Mac OS 9 - Features

Features

Apple billed Mac OS 9 as including "50 New Features" and heavily marketed its Sherlock 2 software, which introduced a 'channels' feature for searching different online resources and introduced a QuickTime-like metallic appearance. Mac OS 9 also featured integrated support for Apple’s suite of Internet services known as iTools (later re-branded as .Mac, then MobileMe, which is now known as iCloud) and included improved TCP/IP functionality with Open Transport 2.5.

Other features new to Mac OS 9 include:

  • Integrated support for multiple user accounts without using At Ease.
  • Support for voice login through VoicePrint passwords.
  • Keychain, a feature allowing users to save passwords and textual data encrypted in protected keychains.
  • A Software Update control panel for automatic download and installation of Apple system software updates.
  • A redesigned Sound control panel and support for USB audio.
  • Speakable Items 2.0, also known as PlainTalk, featuring improved speech synthesis and recognition along with AppleScript integration.
  • Improved font management through FontSync.
  • Remote Access Personal Server 3.5, including support for TCP/IP clients over Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP).
  • An updated version of AppleScript with support for TCP/IP.
  • Personal File Sharing over TCP/IP.
  • USB Printer Sharing, a control panel allowing certain USB printers to be shared across a TCP/IP network.
  • 128-bit file encryption in the Finder.
  • Support for files larger than 2 GB.
  • Unix volume support.
  • CD Burning in the Finder (introduced in Mac OS 9.1).
  • Addition of a 'Window' menu to the Finder (introduced in Mac OS 9.1)

Read more about this topic:  Mac OS 9

Famous quotes containing the word features:

    “The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph into a tree, has arrested us in an accustomed movement.”
    —Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    “These, then, will be some of the features of democracy ... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, particolored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.”
    —Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)

    “It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
    —Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)