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Not too bad, as Macs run Little Snitch (http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.h tml), which makes zone alarm look like the piece of crap it is.

Best thing on the OSX platform (=>10.2) for stopping 'phoning home': http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.ht ml

Little Snitch can do this. Well, only the networking part. Not the filesystem control.

LittleSnitch ( http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.ht ml ) is a software firewall.

Seeing as you're not a user of OSX you'd have no need to know about this program, but it solves your issues with outgoing ports. http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.ht ml It's what I use.

This may be a good time to point out an OSX application that will let you know any time a program tries to make an outgoing connection (even in the background), and to deny said program the ability to do so if you choose...

http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.ht ml

It won't protect you from an exploit like this. But it would (AFAIK) let you know if malware was trying to "call home."

Alright flameboy.

Your arguments against the Mac UI are purely personal preference. You like blue better than red, you like menu bars on bottom, you like 28 virtual desktops... who cares. It's your decision.

Sorry, but screwing around with the "look and feel" of my desktop just isn't something I have time for; if that's really important to you, then you may be able to think hard enough to find applications that do the things you've said you "can't" do.

Keep trying to figure out the best "look and feel" for your desktop. The rest of us just have better things to do.

Just in case anyone isn't in the mood to hunt it down, here's a few links for Little Snitch:

http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/10426
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 17642

Developer's Site:
http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.ht ml

Add Little Snitch and Cookie Assassin to your toolbox ...

http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.ht ml

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 28428&vid=246854

being a vi user, i can't stand taking my hands off the keyboard to do mundane tasks .. and so i agree with you, only i use launchbar instead of quicksilver, because its generally faster, and was there first, and i registered it pretty much straight away..

the combination of launchbar, Terminal.app (loading my own window settings layout), Finder (when its needed) and the rest of the OSX GUI experience means that i only really use my mouse when i have to; certainly not all the time, only when its really needed, to draw something, or make some kind of sweeping selection, etc.

i find mouse users archaic, even.

While you’re right that you can’t get software to install silently under OS X, it would be trivial to trojan a download, and even to this day, a great many (most?) Mac users will gleefully enter their root password when prompted by any random installer.

As to the phoning home part, IPFW doesn’t, as configured in OS X, do egress. I run a $25 app to have real time veto power over outgoing packets. So while the malware situation on OS X is currently infinitely better than that of Winders, I wouldn’t be using that ‘c’ word if I were you.

Little Snitch (which unfortunately is only OS X) is the most usable security type of application I've ever used.

It's essentially a network monitor app similar to Zone Alarm for the PC but IMHO 1000% more usable.

When a request is made either by an app on your machine or from a remote machine to access a port, Snitch pops up a dialogue that asks you whether you want to allow or deny it, for that port or all ports, until the app quits or forever.

This simple selection is enough to cover 99% of all cases. ie: if you're not sure what the app is doing, you can deny it temporarily (game server X on ports 6003 7002 27010 27015 27025 ) and look up what it's trying to do, then restart the app and allow it for the duration of your session; if you know you want it to continue you can set it to allow/forever/ports (browser X on port 80 forever); if you know you don't want it to continue or ever work again (warez app x on port that tells anti-warez company x that you've got warez) then deny forever.

This is the best firewall you can ask for. You don't have to know all the ports you want open precognitively but you still have control over your apps and your ports.

If you mess up, there is a simple control panel that lets you edit or delete your preferences per app.

It's beautiful... it only gets in the way when it's needed and it's easy to understand, in fact I started it up without even looking at a readme file much less a manual of documentation.

That's usability AND security.

What it won't do is filter traffic on a port, so a good net filter or anti-virus is still useful (granted it's OS X so maybe not that useful) but worms, unwanted intrusions and various types of phone-home spyware won't be causing any problems (ie a key logger you didn't know about). Also, you become much more aware of what/who your computer is talking to in the background, very enlightening.

Those are good points. I understand the need for admin authentication when installing some types of software. But the problem is that people have been desensitized to the reason why they need to enter the admin password. Education is needed.

I am a big supporter of Little Snitch. It let's me know when ever a program tries call home or anywhere else. Most programs try to call home to check version numbers and such. Little Snitch lets me see where they are going, so I can investigate the address, and provides me with a way to allow it once, until the program stops, or forever. I can even deny the same way. If I want the program to see if a newer version is available it should be configurable in the Preferences. Nothing should call out without express permission and including the statement in the EULA does not count. GAIN comes to mind...

