Redwood City, CA Ð Sources close to NeXT said that the company will be adding support for Kodak's Photo CD technology to a future version of the NeXTSTEP operating system, though an official an- nouncement has yet to be made.
"NeXT believes in the Photo CD technology and realizes that in order to compete with the other system-software vendors we need to build it in as soon as we can," said Peter Graffagnino, NeXT's manager of media software.
The Photo CD system turns CD- ROM discs into low-cost storage medium for 35mm color and black-and-white photos, which can be viewed on a computer.
Apple has added support for Photo CD to its QuickTime system software, providing direct access to Photo CD images from within Macintosh applications. Other system-software vendors, including Microsoft and Sun, have also endorsed the technology.
Photo CD support isn't likely to show up in NeXTSTEP until Version 4.0. According to Graffagnino, capabilities such as PostScript Level 2, RenderMan, and color printer support took precedence for the 3.0 and 3.1 releases.
Third-party vendors have al-ready responded with their own Photo CDÐreading software. Servare Business Systems bundles such software with its Photo CDÐ compatible CD-ROM drive. Dick Phillips (author of MediaView) has placed an application called pCD in the public domain that lets users view Photo CD images on the NeXT.
Bacchus plans to add Photo-CD support to both Pixel Magician and Image Agent in NeXTWORLD Expo in May.