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SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA--Apple's always-animated developers received a treat Monday, with a sneak peek at the next release of the company's Mac OS X operating system, new software tools, and news that a rack-mount server is on its way.

Steve Jobs, Apple chief executive officer, opened the company's developer conference here by showing off the next OS X release, code-named Jaguar, and software that will ship with it. Thousands of Apple advocates rushed toward the stage to get as close to Jobs as possible as he demonstrated Jaguar, which is set for release before September. Apple delivered OS X about a year ago, and updated it to version 10.1 last fall.

Jaguar should be the OS that developers focus on from now on, Jobs said. Apple itself has stopped developing OS 9.

"Please join me in a moment of silence as we remember an old friend--Mac OS 9," Jobs said during his keynote. "It isn't dead for our customers yet, but it's dead for you."

Jobs put OS 9, represented by a giant software package, to rest in a black coffin that rose up from underneath the stage.

Server in the Works

To complement Jaguar, Jobs unveiled new e-mail software, an instant messaging application, technology for identifying different computing devices on a network, and a handwriting recognition application called Inkwell.

He also said that next week the company will announce a rack-mount server.

"On May 14, we are introducing our first dedicated server in a long time," Jobs said. "It's a rack-mount server, but I can't you give you many details." Jobs would not release any technical specifications for the server, saying users will need to wait until next week.

Jaguar was built on top of one of the latest versions of the FreeBSD Unix operating system and will give rise to a host of new software tools.

Apple will roll out Inkwell with the Jaguar release. This software prompts a virtual notepad to appear on the screen and turns text entered with a pen into a font recognized by the computer. The Inkwell technology works across applications, allowing a user to change the text in a headline of an Adobe Photoshop document, for example, or write several paragraphs in Microsoft Word.

Jobs also said that Apple will ship the new QuickTime 6 with support for the MPEG-4 standard used to stream media files with Jaguar.

Online Extras

In addition, Apple has updated features in its e-mail software, including better spam filtering and improved tools for categorizing messages. The company complemented the e-mail advancements with new IChat software for instant messaging. Apple users will be able to use their Mac.com screen names as identification for chatting, and the Apple messaging product also works with AOL Time Warner's popular AIM program.

One of the most interesting additions to Jaguar will be Apple's Rendezvous technology that lets computers and devices share data with each other. In a demonstration, Jobs's desktop computer was able to see and play all of the songs on a laptop several feet away. As soon as the laptop was turned on, it used Rendezvous to tell the desktop it was present and then used a wireless connection to let the two computers share music files. The technology also makes it possible for computers to share files with a printer or a handheld device such as Apple's IPod MP3 player.

Jobs also demonstrated the Quartz Extreme middleware feature for working with 2-D, 3-D, and video images. Apple decided to handle many imaging-related tasks directly on the graphics card and "free up the CPU" to work on other jobs. During the presentation, Apple showed several 3-D objects rotating over 2-D pictures with video running in the background, and the software appeared to run smoothly at every step.

"We think we are at least two years ahead of the other guys here, maybe further," Jobs said.

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