Two words: Install LaunchBar

Agreed. In fact, if his laptop had Little Snitch installed the thief wouldn't have to worry about the Powerbook calling home to report the crime.

>- The dock. What a hideous piece of crap this is. My trash can
>is on the dock. So are my running applications. So are my non-
>running applications. But not all of my non-running
>applications. To get to those, I have to go into the applications
>folder, which has a nice alias on the desktop that Apple didn't
>create. Those useful programs that you only use once in a blue
>moon? Go dig for them... go dig.

Use launchbar retard.

http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/

How you people survive I have no idea.

If you like Spotlight, then you'll love LaunchBar I've got Tiger installed on my iBook, but I've changed the keyboard shortcut to keep LaunchBar as the default. If like me, you've been using LaunchBar for a couple of years, Spotlight is a bit of a me-too yawn-fest. It's just not that special...

And your practice was sooooo easy. We all know that everyone wants to know what an ACL is, what the difference between a privileged user vs. a nonprivileged user is and why they should get into the (additional) practice of using RUNAS, or hell, what mutexes and semaphores are, much less what the registry entails. You know what? I understand all of this, but I do NOT expect everyone else to. Thus, you, my friend, are a certified computer weenie. 99% of the rest of the population (aka "the ones that this shit is supposed to be set up like this out-of-the-box for") do not give an effing shit. They just want it to "work". They have jobs, that entail them to know and understand other realms of knowledge and experience. You shouldn't need a CCNA or an MCSE or 10 years of computing experience to f*ucking just run a program securely that happens to need privilege for some stupid reason.

I prefer the OS X approach (and hey... weenie to weenie, I recommend you check it out if you haven't... hey, 10.4 aka "Tiger" has ACL's now!). When a process tries to access a directory it isn't permissioned to (and it's not permissioned to out-of-the-box!), the OS itself throws up a privileged user auth window. What a novel f*cking idea. This, coupled with Little Snitch (a VERY nice third-party util that allows you to control ALL outbound internet traffic from your machine... only processes you allow out are let out, and you can allow by port, by protocol, by destination, temporarily, etc. etc.), means that I always know I have ultimate control over ANYTHING an app can do to my data (or my privacy).

Sharing files amongst different platforms has most always resulted in using samba

SMB is only one of many file sharing protocols. Samba is generally only used when you want a Windows machine to use filesystems on a *nix fileserver. That's it.

But Windows is hardly the whole world. There's also NFS (pretty much the standard in the *nix world), Appleshare (what Macs use. To mount *nix filesystems on a Mac, you generally run netatalk on the *nix box, though OSX supports NFS natively too.)

Actually, you can get NFS clients and servers for Windows from several places, and they generally work pretty well once one realizes how NFS differs from SMB.

To mount a Windows file system on a *nix box, you can use smbfs if it's a Linux box -- and note that smbfs is not the same as Samba. Another option is Sharity (previously Rumba) which takes SMB and converts it to NFS.

And in addition to SMB, Appleshare and NFS, there's also Netware, Coda, InterMezzo, DFS, AFS, and many others, and nowadays they're all pretty much multi-platform. This page gives a nice summary of some of the more popular network file sharing methods.

Of course, network file sharing is not the only way. Sneakernet still works, for example. People have been taking floppy disks out of one computer type and putting them into another computer type for as long as computers have had floppy drives, though it probably didn't usually work until both Macs and PCs had 3.5" drives and the Macs learned to talk FAT. And today, USB and firewire drives, if formatted FAT, generally work in Mac, Windows and *nix systems and probably others, and are often used to share files ...

If you like Spotlight (and a lot of people do), I would strongly advise you to check out QuickSilver. It performs a different but similar task, and is extremely useful.

Another good (and much more polished) utility is LaunchBar. It's shareware, but reasonably priced ($19.95 for home use) and is extremely fast and flexible.

I used QuickSilver for a while, and it does work nicely, but I had enough small gripes with it that I decided to buy LaunchBar instead. QuickSilver is not as easy to configure as LaunchBar, the UI and feel of the app is not as OS X-ish, and all around QuickSilver just doesn't feel as nice or work as smoothly. These are fairly subjective points, obviously, but I recommend giving LaunchBar a genuine try for a few days and then seeing if you can live without it. :)

(No, I don't work for/with/whatever the developers of LaunchBar, I'm just an extremely satisfied customer)

OK, I'll bite.

