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And I think gave a good argument why it isn't likely:

Here

This would explain disparagement, but not vitriol. I actually got into an argument with an Apple-basher at college once, and it was during the System 7/Win95 era, where you concern mattered less.

That, and that it has so few games..

The worst flamage is in the developer and business spheres, not the hobbist/gamer space. This comic says it best for me...

But the most important reason is that their friends also hate it, but they have no idea why, only that their friends' friends also hate it.

This is about the only thing I can figure, except that too few people out there even know that Macs still exist; they think they stopped making them or something. This limits the "friends of friends" effect.

hen when I ask them what they know about Macs they say "well, I haven't used one since school, but..."

What's funny is that the "one" is more likely to have been an Apple ][, not a Mac. And the Apple ]['s were well loved in their day.

If I was more conspiratorially minded, I'd guess most Mac haters were decended from Commodore 64 and Amiga users, bitter that that company tanked, as well as getting too used to having many friends pirate games and software for them. (The social network makes it easier to pirate software on PCs than Macs.)

"Long answer and editorial: Konfabulator is a resurrection of the old Apple Desk Accessories if you used those. This has been used to claim that really, Konfabulator isn't doing anything new, and that Apple isn't stealing Konfab. I find this argument to be malarky. Sure, Konfab is the spiritual decendent of Desk Accesories. And maybe even Tiger's widgets started as a coincidentally parrallel development within Apple. But writing them in JavaScript? The look and feel? The likely base package of Widgets? Come on. The most you can give Apple is that someone started working on a primitive version of a Desk Accesories successor, and someone came along and said "That's neat. Why don't you make it more like Konfabulator?""

It's been linked to already, but you might find this to be worth a read. It goes to show how dissimilar the two actually are.

They're ultimately all ripoffs of Apple's Desk Accessories {more info}.

Konfabulator is not a lightweight or small-footprint environment -- every Konfabulator widget runs as a separate process, with its own runtime environment in memory. Most Konfabulator widgets use more memory than typical full-blown Mac OS X applications. Not just Konfabulator as a whole -- but each widget. Install it, fire up Process Viewer, and see for yourself.

Daring Fireball's take: http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_kon fabulator

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Why does it have to compete?

Dominic Giampaolo used to work at Google (in fact, many of the indexing approaches taken by Spotlight are based on his experiences there.)

Eric Schmidt is saying that it's a complete rewrite. Re-engineered for a completely different environment.

Google's smart enough to leverage the good bits of the OS. My money would be on them using Spotlight intelligently and hooking the local index (created by Giampaolo & Co.) with the global index (created by Schmidt & Co.)

For some good background on Spotlight, check this out

-ch

For a while I looked at things to turn the flat text file I was posting to the group into a nice HTML version. I ended up doing what I think that 90% of Usenet FAQ-writers did - did most of by hand. I just wrote the FAQ in HTML and then exported to plain-text to post and email.

There are a lot of utilities like markdown now that blogs have become popular.

The referenced item from Intego was about a theoretical Trojan horse that no one appears to have actually taken advantage of to do evil (symantec's take on it. Also a detailed look at the "security alert" can be found here.

Anyway yes any storage device could have a Trojan, etc. dropped onto it. Yet in the case of the iPod and other storage devices (at least under Mac OS X) just because such a beasts exists on the storage device doesn't mean that once connected it spreads (no auto-run of code on mounted devices is supported on Mac OS X without third-party tools).

Not much can protect one from a Trojan if the victim cannot recognize it for what it is (sure virus scanners may hit on it if it is a known trojan).

Anyway the real issue is mostly about users dropping company data onto their iPod, etc. (likely unencrypted) and then walking out the door and possibly losing it...

It's unfortunately all too common to expect this kind of FUD from Microsoft and their mindless proxies, like Thurrott. Of course, when Microsoft says they're all about choice, what they mean is they're all about enabling users to "choose" Microsoft.

John Gruber unspins the inanity much better than I can.

This "choice" nonsense that Microsoft is FUDing is shamefully disengenuous.

Be sure to also read further commentary on the original article, the RealNetworks issue and direct comparisons with the iPod:

Why 2004 Won't Be Like 1984

"...failing to license is a mistake that has already proved disasterous for Apple once (can you say: Mac vs. PC?)."

