Macintosh System 7.5 lives a lot longer than originally intended under Apple Computer Inc’s latest plans for its desperately late Copland, the company revealed to the San Francisco Examiner. It has now decided to stress new functionality over backwards-compatibility in Copland – all of which seems to set the stage for licensing of BeOS or outright acquisition of Be Inc. The company now says the offerings planned for January and July will be upgrades for System 7.5 where previously they had been described as first components of Copland. The Copland project will be re-oriented towards multi-tasking and other capabilities not available in Mac OS. The company is said to be hoping that the risk posed by the new approach will be minimized by i ts active promotion of Java and OpenDOC, which are intended to minimize or eliminate incompatibilities between operating systems and hardware – but there are not too many Mac OS applications currently available that are written in Java, which means developers still must start almost from scratch. Apple chief technology officer Ellen Hancock revealed to the Examiner that she had halted Copland work in mid-August until executives could agree an overarching strategy, as they have now done with th e dual-track plan: If we have to pick between backwards compatibility and new functions, we’re voting for new functions she said.
