Apple's Jobs bold at Seybold

October will see the introduction of the new Mac OS 8.5 operating system, according to Steve Jobs -- still designated as Apple's interim CEO – said in a keynote address to the Seybold 98 publishing trade show in San Francisco. Jobs called the upgrade, previously code-named Allegro, a "must have" particularly because of its "faster than NT" performance on networks. It also has Sherlock, a technology that allows users to search the Internet or local hard drives without using a browser. The next version of Apple's operating system, OS X, was announced for the fall of 1999. Other software announcements included WebObjects 4 for the development and deployment of Internet applications, said to be available by early October. Intergraph announced the immediate availability of its workstations with Apple's Quick Time 3 Pro for NT. On the hardware front, Apple announced 333 and 300 MHz servers with PowerPC processors, and G3 notebooks. Apple is evidently keeping to its Mac roots and publishing/media focus, and gaining the confidence of developers again. An independent sign of this was seen when Adobe announced that it would be producing its new K2 page-layout program for the Mac, with no announced plan yet for NT release. Apple appears to have stabilised itself with three successive quarters of profits. ®