Slashdot Mirror

A lot of this stuff really just comes around to mindsets. It's true of the businesses and true of the individuals who work at them.

One of the smartest pieces I ever read about the differences between how software shops approach business was a piece from the co-founder of The Omni Group that compared farming vs. mining. The Silicon Valley bubble has a strange obsession with "mining" schemes and exit strategies that leave rubble in their wake. That mindset permeates the culture, with many of them living as if they were oblivious to the fact that outside of their bubble most people lead happier, more fulfilled lives by going out of their way to avoid working and living in those sorts of conditions.

Speaking personally, I had a few offers on the table when I was a fresh out of grad school several years ago. One was for $50K/yr at a small software consulting company in a town most people have never heard of. One was for some interesting government work in D.C. at $75K/yr.. The last was for $75K/yr + stock options at a startup in Austin that was on course to have a big IPO soon.

I took the first one. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

The location has a low cost of living, delightful people, decent schools, and is populous enough to provide all of the benefits associated with the suburbs of a major city. The company is averse to overtime, small enough that we all know each other, big enough to attract a diverse set of clients, provides incredible benefits, and takes great pride in its work. I get to enjoy the satisfaction each night of a job well done without having to take my work home with me.

My income has increased modestly to $65K since accepting the job, which is easily enough for my wife and I to...
- Live off my income alone
- Enjoy a 7 minute traffic-free commute at 30mph
- Have an 1800 sqft. house on 1/3 acre
- Have a $580/mo. mortgage as our only debt
- Donate $10,000+/year to charity
- Enjoy big vacations on a regular basis
- Have time for family, friends, and ourselves
- Give my wife ample time for charitable service
- Retire early if we keep on as we have been

And all of that for a take-home pay that's roughly comparable to what the guy in the summary is paying in rent alone.

I mean, I get it. Prior to getting married, my wife was making $65K/yr in D.C., which was only enough to rent a small basement that was an hour commute from where she worked. When we were deciding whether to move there or here, it was pretty obvious which choice was the right one. Likewise, I've occasionally checked on that Austin startup over the last few years as a "what if". Turns out that after their last round of funding and claims they were going to hire 100 more people in advance of an IPO, the execs mostly all left to found a new startup and the company quietly announced layoffs.

It sounds like the guy in the summary has wants that outstrip his income. Hopefully he'll come to terms with the reality of his situation sooner rather than later, and maybe even wake up to the fact that there are viable alternatives that will provide not only a better quality of life, but may even provide more spending money.

Most people who work in enterprises don't work in IT so they don't care about admin tools etc. Most people work in marketing, sales, accounting, finance, logistics or manufacturing and all the software for all those departments runs on Windows. Middle market accounting software for Mac? Does not exist. Manufacturing/inventory control software for Mac? Nope. Contractor estimating/job costing? You get the picture.

ORLY?

Twenty years ago, that was definitely the case. Not anymore. Here are but a few examples:

Productivity/Project Management BTW, this has been around for many years.

Contact Management/Planning/Marketing

Accounting (also has been around for DECADES)

Manufacturing/Inventory Control/ERP (VERY Robust, been around for years. Cross-Platform, Semi-Open Source) I write ERP software for a living, and this is GOOD stuff!!!

Job Costing. XTuple does that, too; but here is but one example: A highly-rated Job Costing/Estimating package that is cross platform. Job Costing software tends to be more "vertical"; so I would have to point you to an agregator site, like this one.

Now, don't think these are the ONLY solutions in each of these categories; because they aren't. They are just ones that were easy to find, and/or that I was familiar with on some level. A bit of poking around will quickly show that there are many other alternatives in most, if not all, of these categories.

Does Windows still have the upper-hand when it comes to business Applications? Without a doubt; but that picture has seriously been changing over the past decade, and as Macs start to encroach more and more in the business world, there will certainly be more attention paid to the platform by business Application Publishers. And in another decade, your post may very well be simply a joke.

Times change; a few decades ago, CP/M was supposed to be the "business" OS but there was no "business software" available. A couple of decades ago, businesses, including Apple itself, ran primarily custom-built business software on AS/400s and the like. Who's to say what the future holds?

I've know a lot of really food engineering managers.

