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.)