When Mac OS X ships on March 24 in North America, it will also ship in Japan.
“Japanese and all our core language versions will ship on March 24,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs told an appreciative crowd during his keynote speech this week at Macworld Tokyo.
What’s more, the CEO said that Apple had licensed the “most beautiful Japanese fonts around,” with 17,500 characters, and would be bundling them with OS X. No longer would you have to pay a “fortune” to license such fonts on a per-computer basis, he added.
“There’s never been good Japanese fonts shipped in an operating system before,” Jobs aid.
He also demonstrated the new features of the latest build of Mac OS X. Support for AirPort, printing, Location Manager, dynamic network settings, and PPP over Ethernet have been added. The Apple Menu is back, revamped, and on the left hand side of the screen. Mac OS X now also lets you “spawn” windows in the method of the classic Finder if you like. Popup menus are back, in a way. You can now click and hold down items on the Dock and get popup menus. Plus, you can drag and drop items from several folders deep in these product menus.
The controversial Font Panel has been redesigned. You can now shrink it down to a form that is small and has popup menus if you want to leave it open at all times. OS X’s toolbars are smaller and customizable through a range of options. Apple has also added a new screen saver to OS X. It shows your Mac’s icons “floating” around the screen. Plus, you can add your own pictures, such as photos, and take advantage of the OpenGL in OS X to have them cross dissolve and fade into each other. QuickTime 5 will be integrated into the operating system and full Java 2 was supported.
Alias/Wavefront officials demoed Maya running on OS X. Richard Kerris of Alias said the app was in beta testing and would ship next quarter. Mac OS X will be preloaded on all new Macs starting in July.