Obviously you meant "good" here, but it made me pause: is there a correlation between food and good managers? I've been reading more than a handful of materials (e.g. Peopleware ) which have mentioned eating together as a helping to build strong teams (arguably the most important job of a manager). A number of companies have caught on, from the big (like Google) to startups (one of my favorites, The Omni Group here in Seattle even has a full-time kitchen staff who are listed by name on their about us page).

Obviously, it's not a catch-all solution; heck, I suspect it's more correlation (that is, the managers who get their teams to eat together are more likely to care about their teams) than causation. But still gave me a pause.

Slashdot - Taking Notes in the Modern Classroom

TL;DR - I found pencil and paper to still be the best way to take notes in class, but Notability and an iPad stylus work pretty well.

This past spring I sat in on an undergrad philosophy class that a friend of mine was teaching. I hadn't been in a college classroom for at least 10 years, and I decided to experiment with different ways of note taking. No risk if I messed up since I was just sitting in and not taking the class for credit. Here are the methods I tried:

• Good old pencil and paper, Ecosystem notebook and mechanical pencil.
• Macbook Pro - OmniOutliner, Pages
• iPad with on screen keyboard and bluetooth keyboard - OmniOutliner, [Pages]5]
• iPad, handwriting with stylus with Notability

The clear winner: pencil and paper. I thought carefully after trying each system about what did and didn't work, and why what didn't work didn't. Here's why I think pencil and paper wins out: there's no extra cognitive load when using pencil and paper. It's straight out of my brain and on to the page. All the computer and tablet based systems I tried required my brain to do extra work to get my thought recorded. With pencil and paper, I can put things where I want on the page without thinking about it. I can indent, underline, arrange text, and draw diagrams with no extra mental effort. With all of the computer/table based ways I tried, I had to not only thing about what I was putting down but also how I was going to do it. That effort distracted me from what I was supposed to be learning.

That being said, taking notes by hand using a stylus and Notability on the iPad came a close second to pencil and paper. Taking notes that way added less excess cognitive load than any other way I tried save pencil and paper. Handwriting on the iPad had a couple of advantages over pencil and paper.

• I could use different pen colors and line weights to emphasize important ideas
• If I wanted to re-arrange my notes on the page, I could just select the handwritten text and move it around the virtual page.
• Digital versions of my notes without having to scan them.

On the other hand, because of the size of the iPad screen, writing directly on the page doesn't work very well, so I had to use Notability's zoom feature to write legible text. That means I couldn't see the whole page at a glance, so it was hard to tell exactly where on the page I was writing. I often wound up scrunching letters at the right edge of the page, or writing over the page divider at the bottom of the page. The extra cognitive load of keeping track of those kinds of things was more trouble than the advantages were worth, for me at least.

Slashdot - Taking Notes in the Modern Classroom

TL;DR - I found pencil and paper to still be the best way to take notes in class, but Notability and an iPad stylus work pretty well.

This past spring I sat in on an undergrad philosophy class that a friend of mine was teaching. I hadn't been in a college classroom for at least 10 years, and I decided to experiment with different ways of note taking. No risk if I messed up since I was just sitting in and not taking the class for credit. Here are the methods I tried:

• Good old pencil and paper, Ecosystem notebook and mechanical pencil.
• Macbook Pro - OmniOutliner, Pages
• iPad with on screen keyboard and bluetooth keyboard - OmniOutliner, [Pages]5]
• iPad, handwriting with stylus with Notability

The clear winner: pencil and paper. I thought carefully after trying each system about what did and didn't work, and why what didn't work didn't. Here's why I think pencil and paper wins out: there's no extra cognitive load when using pencil and paper. It's straight out of my brain and on to the page. All the computer and tablet based systems I tried required my brain to do extra work to get my thought recorded. With pencil and paper, I can put things where I want on the page without thinking about it. I can indent, underline, arrange text, and draw diagrams with no extra mental effort. With all of the computer/table based ways I tried, I had to not only thing about what I was putting down but also how I was going to do it. That effort distracted me from what I was supposed to be learning.

That being said, taking notes by hand using a stylus and Notability on the iPad came a close second to pencil and paper. Taking notes that way added less excess cognitive load than any other way I tried save pencil and paper. Handwriting on the iPad had a couple of advantages over pencil and paper.