The Art of the Parlay, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Platform Licensing and Market Share

and a followup:

Things Unmentioned in the 'Art of the Parlay'

"...failing to license is a mistake that has already proved disasterous for Apple once (can you say: Mac vs. PC?)."

The Art of the Parlay, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Platform Licensing and Market Share

and a followup:

Things Unmentioned in the 'Art of the Parlay'

Don't forget that Dominic Giampaolo is behind spotlight on the Apple team.

I understand the unix philosophy perfectly, and you've described exactly what I'm describing as the problem. The unix philosophy of first making a black box backend with a documented programmatic interface and trying to keep that completely seperate in design from GUI front-end that's sprayed on at a later point.

User interaction takes place across the entire computing process, not just in the "pretty little front-end" that most programmers think it does. Your choice of algorithms, the names you give files, what engineering tradeoffs are made--everything is going to have some affect on the user experience.

No matter how elegant the programmers think they will have made something, if they try to make the technical part in total isolation from the usability part, they will leave out something critical, and one or more of three bad things are going to happen: the programmers will have to go back and rewrite zillions of lines of code and totally rework the architecture and/or the usability people designing the UI will be massively constrained in what they can do because of the shortsightedness of the programmers and/or there will be lots of legacy UI that confuses users and provides inefficient interaction but is kept in for some or other technical reason (usability guru Alan Cooper refers to this as "scar tissue").

While the MVC design pattern, which has been successfully used to create usable software, does make some attempt at seperation of UI (View) from code (Model), to exploit this pattern to make the software usable and feel truly integrated, you have to design the view first. If you design the model first and the view with the optimal usability breaks the model or the model can't be accessed fast enough, you're screwed. To be able to access your model fast enough or in the right way with your view, you have to make design decisions and tradeoffs regarding how the model is built. How these design decisions are going to be made will depend on how the user accesses the view. You can't simply build a model then try to attach a view to it.

I hope I've clarified my point of view a little.

It's called MP3. Or WAV. Or unprotected AAC.

Their whole argument about "open formats" is flawed. This guy said it best:
http://daringfireball.net/2004/08/2004_wont_be_lik e_1984/

A very good explination why Apple does not want Real's music on the iPod is here: http://daringfireball.net/2004/08/2004_wont_be_lik e_1984

Actually, I largely disagree with that. The only reason to push for Macs is to change one corporate monopoly into another? At this stage? I think that's thinking a bit too far ahead.

Taking Microsoft down (which is what you're talking about when you talk about a proprietary platform, I'm assuming) is challenge enough. Anyone that's gone head-to-head with Microsoft has been very simply defeated.

The only reason Apple has survived was *because* it never went head-to-head with Microsoft. The entire Apple vs. Microsoft thing is just illogical thinking. Refer to this brilliant article for more details:

http://daringfireball.net/2004/08/parlay/

I'm not sure what other Mac evangelists are after when they push for Apples, but I'd push for Apple primarily because it's got a low market share, not because it has more. No viruses, no spyware, clean software, hardware and software communicating seemlessly (a luxury Microsoft just doesn't have) and cost-competitiveness.

What I'd also push for would be diversity. The very reason computer systems around the world are so vulnerable is because of lack of diversity. Why do you think chicken flu outbreaks are so devastating? Farm chickens are genetically very similar to each other, one virus affects them all. It's the same with Microsoft. If 95% of computers use Microsoft, a single flaw in that will demolish 95% of computers.

The solution isn't Linux all by its lonesome, or Apple all by its lonesome. Sure, the companies want that, but an optimum system would be the colours of the rainbow, enough diversity for vulnerabilities not to debilitate a sizeable number of computers so as to cause significant economic damage. Vulnerabilities and viruses will be there, you have to evolve, and the best way to evolve is to be diverse.

Why did you take John's nicely formatted article and ass it up like that? Additionally, he's selling memberships to help pay for his site, I'm sure he'd probably like people to actually come to the site to buy them...

~jeff

No, Dashboard that reimplements the original desk toys idea better than Arlo did

Here's John Gruber's amusing take on the situation.

This explains everyting you need to know. But basically FFS is a compatibility thing. Apple still recommends its HFS+.

The truth is finally revealed!

