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created 1 August 2002

So, outside of the keynote, you still had some really interesting stuff...just not interesting to the general user community.

The one that really jumps out at me is Matlab running natively on Mac OS X. For those who don't know, Matlab is considered the engineering modeling application. Companies like Bose live and die with Matlab, and if a platform doesn't run Matlab, then it gets the boot. For a lot of companies, the former lack of continuing Matlab development doomed the Mac to at best, a niche platform. But I saw Matlab, with the Simulink package running natively at the show, and the folks there anticipate a release in a month or so. It's not using an Aqua interface, but rather an X11 - based interface. This is not really a big deal, as the people who use Matlab use X11 a lot anyway. This also allows you to set up an Xserve as a Matlab server for other Unix clients...great stuff! The Matlab folks told me that anyone with a multi platform license will automatically be able to use the OS X version under that license. This is not terribly sexy, but it is terribly important for the platform, especially in SciTech.

Along the lines of important but not sexy was the Oracle stuff I saw at an off-site event. It was Oracle 9i running natively in Mac OS X. The Oracle rep. told me that they plan to ship the developer version when Jaguar ships, and that the early 2003 timeframe for the full 9i server and clustering technology was still a good estimate. (This timeframe was announced I believe by Apple/Oracle in May of this year at the Xserve rollout.) Again, the common user isn't going to get all wiggly over Oracle 9i clustering, but to the IT geeks, this is major good news. Oracle is still the top, (or a close number two behind DB2) enterprise database system. Having the full 9i, and the clustering technology running on Mac OS X is a major coup for Apple, and will confer the kind of legitimacy in the enterprise market that you can't get from anyone else, except maybe IBM.

Oracle was not the only enterprise database vendor at the show however. The Sybase folks were announcing that they would have their ASE server ready in a month or so. While not as popular as Oracle or DB2, this announcement basically means that the Mac is soon going to be able to host 2 out of the four top enterprise database environments, (Oracle and Sybase, leaving only DB2 and Informix not on the Mac. I don't consider a single platform database to be truly enterprise quality, which is one of many reasons I don't rate SQL*Server as a participant at this level. Maybe one day, when Microsoft gets out of their insecure six-year-old mindset, they'll allow their products to stand outside of the Windows wall.), which makes the Mac a far more legitimate choice at more levels of the enterprise than ever before. This is critical in expanding mind and market share.

Yet another pickup truck application announced for Expo was version 5 of 4-Sight Fax client from the folks are Soft Solutions. This is just the client for their fax server product, although they plan to have the server ready this fall. Even though the server hasn't been released yet I'm still as happy about this product. It is all TCP/IP based, can email your faxes to you as PDF files, and can email PDFs to the server to be faxed out. It supports Mac OS X/9 and windows via native clients as well. The client was being written in Java, so in theory, it should support many more platforms as well, but how well remains to be seen. This is another one of those dull-boring applications that shows the enterprise market that you can use a Mac to get real, dull, boring work done, which is the kind of thing that floats the enterprise boat better than anything you'll ever do in Maya. Not a 'sexy' announcement, but important nonetheless.

One area that should have made me far happier than it did was AppleScript. Not AppleScript itself, which is still one of the major reasons I love the platform, but rather Apple's odd issues with it. Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro are still not scripted. When I ask, I get variations on, "You can't script the creative process." Well, no, but I sure can script the production process, and guess what, the production process always generates more work than the creative process. For every zoomie-cool Final Cut effect, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours of repetitive production effects that vary only slightly, if at all. Station identification effects, upcoming feature announcements, none of these are that creative once the initial build is over. With Media 100, which is scriptable, you can create a lot of work, with very little human intervention. Just ask Showtime how nice this is. It's nice enough that they use Media 100 instead of Final Cut Pro.

What's even sadder is how a good dictionary can make an application nearly infinitely more useful than it otherwise would be. If iMovie were scriptable, I could set up a business that ran old VHS and Beta home movies through a DV Cam into iMovie, which could then output it to iDVD, (Which is scriptable), which would then burn it to DVD along some predetermined lines. You can make real money off of this, and right now, because of AppleScript, iDVD is a far better production tool than DVD Studio Pro. Why? Automation. Some of the things I saw that you can now do with iDVD just blew me away, and for a free application to be able to make the 'pro' version look amateurish is just...well...dumb.

I love AppleScript, and I'm totally jazzed about the things that I saw Jaguar able to do at the show, but come on Apple. There is no excuse for Final Cut Pro to not be scriptable in version 3. DVD Studio Pro is in it's second release, where's my dictionary? Where's the dictionary for the GUI admin tools in Jaguar Server? Here's the way to determine what are the minimal capabilities you should make scriptable:

all of them.

Because if you do, you'll see your applications selling to people you never thought would care and being used for things you never thought possible. If that isn't "thinking different" I don't know what is. AppleScript is a core, critical technology, and Apple needs to reflect that in all its applications.