• I could use different pen colors and line weights to emphasize important ideas
• If I wanted to re-arrange my notes on the page, I could just select the handwritten text and move it around the virtual page.
• Digital versions of my notes without having to scan them.

On the other hand, because of the size of the iPad screen, writing directly on the page doesn't work very well, so I had to use Notability's zoom feature to write legible text. That means I couldn't see the whole page at a glance, so it was hard to tell exactly where on the page I was writing. I often wound up scrunching letters at the right edge of the page, or writing over the page divider at the bottom of the page. The extra cognitive load of keeping track of those kinds of things was more trouble than the advantages were worth, for me at least.

The NeoOffice project (more-or-less OS X native port of OpenOffice; deliberately not providing a link here because the stunt pulled by the devs at the beginning of 2012 makes them weasels in my book) recently switched to an arrangement similar to this, except those guys are far worse than the developer in TFA (who is actually being perfectly reasonable, IMHO). Essentially, the donation in this case buys you the time savings of not having to compile yourself, and some measure of assurance that the binary is compiled as intended by the developer. And if you're OK with setting up the build environment, running makefiles, and taking the time to run the build, then great.

The Neo binaries used to be free. Somewhere around the end of 2011/beginning of 2012, without warning, they started requiring money for binaries of the new major-version release (3.2.x). They didn't bother to disable the update check in the latest 3.1.x binaries, nor to modify it to say something like: "NOTE: subsequent updates will be pay only." The weaselly thing is that they describe this as a "voluntary donation" -- no kidding. You can't download the binaries (nor post to most of the forums) without a donation. All of which would be only mildly annoying if the source, which is available via anonymous CVS and includes the makefiles, were actually possible to build by following the published instructions. Unfortunately, it isn't: quite a few people have tried (myself included), and all independently arrived at the same conclusion, which is that the source will absolutely not build as published. (Search the macosx-talk archives and see for yourself.)

In short, it seems quite clear that the Neo devs are deliberately doing the absolute bare minimum to satisfy the GPL requirements (and to be able to use a ".org" domain, which may have significant tax implications) -- maybe not even that. I suspect they know damn well that the source won't build according to the instructions, even if you follow them to the letter. "Disingenuous" doesn't even begin to cover it.

By comparison, the developer in this case is being very transparent and upfront with his reasons and intentions. Kudos to him!

--Tim

There's also OmniGraffle...
http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle/

4) Go to Omni and purchase a Quantity Discount for up to 30% off. Or a Large Volume Discount for whatever price you happen to negotiate.

https://store.omnigroup.com/main/86705d974e0553dcffffffff/

Just like you did before.

The Mac isn't a walled garden. If software is suitable for enterprise use, then the software vendors will have a volume licensing option. The Mac App Store is designed to make finding, buying and installing apps easy for consumers. But it's not the only way of supplying Mac software.

Tried OmniGraffle?

On the Visio front have you tried OmniGraffle Pro on your Mac? I know it is expensive, hence why I am asking instead of sharing my experience.

OmniGraffle Pro

I really like visio as well. But on Mac I use graffle, and also about a decade I used concept draw which at the time was more full featured than Visio (!). If you are a Mac guy might be worth taking a look.

OmniOutliner Pro - my favorite, most powerful application for day to day use on the Mac. My whole life is inside OmniOutliner - I've got a timeline in there from the day I was born right to today, just as one example of how pervasive the thing becomes. What a great product. And no, not connected to them, except as a very happy customer.

OmniGraffle: Better than Visio, and it imports Visio files.

The Omni Group will be releasing their apps on the store.

The guys who ported Quake to Mac, say objective C, is C. It runs just as fast as C. ObjectiveC allegedly has slower method dispatch (as opposed to C-function calls) but tests show it's fast or faster than C++ (i.e. a tie as far as apples and oranges can be comapred)

Have you had a look at OmniGraphSketcher as a quick way to sketch graphs?

I find it fascinating that you and people like you will not be swayed by three decades of firsthand accounts as to how Jobs treats people, not only competitors but employees and business partners. Why are you so desperate to paint ...

