is great. It's coming out next month, and it is a must-have upgrade. And it's a must-have upgrade for four reasons, and these are the four reasons: one,

Sherlock, two, copy performance, three, ColorSync, and four, AppleScripts. So let's take a look at each of those. Sherlock. Sherlock is amazing. We saw how Microsoft integrated the Internet into their operating system. We've chosen to do it a slightly different way, and you'll see this rolling out from Apple over the next year. And the first major piece of this is Sherlock. So if I want to find something on the net, I get out my browser and I find Excite. I type in "excitement." I go to the Excite search site. I look up something, but that's not there. So then

I go and I type in AltaVista and I go to the AltaVista search site, and it looks a little different, but I figure out where to type something in. No. And then I go to Infosync, and maybe I find what I'm looking for. Wouldn't it be great if I didn't have to do all this, if the computer could do it for me? And that's exactly what Sherlock does. Sherlock harnesses all of these search engines at once. And here's how it works: you type into Sherlock with natural language what you're looking for. You know, I'm looking for all the information on Titanic, and Sherlock then sends messages to all of those search sites at once. So we have

five or six or seven search sites looking at once, including an online encyclopedia, Apple's whole tech info library if you want it. All of these servers are working in parallel for you, and then the results start to come back. And they start to come back the fastest search sites first, but as each of them comes back, they're integrated into the list, and they're ranked by relevancy. And so you can see exactly what you're trying to find from all of these search sites at once. In addition to that, Sherlock actually at nighttime can index your whole hard drive, every file you have on your hard drive from all of your applications, and you

can even look on your own hard disk for things by any keyword, not just in the title of the document but inside every document and find them in seconds. The second must-have feature of Mac OS 8 is network file copy. We, as you know, Apple's market share in the design and publishing market is between 50 and 90 percent depending on which market segment you're looking at, and our publishing customers move around very large files from machine to machine, from file to server, from client to server, from server to client, and our copy performance has not been what it should have been.

And our customers have told us this, and we have worked on it and made substantial improvements in Mac OS 8.5. Well, let's take a look at that. Let's measure how many seconds it takes to copy a 185 megabyte file from a client to a server over a dedicated 100 megabit per second Ethernet. Now, on Mac OS 8.1, it took 34 seconds to copy that file, and that's not good enough because Windows 98 does it in 30 seconds, and we don't like Windows to do anything better than the MacBook. So that bothered us. What bothered us even more

was Windows NT did it in 25 seconds. We worked very hard on Mac OS 8.5, and Mac OS 8.5 copies that same file in 17 seconds. We have doubled the performance over Mac OS 8.1. We are faster than even Windows NT, and this applies to all network copying, printing, and even local copying as well. So I'd like to ask Bill to come back now and we'll go ahead and give you a demo of network copy. Phil? Hey Steve. Alright. Ready? Sure.

Three, two, one, go! And we're off again. I think this time the Windows machine, don't we'll win, don't you? I think so. Here we go. Well, maybe on a good day. Okay. Third, ColorSync. ColorSync. Do you know what ColorSync is? Most of you probably... Let me explain what it is very simply. When we move from the black and white world of printing

into the desktop publishing world of color, all of a sudden things didn't work anymore. The color I saw on my screen was not the color I printed on my printer or my printing press. And this was a big problem. So some of the application companies started building color management facilities into their applications. Some of it wasn't done so well, but it began to work slightly. Except that when I took a file, when I took a picture from Photoshop and I put it into QuarkXPress, everything broke again because every application was doing it a little bit differently.

And Apple realized many years ago the color management had to be part of the operating system, not part of an application. And so it started to design and build in ColorSync into the operating system. ColorSync has now become the standard way that the entire printing and publishing industry manages color, and there are over a million users of ColorSync today. And the profiles, the color engines that calculate all these color profiles shipping in Mac OS 8 today, are from Heidelberg and Kodak. And in 8.5, we now add engines from Agfa and

Animation. So every major color engine can be selected and used across all applications, and the entire industry is using ColorSync. So this is a big plus for anyone in design and publishing with Mac OS 8.5. And the fourth compelling reason is AppleScript. AppleScript is a technology that Apple's been working on for a long time, and it has revolutionized things in the publishing and design market as well. And AppleScript is now in Mac OS 8.5, gotten a lot faster, it has gotten—we've made it native, and so it's running up to five times faster than it ever has before, native on the Power PC.

And almost everything is scriptable. And so we've made the Finder scriptable; you can now script anything in the Finder. We've made ColorSync fully scriptable. We have made Sherlock fully scriptable. And both printing and folders are now scriptable, so you can actually attach an AppleScript to a folder, and that script will run anytime there's an action on that folder—anytime you drop a file in or remove a file or anything you scripted to do. It's pretty amazing. And so, to give us a demo of this again, I'm going to ask Phil: Can you give us a demo of AppleScript? To begin with, I have a folder on my desktop. This folder has an AppleScript attached to it.