Roland Piquepaille is trying to turn himself into the Rob Enderle of Slashdot. Clueless prognostications by a self-described IT consultant.

The problem is:
Roland Piqupaille spam example 1
Roland Piqupaille spam example 2
Roland Piqupaille spam example 3
just leads to more Roland Piquepaille spam

The consultant description is especially funny and fascinating because it seems that Roland spends more time as a troll blogging and spamming sites to link to his blog than he does consulting with clients, just like Enderle spends his time as a quote-mill.

Do you think that the Jackito people would have even taken his phone call if he hadn't spent the last couple of years trolling and spamming Slashdot? Now he can claim he's a technology leader or the voice of Slashdot or some such nonsense ..... and I'll bet he promised to deliver the Slashdot audience in exchange.

Or is he actually working PR for Jackito and not disclosing it? It seems too many of his submissions are just more rehashed press releases ... like the original "TDA" description he "wrote".

Not to mention that he can now charge more for advertising on his blog.

This is really all about advertising and self-promotion in the most crass sense.

Support it and and you'll get more of the same spam from yet another Rob Enderle-type troll. Oppose it and we can be rid of Roland and the other Rob Enderle-s of the world.

The truth is finally revealed!

Roland Piquepaille is trying to turn himself into the Rob Enderle of Slashdot. Clueless prognostications by a self-described IT consultant.

The problem is:
Roland Piqupaille spam example 1
Roland Piqupaille spam example 2
Roland Piqupaille spam example 3
just leads to more Roland Piquepaille spam

The consultant description is especially funny and fascinating because it seems that Roland spends more time as a troll blogging and spamming sites to link to his blog than he does consulting with clients, just like Enderle spends his time as a quote-mill.

Do you think that the Jackito people would have even taken his phone call if he hadn't spent the last couple of years trolling and spamming Slashdot? Now he can claim he's a technology leader or the voice of Slashdot or some such nonsense ..... and I'll bet he promised to deliver the Slashdot audience in exchange.

Or is he actually working PR for Jackito and not disclosing it? It seems too many of his submissions are just more rehashed press releases ... like the original "TDA" description he "wrote".

Not to mention that he can now charge more for advertising on his blog.

This is really all about advertising and self-promotion in the most crass sense.

Support it and and you'll get more of the same spam from yet another Rob Enderle-type troll. Oppose it and we can be rid of Roland and the other Rob Enderle-s of the world.

Oh, brother, not the "Apple stole Konfabulator" bullstuff again.

Read this, then try to defend your accusdation again with a straight face.

But Spotlight is just indexing the same metadata that is in HFS+ under Jaguar, plus data that it pulls out of the file, not out of the filesystem. There is significant improvement in the mechanism and the interface, but it is not a "database filesystem."

As far as I can tell, that is incorrect; Dominic (the authoer of BeFS) has added additional metadata capabilities to HFS+, so Spotlight is actually 1) indexing that metadata, and 2) using interpreters to pull and index data from various file formats. See those post, for instance. While I agree that this does not create a true database filesystem, I would say that it's close to what BeOS had, which is the closest anyone has come.

I must admit interest in MS's claim that they're going to create a true database filesystem; while it is obviously technically feasible, it's just as stupid now as it was years ago when Be decided to back off theirs. Thus, I expect MS to produce a solution that does what they said it would do while sucking so much that no one uses it. It will be interesting to watch.

As to the claim that Apple is just doing all front-end stuff while MS is actually doing technology, I call baloney on that one. Apple has been good recently at creating and then utilyzing really good technology (although it's usually protocols, not servers). All of the technology available via .Mac is available to everyone, even if the servers themselves aren't. I can (and did) create a WebDAV server to store and share my calendars, and I can mount this WebDAV server as a local filesystem. Rendezvous/Zeroconf is another good example of a tech that Apple has developed, championed, and then been a real leader on.

I agree that there are big differences, though: Spotlight is based on proven technology and will surely arrive in 2005, while WinFS is a huge gamble, will increase costs dramatically (both licensing and maintenance), and will also arrive no earlier than 2006, without actually being based on proven tech at all. If their history is anything to go by, it will be 2010 or so before WinFS is usable.

Have you used Konfabulator? If so, have you measured its memory consumption?