How quaint. The rest of us find it fascinating how you, and people like you, want somehow to believe that these other industry players are simply very nice guys, hanging out together, sailing, watching the Super Bowl, and just utterly dismayed as to how the mean old Steve Jobs would be so unkind to them.

Another, and likely more valid, perspective on this bit of industry history is that McNealy and Schwartz thought they could play hard ball with Steve Jobs. They bet their company, and they lost.

The part of the story left out sheds light on this. Lighthouse Design went around buying up several software companies which made the most innovative and popular software packages on NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and OpenStep, then sold the whole kit and caboodle to Sun, which promptly buried all of them.

Here's a brief and amusing summary of the career arcs of McNealy, Jobs, and Schwartz. I stumbled upon it while searching for a reference to the famous McNealy statement, "Sun puts all its wood behind one arrow", which he said when announcing Sun's support for OpenStep. Sun drove that arrow through the heart of OpenStep. Nice guys, Schwartz and McNealy, but hey, that's just business.

Regarding Concurrence, if there exist any patents relevant to the basic concept of a presentation package, those would undoubtedly be held by Microsoft (heard of PowerPoint?) not Sun/Lighthouse Design, and were cross-licensed to Apple years ago as part of a famous "bury the hatchet" move, when Jobs first returned to control of Apple. If Schwartz thought he had a leg to stand on, he might have sued Jobs. Frankly, this part of the story doesn't ring true. Silence on the other end of the phone when provoked in such a manner isn't exactly the style of Mr. Jobs, as you might have suspected since you're actively engaged in propagating rumors of his notorious alleged personality traits. If you're even close to right about that, doesn't it seem more likely that Mr. Schwartz blacked out, as a result of the brief and blunt tirade which he unleashed?

Observers had speculated for years, prior to the announcement of Keynote, that Steve Jobs used a presentation package on stage which appeared to be something other than Microsoft PowerPoint. Rumor at the time was that a special one-user license (with source) had been sold to Mr. Jobs, who despised PowerPoint. Presumably that license would have been sold by Sun, and Schwartz would have been aware of it.

You lack vision.

A quick business use right off the top of my head - you're talking with a person about their processes, trying to map them out. You could try pen and paper, but you'll be making alterations as you go and end up with a mess.

Instead you use diagramming software like OmniGraffle ( http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/ ) and get the process down, with all the edits you like, until the other person is happy. Sure, you can do it at your desk, but it's often better to deal with people in their normal environment, and get them to walk through their process 'live' to check your process map is accurate.

I'd have loved one of these for that. Instead we had meeting rooms, electronic whiteboards and people who are better at showing than telling.

I can see a number of great uses for this device, although it's too early to say if it'll realise the promise it has. Apple's handful of apps show it off about as well as the built-in apps did for the iPhone. The really interesting thing is when you get the third-party apps onto the device, when you see the ways people come up with to use it.

Writing it off as consumption-oriented misses the bigger picture. Sure, you can use it to consume media (when did that revolting phrase take hold?) but there's a myriad of other applications out there waiting for devices like this. Maybe Apple's isn't the best model (and there's good reason to suppose it's not), but it might kick something better off.

That's what I've been asking. What is it for? Seems like a simple enough question, but I see no answers.

You obviously haven't been looking hard. It's for

- websurfing
- email
- movies
- photos
- gaming
- music
- all those zillion apps that will be written for it

Now you are probably going to say "I can do those on a laptop/iPod touch, how exactly is iPad different?"... And that's a fair question which I'll try to answer now:

iPad is obviously quite different from a laptop. The UI is totally different and a lot more direct. It's smaller, has longer battery-life and is a lot simpler to use. What would it been like if Stepehen Colbert had whipped out a netbook as opposed to an iPad at the Grammys? Could you see someone using a netbook (or any other netbook) for something like that? Me neither. It would be awkward and clumsy.

And I bet that iPad is better at many key things than a laptop is. Things like watching movies or surfing the web. iPod touch is already my websurfer of choice, and iPad would be even better.

