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Accompanying the release of Mac OS x 10.3 later this year will be a new set of developer tools known as Xcode. These have been designed to both accelerate and simplify the process of developing OS X applications, with support for making and testing changes while applications are still running and for Rendezvous-enabled compiling of applications across multiple systems.

'Xcode merges the power of a world class UNIX-based development environment with a simple, elegant and powerful user interface,' said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. 'Xcode takes much of the legwork out of creating apps by putting powerful tools at

In addition to preparing the release of Mac OS X 10.3 for desktop systems, Apple is also upgrading its server software. New features in OS X 10.3 Panther Server include: Automatic Setup for easily setting up multiple servers; Open Directory 2 for hosting scalable LDAP directory and Kerberos authentication services; Samba 3 for providing login and home directory support for Windows clients; and the JBoss application server for running powerful J2EE applications.

'With Panther Server, Apple combines the most popular solutions from the open source world such as Samba and Apache with Apple's legendary ease-of-use," said Schiller. 'The result is a powerful standards-based server operating system capable of a wide variety of solutions from supporting Mac, Windows and Linux workgroups to hosting dynamic websites with powerful Web services.'

To cap a pretty good day for the company, Apple has released the latest figures from its iTunes Music Store. Five million songs have been purchased in the eight weeks since its launch, many of which will be stored on the one million iPods Apple says it will have sold by the end of this week.