I think it's lame that the 2 hit new features are shameless ripoffs of existing shareware apps. Dashboard is to Konfabulator as Spotlight is to Launchbar. They may have some improvement over the original, but who could say with a straight face that they didn't get the idea from these shareware developers? Right down to Dashboard apps being called "Widgets", just like in Konfabulator. Was it really that hard to think up their own name for them? If they're creative enough to come up with the best OS around, can't they at least come up with their own name for them? Bill Gates at least called his version of the trash can the "recycle bin". And original ideas are like Kryptonite to him.

Second, the WSJ reviewer notes occasionally odd slowdowns in his tests. What's happening is that he's run out of RAM and that's disk paging he's discovered. Which makes me wonder whether how well I can run Tiger. I have 768MB of RAM, a respectable amount, and running Safari and iTunes at the same time is easily enough to eat it all up, sending me to annoying disk-paging territory. Apple's apps are so fast because they gobble up as much RAM as they can. I switched away from Safari and iTunes, and I haven't had the problem since. How much RAM do you think Dashboard going to need?

There, there's your critical rant. Of course I am still going to buy the damn thing.

After reading the Pogue article (one of my favorite writers), and seeing him mention that Dashboard is like Konfabulator, I must ask this (not having yet used Tiger): Isn't Spotlight pretty much like Launchbar? http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/ I'm not saying exactly, but just like Spotlight, LB you type your hotkeys (cmd-space, in my case, just like Spotlight), and just start typing and it'll bring up any file on the hd, any program, any mp3 or document, etc. It doesn't do searching inside of docs though, that's true.

As for the info display panel, from what I've seen, it seems a lot like Konfabulator (http://www.konfabulator.com/). So, while it's nice to have these things built in, neither one of them are original ideas from either corporation.

Don't use a computer without one if you value your privacy.

Almost *every* app these days does some kind of outgoing communication - whether it's update checking, phoning home, or serial number checking.

It's trivially easy to configure most reverse firewalls to disallow any outgoing activity from specific apps. For Windows there is obviously ZoneAlarm and others. With OS X, I recommend Little Snitch.

I realise that for a lot of users this would result in "just another thing to click yes to syndrome" but if enough people use it, it would make the data gathered pretty useless.

BTW, if you've got a Mac and value your privacy you should get Little Snitch (no affiliation) to do exactly this.

True, it doesn't allow you to partition your applications in some set of virtual desktops. However, it obviates the need for having such a setup in the first place.

Who cares where an app is when you can reach it (and perform some functions with it) in 2-4 keystrokes? Who cares if you want to keep app A and app B next to each other so you can operate on the two of them together if you can use something like Quicksilver to "glue" the two together?

I suppose it's also fair to ask, other than catering to OCD-like tendencies, what does a virtual desktop environment give you that something like QS or Launchbar don't?

Then after a week or so you get something like Launchbar or Quicksilver so you never have to look at the Dock or think in terms of virtual desktops again. And then a month down the line you pick up something like the Touchstream so you never have to touch your mouse again...

It's the best setup you'll ever use.

Well, I can't help with the focus follows mouse problem but there are a few good applications that I can recommend that might prove useful for you. Witch (http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?thema=witch&sp rache=english) will allow you to maximise from the dock and to switch between open windows. Making use of a good launcher like Butler (http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?thema=butler&s prache=english&kopf=labor), LaunchBar (http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/) or Quicksilver (http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/) to quickly open applications or documents. Another interesting application is GeekTool (http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/) which lets you display text files (i.e. logs), terminal output, or images on your desktop. Finally I recommend that you try out TinkerTool (http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html) for changing some of OS X's less apparent settings.

I would rather use default OSX over default Windows, but give me a customised Windows, and I'll take it over any other OS.

I suppose you do know you can customize OS X as well, don't you? Everything from WindowShade to Desktop Manager to LaunchBar to Quickeys and a few thousand others!

I agree with your point though: "people are most productive in whatever they're used to, and whatever suits them." I hope that's the theme that emerges from this Slashdot discussion.

OS X is great, especially if you know all the key combinations and shortcuts. If you add LaunchBar or a similar utility like Quicksilver or Butler and minimize Dock usage and Finder navigation, OS X is even better. You can also affix shortcuts to applications in the top of the finder window itself, which is useful for apps you commonly drag things into, like text editors, Photoshop, email clients, and media players, for instance.

No SSH server

System Preferences -> Sharing -> check the Remote Login box and your ssh server is running.