And the thing iPad has that a laptop does not have is simplicity. You can't hide one app-window behind another app-window. You do not have to worry about which app has focus when you try using keyboard-shortcuts. YOu do not have to worry which app is slowing the system down. You just have one app right in front of you. It's easy and it's simple. Some might find that too simple and too limiting, but fact remains that iPad offers simplicity and ease of use that does not exist in a laptop running traditional OS. And there are lots of people who will find that appealing. People want to do things with their computers, they shouldn't have to worry about cleaning up the filesystem or other crap like that.

Well, what about iPod touch/iPhone? It should be quite obvious that iPad offers possibilities that simply do not exist on those devices. Like iWork. Running an app like that is simply impossible on an iPhone. You could view a document, but editing a document would be very hard indeed. On the iPad it's perfectly doable. And that's just one example. The level of sophistication in the apps is simply a lot better on the iPad-apps than what is possible on the iPhone-apps. The big screen really changes things.

I bet that the device Apple introduced is just the tip of the iceberg. The key is the software. When we start getting news of iPad-apps that would simply not be possible on the iPhone, it will start making more and more sense. I mean stuff like this: http://blog.omnigroup.com/2010/01/29/ipad-or-bust/

We can't simply think that "I can do XXXX on my laptop, wo why would I want an iPad?", we need to think more about HOW we do those things. In theory I could surf the web with my Nokia-phone, so someone could say that iPhone has no advantage over Nokia when it comes to mobile websurfing. But anyone with any experience with websurfing on the two would say that Nokia is next to useless for web-browsing, whereas iPhone is perfectly capable websurfer.

With the iPad we are still stuck at the point where we stare at paper-specs and use them to determine the value and use of the device.

According to Omni Software update statistics, a third of all macs are still running tiger. http://update.omnigroup.com/

I also used OmniGraffle for diagrams. It is a vector diagramming tool so I could export to EPS and import into LyX directly. That way my class notes were typeset using TeX and had vector graphics. LyX even allowed its keyboard combinations to be remapped to whatever you wanted. For non-tablet equation and diagram input, it really doesn't get any better or easier than LyX combined with OmniGraffle.

Not to get too "640k is all anyone needs" here, but having used Wave now for about a week or two, the current client doesn't seem to be much more than a multi-user version of Omni Outliner (with less functionality).

Yeah, you could write new clients that make it work like twitter or IM or email. But those things already exist and work just fine. I don't see it as a very useful way to real-time collaborate on a document (compared with other, better ways- whether google docs or wikis...) So I guess I'm not sure what the hype is about exactly. Does google know what Wave is supposed to be, or is it just putting it out there and hoping it grows into something?

Tabs should be down the side. [...] I don't understand how this basic mistake can have stayed with us for what, 10 years+ of tabbed browsing...

OmniWeb has been doing preview tabs on the side since 2004. Unfortunately, it's a Mac-only browser and has never really caught on.

For MacOSX from the Omni Group.

Most browser tab implementations are lame beyond belief. For a non-lame implementation, see OmniWeb at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/. This puts thumbnails in a moveable drawer at the side of the browser. If the vertical space is filled up, a scroll bar appears. There is a plugin for Firefox that emulates parts of this behavior but is less integrated with the browser and the rest of the OS (in this case OS X). Of course, I'm leaving out many features due to lack of space and will.

Any browser that uses precious vertical space for anything but displaying page content and minimal controls and URL display is poorly designed in the first place.

OmniWeb has many, many other features (workspaces, site-specific preferences, and world-class ad blocking come readily to mind) that makes it the finest browser I have ever used.

Me too. I bought a MacBook after Christmas, and since then I bought CSSEdit, Espresso, the recent MacHeist3 bundle, iWork, and I'm that close to buying OmniGraffle (except that one's a little too expensive and I'm getting by fine with the free eval version).

I can't remember the last time I actually *bought* software for my old Windows machine.

Mac OS X gets lots of press, but the people who build these great little software apps for Mac should get more praise.

OmniWeb has had something similar for a long time, it's called shortcuts. You can either type in your searches (such as: imdb Jack Black) or you can use the search shortcut on the toolbar.

I like Firefox a lot because of its support for standards and its expandability but honestly I find myself using OmniWeb a lot more. Sure I can get addons to Firefox that make it as (or perhaps even more) functional as OmniWeb but the Firefox addons can get a bit odd at times, interacting with Firefox in weird ways. It's also annoying to constantly have to update all the Firefox addons I'd need to match OmniWeb. (I'm sure I can turn off updates but see the previous statement about odd bugs.) It's nice to get so much functionality in an easy-to-use browser like OmniWeb.

