TiVo, Brother, and Aspyr have announced new products incorporating Apple’s Rendezvous networking.
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Rendezvous enables users to create an instant network of computers without having to assign individual addresses or use additional servers or other technology. Supported in Mac OS X 10.2, the technology works with a variety of networkable devices. Rendezvous itself is based on an existing open source specification called ZeroConf, and utilizes standard protocols like IP, ARP and DNS.
Jim Barton, co-founder and CTO for TiVo, announced that TiVo’s upcoming premium service package will use Rendezvous technology to automatically discover Macs within the home network and determine which services they provide, allowing customers to listen to their shared music or view their shared photos on their TV.
Brother is shipping the first Rendezvous enabled printer: the new HL-5070N Laser Printer, which is “completely configured by just turning it on,” said Don Cummins, vice president, Brother International Corp.
“The hottest game on the Mac this past Christmas was Aspyr’s Rendezvous enabled NASCAR Racing 2002 Season,” said Michael Rogers, Aspyr Media’s president, in announcing the company’s Rendezvous plans. “Rendezvous vastly improves the multiplayer network gaming experience by making it easy for players to find and join games on the network. All of our future networked games are going to take advantage of Rendezvous.”
Developers can download Rendezvous as open source under the Apple Public Source License; it’s part of a larger open source release from Apple that includes Darwin 6.0.1 and new Open Directory plug-ins.