No autoscroll on the trackpad (fixed but only for new powerbooks)

Not standard, but if you have newish trackpad hardware you can use: http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/ (this was working last night but seems down at the moment)

Doesn't support focus on mouse

Would that even work for the Mac? With the application menu at the top of the screen, you'd be likely to lose the current focus as you move up the screen and pass over other windows.

No support for a folder of applications as a single widget on the dock.

That would be handy, though perhaps LaunchBar would cover it?

It's region locked.

As are all hardware players, as required by the DVD consortium - you can hardly blame Apple for that! There is a RPC2->1 hack for many of the Mac players, but not yet for the one in the latest G4 PowerBooks.

It only resizes to half/full/double/full screen instead of being arbitrarily sizable.

Try better placer, such as VLC.

Compared to MS Windows, OS X comes with a LOT of extra stuff already. Seems like you want it to be a little too much like the X window system. Still, I'd be surprised if there weren't 3rd party solutions for most things you're after...

Read the wikipedia article. Sounds vaguely similar to the Launchbar utility.

>> So because all your appliances are getting smaller they are easier to rip off?

Yes. If it's at home and someone busts in to your house, they want to take small, easily portable items. Cash and small electronics. The mini-mac is now in the "small electronics" category.

So, you would not buy a mini because it's... mini? Because it's one of the first things the burglars that are regularely visiting you will steal? Uhm, you do have strange priorities then. ;)
But anyway, there's even a Kensington hole in that thing.

>> The mini has more style.

Style is in the eye of the beholder.

Yes, true. But I'd still not consider colourful == style.

Systems administraton. Reading and answering mail. Browsing the web. Writing documents and spreadsheets. Shell scripting. Works fine for me.

Guess you could do the same as easily in OSX, if not even more productive. I for one wouldn't want to live without Expose anymore, or Launchbar . But I guess it's just a matter of getting used to a certain system.

Said Mr Sim, "Actually, to me it's a big let-down: we're expecting a good fight but they're coming out with something that's five generations older... So I think the whole industry will just laugh at it, -- it's worse than the cheapest Chinese player. Even the cheap, cheap Chinese brand today has display and has FM. I think it's a non-starter to begin with."

I am not here to discuss your comment about the Chinese, nor am I here to bash you personally or your company. I am not even here to talk technical specs, because frankly the lack of a male USB port on your Micro Slim is currently the least of your worries right now.

You are undoubtedly a smart guy, being where you are now. You have sold over 2 million MP3 players last Christmas season, no mean feat at all (vs 4M iPod). There is no doubt that your company Creative is a successful one.

But let me ask you this: You have declared War, but Do you want to WIN this war? Absolutely demolish all that is iPod and steal all the glory? Well then read on because as it stands, this is a War you will live or die for. If you want to live, please consider my Two Cents:

1) Tip #1: Think like the underdog. If you want to be a market maker, you need to grow up and act like one. We all learned about "Perfect Competition" in school, how it meant that there was no excess profit and that the only way to get out of that bind was to differentiate yourself. Right now, iPod is winning because it is differentiable from you (brand name, iTunes integration). How are you winning? What is your battle cry?

For the last two years, Creative has acted just like the "Chinese" me-toos (as you so put down in your latest comment) while Apple has been the market maker through and through. Here are some examples:

When the first generation Apple iPod was released, you still were selling the MP3 jukebox ($480) that could not fast-forward or rewind (true), that looked like a spaceship (definitely), and still took 20 seconds to transfer a song (USB1.0). Quickly, your team raced to build a better looking version, after the success of the big iPod.

The success of the iPod touch interface was also "borrowed" on your Zen-Touch line. And finally, after the Apple iPod Mini was announced, you surprisingly announced the new line of Zen Micro's in 10 colors.

See, I like supporting the "underdog." I like supporting the brightest and most inventive minds. I support Tivoli Audio, Sirius satellite radio, I support many of OS X's small developers' applications, I support the Treo 600, Brian Transeau's music and a million gazillion other small companies out there with insanely great ideas. These are premium but differentiable products that people are willing to spend extra money on.

Make something special, Be somebody special. We want that for your kids right? So incorporate that into your technological children, the Muvo's and the Zen's. Because Nobody honestly lusts to buy a me-too product.

2) Tip #2: Make us shit in o

Please, the Mac shareware developers practically invented this genre:

Launchbar (the first)

Quicksilver The current favorite, and free.

Butler About the same as Quicksilver, more features but not as slick.

