I have a dozen e-mail accounts, a couple dozen web accounts of various types, and several accounts to get into work servers and such. There is no way I'm going to remember 40+ different user names and passwords, so I use a handful of usernames and four different passwords. This is still not good enough, as I tend to forget exactly what username/password combination I need to get into my credit card account or this web site I only visit once every few months. So I've taken to writing them all down, which is rather cumbersome.

Enter Apple's Keychain technology, which is just a specialized database to keep track of all your usernames and passwords. It has a well-defined interface so that programs that support the Keychain can automatically log in as you access whatever services you need. It's a good idea, and hopefully companies will start to support it in their products.

Apple has pushed a lot of new technologies, some of which have succeeded, others which have failed. There have been bad ideas which failed and been improved upon, such as Quickdraw GX which has been incorporated into Quartz. There have been good ideas which also failed, but have come back in later Mac OS releases, such as Keychain, which is directly descended from Powerchain (or Powerchain, I forget what it was called). And there are other technologies which failed and may some day be retried, such as OpenDoc.

Macintosh developers that try to stay on the cutting edge take considerable risks. Who knows if all the time and effort you spend to incorporate the latest technology will be wasted if it fails and Apple drops it? I know there were a couple of small companies that went under when Quickdraw GX failed to take hold. Should you let others take the risk and stick to the proven technologies?

One of the complaints from developers has been the way that Apple sometimes changes its mind and drops a technology without giving it a chance. Apple officially supports one technology in one OS and then shifts to another technology in the next OS. It doesn't happen often, although it's more likely for the Apple-initiated technologies.

I can't blame Apple for shifting its strategies. They have to do what they think is right, and sometimes they don't have the luxury of waiting for a particular Apple technology to take the world by storm. On the other hand, it's really frustrating to support the company and see it backstab the developer community. Without those developers, there is no good software for the platform.

I've never written any programs for the Macintosh. And I don't think I'll the time to do it in the near term. It takes a fair amount of time to learn how to use the Mac OS libraries to create a proper Mac OS program. My development efforts are concentrated on Java, which is a great cross-platform language. So that's what I'm likely to write: a Java program with a Java-based user inter- face. One that uses common technologies and is therefore not plat- form specific.