I use Parallels to run MS Access and Visio - there is no native versions of either of these for Mac

Have you tried using OmniGraffle. It's far superiour to Visio, at least from my point of view.

For Access... well... you could consider using a real database. Stuff like PostgreSQL runs fine in Mac OS X. I create little database applications with a web frontend using some simple PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby/whatever scripts to talk to the database all the tim, it's really easy to do and a lot more robust and portable than Access will ever be.

Inkscape is a vector editor, and doesn't support automatic layout when you move items around. At least that I know of, if you can tell me how, you'll make me very happy. That said, I use Inkscape for making presentation graphics in Linux, but it's not really a Visio replacement.

Reddit had a thread on this topic a few months ago, which you can find here: AskReddit: What is the best Visio replacement?

Some of the better suggestions were:

• OmniGraffle - Great, but Apple only
• Gliffy
• Project Draw
• yEd
• OpenOffice.org Draw
• Dia

Heck I would be happy for a mac port of Microsoft Project.

Have you tried Omni Plan? I've been impressed with their products in general and supposedly it imports and exports to MS Project. Obviously it's not MS project and I have no idea how good the import/export work.

Uh, no I don't... My web browser controls what is loaded in a very fine tuned manner. When I load a page at slashdot.org, I only load what I want.

My browser didn't load those 'mc' and 'uid' quantserve cookies that are tracking people everywhere online from slashdot to hotornot.com. I did however load, store, and will later use the Slashdot.org cookies. I have granular control over all my cookies, and they are one click away.

At my command, my browser also blocks swf files, other known ad sizes, and blocks data entirely from known bad guys like doubleclick. If something does slip through, eliminating it is a simple control click away. The PERL wizards will appreciate that I can blackhole data based on regular expressions in URLs. Any domain, path, file extension... I can nuke it. It's certainly much more powerful than a hosts file.

My browser also blocks the popups that other browsers like Safari miss... If I need something that didn't get though, there's a little icon for everything that was blocked in the form of cookies, popups, images, etc on the status bar at the bottom of my window. Images and SWFs are a grey box. Hover and it tells me the domain. Click and it loads. Everything is one click away.

I can even change all of those settings on a domain by domain basis. My browser gives me complete control over what I load and what gets displayed. My browser even makes it simple to snatch images from websites like flickr that attempt to block me from saving images. I just view page info and there's an list of every image on the page. No more hunting through page source to find a image. Click the display button to see it. Click the save button to keep it.

I don't even have to load your front page to use your site in many cases. In my url bar, I type "google macdork site:slashdot.org" and I get a google search for "macdork site:slashdot.org." I can do the same with yahoo, msn, ebay... I can shortcut any search box on any site with one click simplicity. Why should I have to be subject to Yahoo's front page and their latest "Top 10 ways to spend your money" list and other info-tainment-mercials, when I just want to use their search engine without the distraction? For sites with different parameters like the RIAA Radar I can dictate which parameters are used in the search, so "riaakey" shortcut does a keyword search while "riaaart" does an artist search.

You two can bicker about who has "the power" in the arrangement, but reality dictates that you do not define what I can and cannot do with the data your web server spews at me. My browser is in control of that. You're only able to dictate your terms to people who use limited, crappy browsers. The entire ad based internet is based on that assumption. For people like myself however, I am able to view "your" content on my terms unless you decide to shut your site down. If anyone is wondering by now, I use Omniweb. Registered user since 2004. (^_^)

And what the hell does "potential software base" mean? I have no idea, but I do know that lots of Mac applications exist. That doesn't even count some of the big ones, like those produced by Omni or something like Delicious Library and DEVONtechnologies.

I converted my XP machine to a VMware image, and now run it in Fusion to support IE and Visio.

You may be interested in OmniGraffle as a native replacement for Visio.

Actually, this does: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/pro/ Quote: OmniGraffle Professional 4 now uses the recently-opened Visio XML schemas, so there have been many improvements to the Visio XML import/export function, and some of the newer feature sets (such as the Bezier drawing tool) bring OmniGraffle's Visio support to a higher level.

