Firingsquad MacWorld 2000 report

Firingsquad heeft een artikel gepost over de nieuwe waren die Apple op de MacWorld 2000 heeft gepresenteerd. De meeste aandacht ging er vanzelfsprekend naar MacOS X, waarover hier een stukje:

One of the more important changes to the operating system is that the 2D graphics layer will be handled by a system known as Quartz. Quartz is totally PDF based - yes the same .pdf standard that you use to view Adobe documents is the standard by which ALL 2D graphics on OS X will run. So what does this mean for the user? Basically every application, every picture, everything on screen gets on the fly rendering, anti aliasing, and transparency. This results in razor sharp, clean image quality, and allows Apple to do some clever tricks to enhance the user interface.

In a more practical sense, having everything .pdf based allows the user to cut and paste any image they want and resize it easily. Using the built in PDF compositor application, Jobs demonstrated how users can drag and drop pictures or text into the compositor, scale and resize them, make certain layers transparent, and then drop the finished product into an email or document. All this can be done easily without loading up something as complicated as Photoshop.