Personal highlights of Apple's new OS announcements for next year:
- Jabber in iChat - apparently it's been there for a while, when using iChat on a local network via Rendezvous, but hopefully they'll use Jabberd2 and the official Multi-User Conferencing for their iChat server. Letting iChat log in securely to other, non-Rendezvous Jabber servers would be great as well.
- Automator, which will hopefully cover everything I try and do already with Folder Actions, Terminal aliases, TextExtras, On My Command and all those other contextual add-ins.
- Launchd, for sorting out them daemons.
- Safari RSS, not for being able to read RSS feeds in the browser, but for the little feed icon that shows up in the address bar. As long as other aggregators can take control of that link - which seems likely, as it uses a feed: protocol (or similar) - I'll be happy. Maybe it could detect FOAF and other embedded links too, for a one-click transfer from web page to Address Book?
- Spotlight, because Mail.app (and most of the rest of the system) needs a decent search engine. The API should make the search features available to third party applications as well.
- Finally, CoreImage and CoreVideo look great, but where are the improvements to CoreAudio?