For a while now (mysteriously) I have been getting Appleis QuickTime Newsletter in Japanese as well as English. This is just one of these things that seem to happen on the Internet, and I have not even bothered to attempt unsubscribing, even though I do not read Japanese easily.

I have also for the past couple of days been testing OS Ten Beta for a few hours each day (I might use it for the bulk of the day if not for the fact that on a dial-up Internet connection Classic Internet apps do not connect.) So, today I received the Japanese QuickTime Newsletter while working (and playing) in OS X, and it was different! The text in the e-mail app Apple includes free with OS X (called Mail) was shown in genuine Japanese characters!

The screen shot below (taken with the free screen grab app which also is included with OS X) shows you:

1. Actual Japanese text automatically shown right along with English! Cool.
2. The wonderful anti-aliased text there is systemwide in OS X.

Perhaps you donit have any use for text in non-roman languages, but I assure you that there are many people on the planet who have, and this is a powerful feature of the new System.

Also the universal anti-aliasing is a really excellent feature of OS X. Indeed OS 9 and 8.6 has some of these abilities also, but not on this level. I think you will see immediately how much better the text appears. It makes reading much more of a pleasure, and when you go back to something less, it appears very crude.

Both of these features, which are amongst things that donit leap to oneis attention right away when OS X is described, show clearly how this is a powerful ground-up rebuild of the Mac Operating System. I have not used Mac OS X Beta much yet, but I am already strongly suspecting that when it is finished next year, this will be one of the most important software developments happening in personal computers in the first decade of the third millennium.