Do you think Apple's OS engineers should be concerned about performance and resource consumption?

Do you think you know more about performance and resource allocation than Apple's engineers?

Do you believe reasonable engineering opinions can be drawn by looking at screenshots?

Do you realize how insulting it is to have someone who knows nothing about the details of your work tell you that they know better than you do?

The call for these extensions is not coming from graphic designers, but UI designers. They are different. Their job is as difficult as any other layer, and in HTML it is extremely difficult. The idea is to make is easier to write good, rich UIs for web applications, not just "eye-candy".

Take a look at Daring Fireball's essay about how the web app has won over the consumer (very interesting!). We have a real opportunity for creating truly portable web apps.

And to those of you who respond "But web apps suck!", well, I guess that's my point: one reason they suck is ecause we don't have the right UI tools yet. Let's make the tools.

Even if that weren't a crap argument, which it is, that's no reason not to switch.

John Gruber effectively demolished that claim in this post.

No matter what code Apple releases with OS X 10.4, there will forever be the stain of the Konfabulator.

You forgot to add, "IMHO." Not all developers feel as you do.

Better yet, read John Gruber's take on this non-issue, and see if you still feel the same way.

But you don't get it. The point is that you can use either HTML+JavaScript OR Interface Builder+Objective C (reference: Here and search for 'further extensible using Cocoa'.)

So while Konfabulator is cool, Dashboard should be MUCH better. And yes, I'll be paying for it.

Wanna be objective yourself while at it?
Once again, point upgrade is a paid major upgrade. Double point update is the free minor ones. Do you expect to get Longhorn for free too? I am surprised as a Mac user you don't know any better. If you don't like Apple much, why keep using your iBook?

As for the Konfabulator debate, read the other /. article and Dashboard vs. Konfabulator. Even Arlo started toning down the rhetoric from outright accusing Apple of theft.

One thing you are right, though: Apple is a company and they are out to make profit.

They didn't.

Most infamously, the Watson/Sherlock controversy. Except note that Apple offered Watson developer Dan Wood an engineering position on the Sherlock team, which Wood declined. This is of course contrary to the popular misconception that Apple "blindsided" Wood with Sherlock 3 (which had been in development before Watson debuted). Wood wanted compensation for the existing work he'd done on Watson, not just a job that would pay him for future work on Sherlock. Twice offering Wood a job on the Sherlock team doesn't qualify as oppression.

Most infamously, the Watson/Sherlock controversy. Except note that Apple offered Watson developer Dan Wood an engineering position on the Sherlock team, which Wood declined. This is of course contrary to the popular misconception that Apple "blindsided" Wood with Sherlock 3 (which had been in development before Watson debuted). Wood wanted compensation for the existing work he'd done on Watson, not just a job that would pay him for future work on Sherlock. Twice offering Wood a job on the Sherlock team doesn't qualify as oppression.

John Gruber has written a very insightful piece about Dashboard vs. Konfabulator. I suggest you go read it.

Not content with ripping off Watson, they've now stolen the features for another product without proper recompense and included it in their "Tiger" OS.

Not content with doing any actual research on this story, now you've propogated the misconception that Dashboard was "stolen" from Konfabulator.

For John Gruber's excellent write-up on why this "spin" is plain wrong, read here.

Actually, everything so far has been a security vulnerability, not an exploit. Big difference. Daring Fireball can explain this better than I.

Oh, ferchrissake, stop spouting that old FUD about how Windoze market dominance means it's the preferred target for viruses, and if Mac had a 90% share, it would be targeted too. It's just not true.

Wouldn't it be cool if you could go to the online grocery web page and
* type in your own recipe, or
* pick from an easy-to-use list of recipies
* how many people will be involved w/each meal

...and it gives you not only the list of ingredients and how much of each you will need, but also a map in the store to optimize your time?

You could do this from home, or from a computer kiosk at the grocery store itself. I always forget an ingredient, or spend too much time wandering around the store looking for a hard-to-find item.

Now THIS would be a useful application of technology to a very low-tech thing. (Remember, spray on usability is bad)

Most lowtech/hightech fusions that have gone down in publicly hilarious fireballs are due to the gross MISapplication of technology. Simply using a web page to pick out individual ingredients (separate from what the meal of which they are just a component) is just taking the existing paradigm and putting it on a web page. Won't work.

