Apple Continues To Expand Mac's New Media Tools

Networking
Every Mac now ships with full support for WiFi (802.11) with a built-in antennae as well as a jack for an Ethernet cable. Apple’s implementation of the 802.11b and 802.11g standards is called AirPort. The difference between the AirPort and AirPort Extreme (an upgrade for some systems) is that the AirPort Extreme supports 54MBps when communicating with other 802.11g computers or devices. Sounds blazingly fast, but since the bottleneck is usually in the wide area, the high data rate is really only noticeable in a LAN environment when pulling files directly off a local file server.

For most people, the key networking breakthrough is in the Macintosh OS X’s native support for SLP (Service Locator Protocol), an IETF protocol used for dynamically discovering network services like file servers. Using the "Connect to" command from the "Go" menu in the Mac Finder, a user can browse the available file servers on a network regardless of the file server OS, provided the network administrator implements SLP support. If the user needs to connect to a company’s network remotely, Mac OS X has built-in VPN clients (Mac OS X supports PPTP-based VPN as well as standards-based networks).

Once connected to a network, Mac OS X also has support for an emerging Internet standard called WebDAV. WebDAV is an extension of HTTP that allows users to more easily share files and author for the Web by adding file server capabilities to ordinary Web servers. This innovation in the OS enables the Mac’s connection to the Internet (as well as office and home peripherals) to seem and, for all intents and purposes to be, persistent.

Apple Applications
In the application domain, there are two trends reducing the barrier to Macintosh adoption.

First, through partnerships Apple has worked to improve its application interoperability with existing (non-Macintosh) services and applications. One of the strategies has been to deepen liaisons with existing partners. For example, in June 2002, Apple announced that the iChat Instant Messaging application could interoperate with AOL Instant Messaging (www.aim.com); this relationship has since strengthened. In a parallel effort, Microsoft Office is being maintained such that files created in the most popular business productivity suite can seamlessly move from the Mac to the Windows platforms without losing functionality.

The second trend worthy of note for non-Mac users is the release of new Macintosh applications based on Mac OS X.