Jaguar Server, leaving aside the AppleScript issues, is poised to be the server that Apple has needed for a long time. Finally, you will be able to easily NetBoot and manage Mac OS X machines. It's also adding full LDAP v3 server and client support, which means that you will be able to integrate Mac OS X into any LDAP or LDAP - compatible environment, like Active Directory, or iPlanet/Sun ONE Directory Server, Novell's eDirectory, or OpenLDAP. This is a critical issue for Jaguar Server, and OS X in general. While Mac OS X has had some basic LDAP functionality, it wasn't LDAP v3 compliant, and it had a lot of issue that made it quite painful to set up. Perusing the recently released Administrator's guide, (available on the Mac OS X Server site), it's obvious just how serious Apple is about LDAP.

They are trying to make the LDAP integration as easy and as thorough as possible, and are attempting to make it as simple as possible to use existing custom schema via a one button 'From Server' option. LDAPv3 over SSL is now available as well, so that critical data isn't being sent as clear text. If you have your existing LDAP server using DHCP to advertise itself, Jaguar Server is able to handle that as well. If you have to modify your LDAP server mappings, you can do that locally on Jaguar Server, and then write them back up to the LDAP server. If the implementation works as good in the server room as it looks to on PDF, then Apple deserves major congratulations for this level of upgrade. Note that while NetInfo is still a major part of Mac OS X, the simple fact is, it never caught on with anyone outside of the NeXT/OpenSTEP world. LDAP is the open standard that the world is using for directory services, and Apple is to be applauded for recognizing this, and acting appropriately, rather than retreating into a NIH funk.

Jaguar Server is also finally going to allow people with Mac OS X clients to manage them at the same level as Macintosh Manager allowed them to manage Mac OS 8/9 clients. This is a critical function, and has been a hard reason for the slowness of Mac OS X's adoption by the K-12 market. Macintosh Manager, for all its growing pains, has allowed people who aren't IT administrators to run fairly large networks of Macs in a coherent way. When you are talking about kids, who are smart, and live to test boundaries, this is not an easy job to do. Up until now, there was no easy, or even remotely 'non admin-friendly' way to run Mac OS X clients. Well, the new Workgroup Manager in Jaguar Server should fix that. It works with the newer features in Jaguar, such as the return of the Simple Finder, and the ability to restrict access to settings and applications for non-admin accounts, even without Jaguar Server. (As a parent, I definitely appreciate this ability. It allow me to decide computer use for my child, rather than expecting Apple, or the government to do this, which is how it should be.) In addition, it can control iDisk access, Classic features, and adds disk quota limits for home directories, a much needed feature, along with print quotas, which should make Mac network administrators much happier about implementing Mac OS X.

Another feature long missing from Mac OS X Server 10.X has been the ability to share printers via AppleTalk, which always seemed like a fairly silly omission for Apple. That's back, which is a huge relief for people with older machines that couldn't support SMB or LPR printing. The improved print queue logs will make it easier for people who need to implement chargeback mechanisms for printer usage on their networks.

Netbooting of Mac OS X images is now supported, another welcome feature that has been holding k-12 schools back from Mac OS X. As well, the ability to install Mac OS X software across a network is now included in Jaguar Server, a feature long missed by Mac OS X administrators.

From what I can see, Jaguar Server is the upgrade that Mac administrators have been waiting for. In almost every way, it is a step up from AppleShare IP, and older versions of Mac OS X Server. The only thing left out is an easy way to set up DNS. That is still a command line exercise, and considering how critical DNS is to Mac OS X Server, (which practically lives on DNS and revers DNS lookups), this is a rather large lapse on Apple's part. There are other tools out there to help you configure DNS, like GUI interfaces available from VersionTracker, and QuickDNS from Men & Mice, but still, for such a core service, Apple needs to provide better tools than EMACS and Pico.

Besides products, the show floor was interesting. There were a lot more smaller vendors in the spaces usually occupied by Adobe, Quark, Macromedia, which is better than some may think it is. The Mac market needs new blood to remain vital, and we can't achieve vitality if we define our expos by a handful of major vendors. I've also noticed, since the release of Mac OS X over a year ago, that the technical side of Expo seems to be flourishing. From the greater professional content in the sessions, to the new hands on labs, to more technical companies coming to the Mac, MacWorld Expo is becoming far more geek-friendly than it had been prior to Mac OS X. Not surprisingly, I think this is a good thing. The Mac market needs more geeks, even if they do sometimes have a bad opinion of home users. More geeks = more toys for everyone, and that's always good.

Conclusions

So, it was an odd expo, but not a bad one by any stretch. The attendance was surprisingly good for the state of the economy, which shows that Apple, and the Mac market, while small, is not nearly as moribund as the Wintel market looks to be. If Quark, and a few other companies can keep to schedule, we may have a really cool expo in January as well. Also, look to Seybold and the Paris Expo in September for more interesting things in the Mac market

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