That's neat, that's neat... Jobs loves his Tiger feat

Apple CEO Steve Jobs yesterday showed off Tiger, a new version of Mac OS X that features improved search and will debut next year.

At its Worldwide Developer Conference, Jobs said the cat-themed operating system is being shown off fairly early in its development cycle, but said it will ship in the first half of 2005 - more than a year before Microsoft's next major release of Windows is expected to arrive.

"We have leaped ahead of our competition and Apple is once again the innovator," Jobs said. "Everyone else is following our tail lights."

In particular, Jobs pointed to Spotlight - a new systemwide search engine that will allow Mac users to quickly search and find any file - whether it's an email, an application file or a contact entry.

The technology borrows from the search engine used in iTunes, but is able to pore through the contents and hidden data of many types of files.

"It finds stuff that you would never be able to find by hand," he said.

Tiger will sell for $129 when it is released next year and will be officially known as Mac OS X version 10.4 Tiger.

Ina Fried writes for News.com