News 

However the Apple CEO could not resist a dig at Microsoft, saying that Tiger will be available 'long before Longhorn', the delayed successor to Windows XP.

Most of the ground Jobs covered in his outline of Tiger is already well-documented, features such as the Spotlight search technology, Dashboard widgets and the H.264 QuickTime video codec.

He said that with Spotlight 'you can find stuff on your system that you never knew was there'

ADVERTISEMENT

before insisting that 'it's much nicer' than the Google and MSN desktop searches that are trying to do the same job for Windows users. Some 100 developers, Jobs added, are building Spotlight into their applications, including Microsoft.

Jobs then gave a brief outline of some of the widgets that will be included with Dashboard, such as a converter, a dictionary and thesaurus, a stock tracker, a translator, the yellow pages, weather and a flight tracker. The stock tracker showed Apple's share price down, though Jobs noted that 'we got a lot more of the keynote'. In fact the price fell throughout the day, closing more than six per cent down.

Briefly touching on QuickTime, Jobs noted that the new default H.264 codec is being used by both the new high-capacity storage systems: Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

'So whichever wins, H.264 wins,' he said.

For more information on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger visit www.apple.com/uk/macosx.