Quicksilver also has the worst interface of any Mac app, ever. Unlike any of the Desktop Search Engines in this article, Quicksilver just dumps you to a screen with two giant icons and no clue about what to type or do.

It's great for geeks that want to spend hours customizing their interface, downloading thousands of plugins, themes, skins, etc. I'll stick with applications that actually accept text input to find results quickly, like LaunchBar.

Could someone tell me how all of these Desktop search tools compare to things like Launchbar, Butler, and Quicksilver?

Thanks.

Quicksilver is a pretty nifty program, and I used to use it as a free alternative to Launchbar (which used to perform roughly the same tasks). Both programs learn what you want certain shortcuts to mean, and both use Command-Space to activate them. For me, entering 'FX' is Firefox, 'PS' is photoshop, and so on.

However Launchbar has since updated to 4.0 beta release, and in doing so has pre-empted spotlight, as it does (right now, in 10.3) index system-wide metadata. So now you can cue up songs by entering MP3 names, open any kind of files by entering keywords for filename or type, open websites, perform google searches,Google image searches and so on.

It's worth trying out as an alternative to Quicksilver.

The competition is going to be tough on the Mac platform with launchbar, quicksilver allready there and do not forget apple's upcomming spotlight. Seems like another fine example of a function at which the Mac platform is ahead of its competition: "fast access to content".

Little Snitch appears to be a $25 app these days.

Hierarchical filesystems rely on users being able to organize their own data, remembering where they put it, and being able to navigate to it quickly. In reality, this has turned out to be a pain more than anything else. Not all files are easily categorizable, and not all users have their own schemes to keep their files in relevant places. Further, some files can easily fit into two or three different categories, but hierarchical filesystems only allow the file to exist in one place.

There have been numerous hacks to get around this problem: aliases/shortcuts, application and file launchers, the start menu, drawers, etc. Each way is essentially trying to overcome the limits of a hierarchical system.

When the internet was developing, top-level domains helped distinguish different types of content. Domains and sub-domains further helped. When those became too many to deal with, Web directories like Yahoo! became popular in an attempt to categorize and separate content. This is essentially a hierarchical filesystem for the internet. Then Google's innovation was that you didn't have to use a filesystem, you could just search the content and its relationships to find what you wanted. No filesystem is needed: you don't really need bookmarks or directories if you have Google, you just search for whatever you want.

Now, computing companies realize that the same idea applies to the desktop: the hierarchical filesystem is badly broken, and has been ever since people had to start inventing hack after hack to make it more tolerable. File searching was always a kind of last resort for OS writers. Microsoft focused all its efforts on making IE its filebrowser, instead of making a filesystem that's actualyl usable. Now companies realize what the next stage is: Apple has Spotlight, Launchbar, Quicksilver, and Butler; Windows has Google Desktop and Copernic; Linux has the always reliable grep.

It may take one of two more iterations of OSes, but I predict that when you boot up your OS, the first thing you see will not be a desktop of icons and a hierarchical filebrower. Your OS will have one simple interface: a search field. Just like Google's internet search, the OS will have one simply interfact. Only on the desktop, the OS can make the search results appear in realtime, categorize them more efficiently with metadata (which won't be spoofed in the same manner Web metadata was), and be able to launch or alter the files from the search results.

Things to look for: Apple's 10.4 Tiger OS now features Spotlight, but that finder search tool takes an auxiliary position in the UI. By 10.5, look for Spotlight to take the central position away from the Finder/Dock and become the primary instrument for using the OS. Launchbar has already done this to my computer-use habits, and I'm still using 10.3 Panther. If an when WinFS ever surfaces, look for it to transform the Windows desktop in the same manner.

You don't have to wait until next year to have this type of application on your Mac actually. Check out Launchbar, Quicksilver and Butler. All do exactly what the Google Desktop does, only they are able to search through more types of files and items, and are better integrated with the filesystem. It's nice that Google threw Window's users a bone though. I may use it at work.

These are all the free (as in beer) applications I use all the time:

WireTap: Save an audio file of any sound being played on the Mac by any other application.

DVDBackup: Great for backing up DVDs (while removing region coding, CSS encryption, and Macrovision encryption.) You'll still need Toast to burn the DVDs though.

PixelNhance: A must-have to tinker with the color/brightness/contrast etc. of your digital pictures.

Pixen: The best pixel-level editor on any platform.

MorphX: Morphs one image into another.

