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At the recent MacWorld convention, Steve Jobs' keynote address unveiled a lot about the much anticipated Mac OS X. The X is a Roman numeral so it's pronounces "Oh Ess Ten" and it will have the things a modern operating system should have such as protected memory and preemptive multitasking. But up until the keynote, it was unclear as to how X would be rolled out and how it would be positioned to the general Macintosh consumer.

According to Jobs, X should be available to consumers by this Summer. And at that time, everyone using Macs able to run OS 9, Apple's current operating system, should be able to convert to X. This will be accomplished by three application environments within X itself. The "Classic" environment is designed to run today's applications. And since your investment of current programs will work as well on X because of Classic, it should make your move to the new OS as painless as possible.

X's second environment is called "Carbon." Applications have to be specifically written to take advantage of Carbon and when they do, you'll begin to notice operational as well as cosmetic changes in your programs. Carbon applications will for example, make use of the new Aqua appearance. All of the on screen buttons, sliders and other navigational images on the desktop have a translucent watery quality. And for the future, the "Cocoa" environment offers developers a whole new set of tools to create applications that are even more visually pleasing as well as operationally superior.

The other component of the Mac OS is the Finder. X's Finder will offer many new navigational improvements such as being able to choose the format of how one sees the contents of an open window. Aside from the traditional displays, the new Finder lets you navigate within a single window. Double clicking on a folder doesn't open a new window. Instead, the view of the new folder replaces the old folder. This effectively eliminates the clutter of open windows on your desktop. A new column view uses columns to list the contents of each folder. Single clicking on a folder creates a new column view to the right of the previous folder view, again all in the same window.

Replacing OS 9's pop up windows is the Dock. You'll be able to move folders and documents to the Dock which appears at the bottom of the screen. Windows moving to and from the dock literally ooze back and forth as they are selected. The Dock automatically scales and inserts its items as they are added and removed. It's a highly dynamic structure that makes your most important data immediately accessible.

Finally, X's appearance will display text without jagged edges, document windows will have position-aware animated dialog boxes to save their contents, and menus will fade away rather than vanish. It's images like these as well as other subtle effects within X that impart a feeling of solidity and stability to your overall computing experience.

It may be hard to visualize everything from my words so if you want to see X in action for yourself, you can at Apple's web site. They have a theater of QuickTime videos that show off all of X's fancy moves. It's definitely worth a look to see the future of Macintosh computing. But a warning to Windows users... Look at your own peril. You may become extremely jealous.

www.apple.com/macosx