Robert Enderle

Apple's switch stories are also made up, the switchers themselves say that.

Hating myself for feeding the troll, but...

I happen to work with one of the "switchers" and can attest to the veracity of at least one story. Surely that counts as at least minor refutation of the parent post's absurd take on things.

Also Microsoft's story wasn't made up, only slashdot monkies claimed it is. In fact the person who wrote it stood up and told her story.

Interesting to note that there is a kernel of truth to this, however small, in that the person stepped forward only after being named by the Associated Press. However, it's just as likely that the "switcher" here was unduly prejudiced to write a good yarn, being in the employ of Microsoft at the time in public relations.

Have a look at Markdown. It's like other text languages, but has 'fallback to HTML' easily available and is designed to be standards-nice:

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

There is also a flavour which guarantees XML-wellformedness, called xMarkdown (you can find a link to it on the Markdown list).

Here

Basically a critique of ESR's article. Key quote:

Well, allow me to retort. UI development is the hard part. And it's not the last step, it's the first step. In my estimation, the difference between:

• software that performs function X; and
• software that performs function X, with an intuitive well-designed user interface

isn't just a little bit of extra work. It's not even twice the work. It's an entire order of magnitude more work. Developing software with a good UI requires both aptitude and a lot of hard work. Raymond acknowledges neither.

I disagree with his view that ui design is some sort of mystic, unlearnable talent, and he may take the argument to the opposite extreme, but the position that the gui problem suffers from a lack of respect is spot on. Afterthought guis look like afterthoughts.

There's a lot of "you have to do this" and "you have to target Mr. X" floating around, but I think the real breakthroughs will come as developers begin to view ui design as an interesting and substantial problem to be solved rather than a quick makeover.

It amuses me, then, that I'm currently having problems sharing a printer between two MacOS X boxes. We have a home network consisting of two MacOS X machines, plus a FreeBSD box that I do most of my work on. The printer is on my wife's Mac, and I don't have printing set up on FreeBSD, so normally I just transfer a PDF file to my own Mac, then print it via her Mac. Hee hee -- it almost exactly mirror's Eric Raymond's original situation with sharing a printer between his machine and his wife's, except that the OS has been changed to protect the innocent.

Well it's true that setting up printer sharing was really easy. The problem is that it often doesn't work. I try to print, and I get this beautiful, lickable, throbbing blue dialog box that says "Unable to print" (or "There was a problem printing," or something equally useless -- I forget what, exactly).

So what ya gonna do on an OS that is supposed to Just Work, and one day it Just Doesn't? If it was Linux or FreeBSD, I could read the man page, or find out where the log file was. Oops -- no such option on MacOS X. On Linux or FreeBSD, I'd also probably get some kind of error message that, while written in Martian, would at least provide some hint as to what was wrong if shown to someone sufficiently knowledgeable.

So what do I do? Reboot my machine; no dice. Reboot her machine; no dice. Give up. Some days it works, and some days it doesn't. Shrug.

The solution ends up being just what it probably was in the Raymond household: transfer the file to my wife's machine, then ask my wife to get up from her desk and let me print the file. The main difference is that since MacOS X is a proprietary, closed-source system, there's no way for people with the necessary skillz to dig through the source code, figure out what's wrong, and fix it.

In a lot of cases, what you say is true. Then you get stories like these two.

I have not had that particular cups problem, but quite a few linux UIs are really pretty arcane. Then again, I was trying to configure XP's networking for a friend last week and did not manage to get communication with the client going.
He then tried reconfiguring his client himself and ended up being locked out of his system altogether. Neither XP nor linux has a monopoly on problems.

Markdown - text/html conversion

If a submission with this "leaked" code is made to Linux. It will most likely be coming from a minion of MS itself. Be careful with what is accepted into the next kernel. It wouldn't be the first time MS employeed such dastardly tactics.

As you admit OS X makes significant (I'd say huge) reuse of (Mach,) BSD and NeXTstep. Didn't previous attempts to do it from scratch almost kill Apple? (I forget the projects' names... Taligent? Copland?)

As to KHTML vs. Gecko, they seem to simply not have found the latter so "superior"...