I put Ubuntu on my macbook recently and was seriously impressed. Really looks up to scratch for the desktop. First off, pretty much everything worked without too much googling. Picked up the graphics, sound, wireless, etc., no problem. I read I can get the webcam working quite easily too. The only thing I didn't try was the dual screen/extended desktop. The compiz stuff worked as soon as I turned it on (I'd miss exposé otherwise). I have a usb tv-receiver that won't work but I expected that since it's built for Mac. It was the responsiveness that really got me though, Ubuntu was far snappier than OSX (and I've 2GB of memory) - Mac apps like to think about things for a while sometimes (and they're not using the CPU to think, whatever the hell they're doing).

There are a couple of Mac apps I'd miss. Number one is Omnigraffle. Really handy for making diagrams. There's nothing close on linux as far as I can see (although I've just tried the OpenOffice Draw program and there's potential there). Second one is Keynote. OSX also has PDF built in as a native format, which is really nice, and the drag and drop support is unparalleled.

I use Linux in a virtual machine on Mac for college. It's about a 2GB code base (or something ridiculous) so I won't be trying to recompile for mac any time soon. It works, but native would be much nicer.

I think the Apple hardware is pretty decent. They cram a lot of good stuff into a small space. I've been hard pressed to get all the same features in a Dell for the same price last time I tried (and it's usually twice the size/weight).

So I think Linux on Mac makes sense for some of us.

hmm user banned from posting.. apparently i am a troll...

the only closed source part is the UI which is hardly anything significant. the engine is entirely open source like gecko. you can even port it to
GTK UIs, non apple iphone competetior devices,
rival browsers . The safari UI is hardly critical as the links i just posted show. If you dont like the safari UI you can just make you own pretty easily with webcore. It is even easier (about 5 lines in cocoa) if you use Webkit

In transportation terms, he's looking for a vehicle that can:

• transport several people / several tons of kit
• rapidly (>100mph)
• to / from endpoints without infrastructure (ie. no roads / runways etc.)
• over inhospitable terrain ...but is not a helicopter.

In other words, he wants an airship. :)

There are some airship-quality tools available, including OmniGraffle Pro and the venerable but amazing TeX, especially CONTEXT, and even Apple's Pages.

But if you're dealing with print shops, they're going to expect that your documents have been put together with certain applications, and that's all they'll do. So professional work is going to require professional tools, and that may mean ponying up for Adobe applications until another company decides to challenge them and create a competitive product.

And, of course, as a Java developer, Eclipse runs on the Mac and is FOSS, so what more could I ask?

Firefox is focused on general, average user profile who still uses bookmarks and even check their history manually.

That is why they are successful at adopting the average browser user. That is what Mozilla suite (pre Firefox) missed and people like me were getting flamed/kicked/banned by community because of reminding that fact.

I think what is more interesting is Opera Speeddial feature which has been recently introduced. If they were just, a bit OS X native friendly... (I really need keychain)

http://www.opera.com/img/products/desktop/screensh ots/speeddial.jpg

They found that average end user visits 10 sites frequently and made that "Super simple bookmark" thing.

I personally prefer Omniweb Workspaces, a grouped bookmark feature native to Omniweb

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/gall ery/movies/04_workspaces.html (Embedded Mov file)

Autocad

Architosh is a community Mac users of CAD programs.

Visio

OmniGraffle 4

Primavera

Minimum Requirements: Apple Mac OS X 10.3

All of these were specific apps not tasks the apps needed to be able to do however of the three one specific app does have a Mac version and the two other have equivilent programs. In each case a Mac can to the task needed.

For people outside Mac environment, Omni group is one of the last companies to attack. They provide their own commercial app used Frameworks for free, without any restrictions to developers.

http://www.omnigroup.com/developer/sourcecode/

They even give their software update statistics for free

http://update.omnigroup.com/

It is all about the psychological sad state of these trolls. Every 3rd party app they attacked was successful in its own segment, respected and known for code quality.

For people outside Mac environment, Omni group is one of the last companies to attack. They provide their own commercial app used Frameworks for free, without any restrictions to developers.

http://www.omnigroup.com/developer/sourcecode/

They even give their software update statistics for free

http://update.omnigroup.com/

It is all about the psychological sad state of these trolls. Every 3rd party app they attacked was successful in its own segment, respected and known for code quality.