It simply scripts the very basic folder functions of opening and closing folders. When I double-click on it, all of the folders inside that are labeled as hot automatically open with it. When I move the topmost folder, they all move with it. When I close a folder, they all close with it. So simple Finder actions are scriptable, and you can write scripts and attach them to folders and automatically automate things you do in the Finder. Let's take that a step further. Let me open up a folder with one image in it: an image of an iMac and a series of folders, each that have a script attached to it.

When I drag the image onto the folder, it's going to automate an action for me. So first, I take this iMac picture, and I drag it onto the Rotate Image folder and let go, and now it launches Photoshop and runs a script inside Photoshop to rotate that image automatically for me. I drag that same image onto the Flip Image folder, and automatically it will open Photoshop and flip the image for me. And lastly, when I drag it on top of the Clouds Image folder and let go, it will bring it into Photoshop and create a background of clouds. This is all done using a new plug-in for Photoshop called PhotoScripter that makes Photoshop

entirely scriptable and can be automated by publishing customers. So Mac OS 8.5, these four things and many, many others, we believe make this a must-have upgrade. And this is going to be shipping next month in October. And we think that what's been done with Mac OS 8 and 8.1 and now on to 8.5, we are investing a lot in the Mac OS to not only keep it ahead but to actually widen the distance and keep it the best OS in the world. So that's what we're doing with Mac OS. But even so, people are still

now asking, "Well, what about the applications? Okay, you've survived. You have a product strategy. Your OS strategy looks good too. But aren't there a lot more applications on Windows? Isn't it hard to find applications for the Mac?" And I think the answer a year ago to that question was yes. The answer is rapidly becoming no. There are tons of applications for the Mac OS. We launched the iMac on May 6th; we announced it on May 6th, and that was 134 days ago from today. During those 134 days, I am very pleased to report that over 900

new and revised apps have been announced for the Macintosh OS. It's been huge, much more than we expected. And of those, 219 have come from Europe, European developers. Many of these are consumer-oriented apps as well, which is great because that's where we're targeting the iMac. Microsoft, as you know, is one of our key partners, and Microsoft has been updating all of their apps this year. And the three apps that we have from them now are, of course, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and Microsoft Office 98, their most advanced version of Office. And right now, I'd like to bring up Ben Waldman, who's the general manager of the Macintosh

business unit at Microsoft, to say a few words about our partnership and tell you some cool things about these products. Ben? So, with this group and with our dedication to creating great innovative software for the Mac, we knew that Office 98 could not be some sort of high-end product full of high-end features that only a few users could use. So we spent 80 percent of our time working on features that every single user could use every single day so that Office 98 would be a perfect compliment, whether people were using a G3 desktop, a G3 PowerBook, or even the new iMac. And so that's why you'll see innovative

features in Office 98 like drag-and-drop install and self-repairing applications, features available in no other product in the industry on any platform, that eliminate the need to run an install program and make Office the easiest software to deploy and maintain on any platform. As I said, whether one works in a home or in business. That's why you see features in Microsoft Word like Background Spelling, which checks your spelling automatically as you type without even having to go and pick the spelling dialogue. That's why you see features in Microsoft Excel like French language formulas so you can type your—let your formulas in plain French and not have to type some obscure spreadsheet, uh, formula language. Okay, now

I want to show you a few more of these apps. I'm going to click buy them pretty fast, but we've been seeing again some of these 900 applications in the last 134 days. A lot of stuff on the web—GoLive, Cyber Studios, fantastic, you should check it out. NetObjects Fusion, a whole bunch of different web software. Adobe Photoshop 5, huge upgrade of Photoshop again on Macintosh first. Some great stuff out of Macromedia, SuperGoo, uh, and, you know, Poser, some really good stuff there. Some great stuff, Avid Cinema, new release of Avid Cinema Souves, uh, very, very good stuff on the video side. Some great games, we've been really focusing on games. I don't know why, but I guess the prior

management of Apple’s, and we like games a lot. So, uh, Tomb Raider, really great version of Tomb Raider. Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic is running a platform, and that's wonderful. The X-Files game, Riven, Star Wars, uh, some great games out of Europe. Uh, and we've got also Unreal, which is, which is Unreal. Uh, you should, you should check that one out if you like games. Some great younger kids stuff as well. So, 134 days, 900 applications, and it's not stopping. The developers are absolutely returning to the Macintosh because Apple has tried to remove lots of barriers for them in dealing with our company, in dealing with the distribution of their software, and most importantly we're

selling a lot more Macs because we want to be the computer company that makes the best and coolest computers in the world for you. And I hope that you're seeing some progress towards that goal out of us all. So, thank you very much. It's been really great to be with you today. Thank you. So you