SnapNDrag: For screen captures (Grab is another basic screen capture utility that comes bundled with OSX).

Galerie: Puts your photos in a nice album-type gallery of web pages for being served by a web server.

LaTex Equation Editor and Tex Fog: The equation editors I use. Requires Tex/LaTex to be installed..

And if you are into LaTex, you'll also want CPlot: A parametric equation plotter.

CyberDuck: Open source S/FTP client. (Other FTP clients for OSX include osXigen, Transmit, Fetch, Fugu...).

Onyx: A must-have system utility.

MenuMeter: Another must-have system info utility. Excellent.

Books: A library software (book database).

Xnippets: A decent information organiser.

Carbon Copy Cloner: Backup software. (Donationware)

A few apps I have gladly paid money to use:

ChartSmith: Wonderfull for making all kinds of charts you have ever thought of (and some you haven't).

EvoCAM: Great app to record/play (or otherwise control) a Firewire/USB camera hooked to your Mac. Well worth the shareware price. (Also checkout their other offerings - ImageDV and VideoScope)

Intaglio: The 2D vector drawing/CAD program of my choice for simple CAD/ technical drawings.

Keynote: A (much better than) PowerPoint replacement from Apple. I use this all the time. (When it came out originally, I paid $$ for it; I heard Apple is bundling it with iLife now?)

Little Snitch: Keeps tabs on any stealth connections being made to/from your Mac, Shareware.

Intuem: Nice MIDI app with a clean interface. (GarageBand, one of Apple's iLife apps, is great for Audio/MIDI as well, but I find it limiting for my purpose because it does not do MIDI-out to my keyboard/synth.)

cheers- raga

By using the native System Preferences panel? No, it sure doesn't. But you can write your own firewall rules and load them from the command line or use a 3rd party GUI to configure them. Of course these rules would apply to all programs. To block outgoing connections on a per application basis, you'd have to use Little Snitch

A cable modem with a reverse firewall sounds nice but I would rather handle this at the CPU level. I want to choose what to block and accept.

Of course, Spotlight is just a rip-off of LaunchBar, which I was using for months when I was on a Mac (10.2.x even, didn't have to pay for an upgrade).

So all you people who say that Apple never copies, only innovates... let this be a lesson to you.

I've been waiting for searchable bookmarks for about a decade now and it is yet to appear in any web browser.

Your decade is at a close! As of version 5, available today, Omniweb has both searchable bookmarks and history, Launchbar (also available now) can search across all browser bookmarks simultaneouslt, and Safari 2.0 will have this kind of functionality as well next year in Mac OS X "Tiger".

~jeff

Direct-access user interfaces, like Apple's Spotlight, Black Tree Software's QuickSilver, ObjectiveDevelopment's LaunchBar (all for Mac OS X) and Candy Labs' AppRocket (for Windows), are the future of file management interfaces.

The spacial vs. browser-style debate isn't worth winning, because either way you're sticking to metadata-ignorant heirarchies that humans just aren't very good at dealing with beyond a certain point.

Go ahead and mod me 'Flamebait', but some of the new features very strongly resemble applications written by independent developers. Dashboard? Meet Konfabulator. Spotlight? Meet Launchbar. Safari's new RSS feature? Meet NetNewsWire. IIRC, Apple did the same thing involving Watson when it added channels to Sherlock.

Maybe this is why Apple distributes the Developer Tools free of charge; so they can coopt any product that is created using those Developer Tools?

Those banners have taken on a newer, more conflicted meaning for me, as I can't help but to notice two of Tiger's biggest features, "Dashboard" and "Spotlight" are carbon copies of some of the nicest third-party apps available for Mac OS X today, "Konfabulator" and "LaunchBar", respectively.

I'm of the opinion that UI advancements like LaunchBar and Konfabulator are of such high-quality that everyone should be able to take advantage of them, which means to break them out of their niche market (third party mac apps are by definition a fraction of a fraction of a market) they need to be rolled into the OS. So I'm happy about that. I'm happy that my Mom will be using "Widgets".

And "Dashboard" and "Spotlight" or whatever seem to be at least high-quality implementations of said UI advances; as they should be, as they are carbon copies of already thoroughly refined products.

But if Steve doesn't personally show up to Arlo's house with a cartoonishly overflowing wheelbarrow of cash, I'll be pretty fucking disappointed. Konfabulator was clearly Arlo's labor of love for several years, and overnight Apple has relegated it to second-ran status by slavishly copying it.

~jeff