One of the highly anticipated new features of Jaguar (set to ship August 24th), is a technology called Rendezvous. This new technology is billed by Apple as "Networking made easy;" and from what I have observed, this marketing term is right on target.

Steve Jobs first showed us Rendezvous at the 2002 MacWorld New York keynote, where he networked two computers together, found a printer on the network, played iTunes songs, and found other iChat users on the network with no configuration. The last part of that sentence, "with no configuration," is the most important part. The computers found the devices when asked, without first setting up software, loading drivers, or any of the other hassles that goes hand-in-hand with networking. Everything just worked.

Rendezvous has a good foothold already, as various printer manufactures are building support into their printers, and of course, Apple software has the code built in as well. Plus, Steve Jobs proclaimed that Rendezvous will be open source, allowing users to make changes to the underlying code, and building Rendezvous capable products with ease. Open sourcing this technology was probably the best move Apple could have made.

Furthermore, Rendezvous works with the major standards in networking including ethernet, 802.11b (AirPort), and even Firewire (target disks). This means hard drives, palm devices, file servers, music servers, etc. will be able to easily become networkable, or integrated with a Rendezvous network.

Speaking of music servers, during the keynote, Steve Jobs had two computers, each running Jaguar and iTunes. Through Rendezvous, he was able to play the songs from one computer, on another computer, without transferring files. It was kind of like a local streaming radio station, which shows off just the beginning of what this great new technology can do.

However, there is one thing Rendezvous users will have to be careful of, the security of files, printers, etc. Recently, I left my iBook running a wireless network sniffer as I was riding around my home town. I found 24 different networks (of which only 4 used WEP), in about 1 hour. If any of these networks were running Rendezvous, I could possibly transfer files, use company printers, or who knows what else. I hope various security measures are taken, such as passwords and encryption, otherwise this could be a security disaster.

Even with the security concerns (which may be covered when Rendezvous is debuted), this will be a great technology. I hope this technology takes off like nothing Apple has ever done before. I hope it catches on quickly with Windows, Unix, Linux, and every other operating system out there. I hope easy networking becomes the norm, rather than the exception. I hope it just works as advertised. :)