Whew! We're thoroughly exhausted after the first day of Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference-- and we're not even attending! By now you've all heard the big news: as predicted by Mac OS Rumors several times in the past, the Mac OS and Rhapsody are converging into a single operating system, now called Mac OS X. (That X is a Roman numeral 10.) Mac OS X is due in beta by early next year, and it's expected to ship by Q3 1999; it will include plenty of "modern" OS features inherited from Rhapsody, such as pre-emptive multitasking, true protected memory, a real virtual memory system (apparently we can finally say goodbye to predefined memory partitions for each application), etc. As for Rhapsody itself, Developer Release 2 came out today, the first commercial release is due this fall, and after that it'll be rolled into Mac OS X. So much for that Microsoftesque "dual OS strategy," hmmm? Good riddance, we say, especially given the problems we've seen with trying to support NT and Windows 95 in the same office...

The really funky thing about Mac OS X is that it doesn't require developers to completely rewrite their software in order to take advantage of the modern features. Apple's announced a new set of API's, called Carbon, which are a subset of existing Mac OS Toolbox calls with a few more calls thrown in for good measure. Since the call library is very similar to what programmers already use to write Mac apps, only about 10% of the code for most applications needs to be changed. Compare this to Rhapsody, which runs Mac OS 8 applications in the Blue Box, but requires a full program rewrite in order to take advantage of the modern Yellow Box environment. No wonder Adobe was balking at committing to Rhapsody-- how'd you like to rewrite Photoshop, Illustrator, and Pagemaker from the ground up, over the course of several years? But with Carbon, "porting" to Mac OS X is relatively simple; "Carbonized" versions of SimpleText, AppleWorks 5, and Photoshop 5 were all shown, while developers remarked how quickly the "tuning" process was. A nice surprise!

Wait a second, didn't Steve promise us surprises every 90 days? How many days has it been since the iMac unveiling, five? C'mon, Apple, take it easy on us poor Mac folk who have to digest all these changes; a little time to recuperate would be nice. (Just kidding. We obviously love all the craziness.)

After the hubbub died down, many of us were left wondering about the Yellow Box. Remember that applications written to the Yellow Box APIs were supposed to run on Rhapsody PPC, Rhapsody Intel, Mac OS, Windows 95, and Windows NT, plus possibly Solaris and maybe some other operating systems. Where does that fit into the Mac OS X plans? In fact, now that Rhapsody's going away, what happens to Rhapsody Intel itself? Discussion of cross-platform support was conspicuously absent today; in fact, we don't think the phrase "Yellow Box" was mentioned even once.

While at first it seemed to us that Carbon was a repackaged Yellow Box, it's now clear that isn't the case; Carbon is a set of Mac OS API's that will work "natively" in Mac OS X, but since it consists almost entirely of Mac OS calls, it's not cross-platform like the Yellow Box. We think. Basically, MacCentral nailed it right on the head when they wrote about the confusion surrounding today's announcements. While most Mac developers are stoked about the day's surprises, we imagine a lot of former NeXT programmers, who have been writing to the Yellow Box for years, may be a little nervous at this change in direction.

The Carbon API's are a great way to keep existing Mac developers on the Mac platform as it grows and changes; however, the lure of the Yellow Box API's was that, once you spent all the effort of writing all your code for the Yellow Box, you could make it run almost anywhere with minimal porting work. Has Apple decided that such a strategy wouldn't be enough of a draw for new developers? Regardless, we did find one mention of the Yellow Box in a MacWEEK article on the day's events: according to marketing guy Phil Schiller, the Yellow Box will indeed run on both Mac OS X and Rhapsody. So Yellow Box developers aren't left out in the cold, at any rate. Hopefully the picture will become clearer over the course of the week.

Until the Mac OS X sparks started flying, your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff was more than a little impressed with the announcement that Quicktime would be gaining real-time live video streaming capabilities this fall, via the rtp protocol. (Actually, we found it pretty darn impressive after the Mac OS X announcement, too, but this is an overshadowing rivalling how the iMac stole Wall Street's thunder.) This is good news for anyone who wants to send live video data out over the internet from their Mac-based servers-- and it may be great news for Apple, whose Quicktime gains another point favoring it as a potential industry broadcasting standard in the digital age. MacCentral's got some nice coverage.

This came as no particular surprise to any of us, as we'd been hearing rumors of such a development for a while. And if Apple ever wanted Quicktime to become any kind of digital broadcasting standard (and they obviously do-- recall, if you will, Steve Jobs' drooling, pleading pitch to the NAB several weeks ago), they'd obviously have to add some method by which live data could be transmitted. Still, there was something terribly exciting about seeing it work, with Steve's exaggerated antics going into a live motion cam on one machine, and being echoed in an Internet Explorer window on another. Nifty! Perhaps Quicktime has a shot as becoming the broadcasting standard after all... And the best news is, all developers need to do to add this capability to their applications is-- support Quicktime. The rest is built in.

As to why we were so impressed continues to elude us, given that we were watching the whole thing live, over the internet, via RealVideo. So it's not like this streaming live video thing is a new technology, or anything. We suppose it's partly just because it's being integrated into Quicktime itself, which is rapidly becoming the "Swiss Army Knife" of digital media. And the rest is probably just because it was an epiphany to see Steve Jobs making goofy faces in the middle of a Microsoft Word document. That's clearly a religious experience on par with finding the image of Elvis in a flour tortilla. We have seen the light!