Ecto: http://kung-foo.tv/
Transmit: http://www.panic..com/
OmniGraffle: http://www.omnigroup.com/
DevonThink: http://www.devonthink.com/
Guitar Shed: http://www.guitarshed.com/
Logic Pro/Express: http://www.apple.com/logic

Linked version with condensed summary. I wanted to find out more about some of them. Others may benefit too.

Ecto a blogging client (but the site seems to be down: try this for more info). Shareware, $17.95.
Transmit an FTP client. Shareware, $17.95
Sync Services -- comes with 10.4
BBedit text/html editor. $125, but worth it.
Missing Synch for Windows Mobile - synchronize with PDA/smartphones. $49.95/$39.95
OmniGraffle - diagramming / flowchart program. $79.95 / $149.95
ConceptDraw - another diagramming / flowchart program. $299
IChat AV - built-in to 10.4
AppleScript, Scriptdebugger - also built-in. No link. I'm getting lazy.
Microsoft Entourage -- part of MS Office.
Sketchfigher 4000 Alpha -- a game from the great Ambrosia Software. $19.00
TypeIt4Me - keyboard macro expander. $27
NetworkLocation - automatically trigger configuration changes depending upon where you are on the network (e.g., at home, work, etc.). $15
Apple Remote Desktop 3 - control / configure Mac systems remotely. $499 / $299 (unlimited / 10 systems)
MacLinkPlus - file conversion software (e.g., from WordPerfect documents to/from Word, and many others). $79
Parallels Desktop for Mac - virtualization software (e.g., run Win XP simultaneously with OS X). $79.
Remote Desktop Connection - connect remotely to a Windows desktop. FREE
Snap X Pro - screen / movie capture. $29
Boot Camp - dual boot Windows. I'm lazy.
PDF - Portable Document Format from Adobe? What?
Lingon - tool for making launchd scripts for 10.4.
Workgroup Manager - manage local systems - part of 10.4 Server.

---
Okay, a mildly interesting list. Here's a few more suggestions:

Cyberduck - FTP and SFTP client. Donationware.
VLC - cross-platform video viewer / transcoder.
Blender 3D - cross-platform 3D modelling / rendering.
Bookends - excellent bibliography software. $99
Celestia - cross-platform real-time 3D astronomy simulator.
Plot - a, uh, plotting / graphing program.
proFit - another plotting / graphing program, non-free. $95
WordService - adds a bunch of text reformatting tools to the Services menu, making them accessible in any program. The same page has a bunch of other useful and free services.

The original article lists PDF, but no tools. While its true OS X native support makes PDF pretty easy to use, there's still some tasks that are awkward and some useful tools out there to do t

Let's face it: Safari isn't bad, but Firefox (and other browsers for Mac) are quite a bit better.

If for no other reason than the plugins like AdBlock and NoScript, Firefox is terrific. That said, Safari really still only serves primarily for me as a springboard to getting Firefox installed. Sure there are a couple of remaing sites that require Safari (or IE on Windows, of course), but aside from that, there's little reason to use Safari IMHO.

Also noteworthy in Mac browser land are Camino (with CamiTools installed) and OmniGroup's OmniWeb are also quite good browsers--certainly light years better than IE.

OmniWeb
And amazingly, against all the free competition, worth the money.
And FWIW, nothing is as slow as Firefox on OS X. (Flock doesn't count).

I'm not familiar with OneNote, but I've heard it mentioned in discussions of outlining / note-taking / "junk drawer" apps., such as OmniOutliner, DEVONthink, and Yojimbo. This seems to be a particularly hot genre on the Mac right now.

And, guess what, nobody is _made_ to upgrade anything. The upgrades offer new features

Like the ability to run software that is still developed and marketed? I am under the impression that developers of applications for Mac OS X don't care as much about compatibility with old operating system versions as much as developers of applications for Windows.

If you have a good systems admin, then Linux/Solaris is certainly mature for the cooperate desktop.

As far as Mac OS X application offerings, have a look at OmniGroup's offerings. I believe that OmniOutliner is currently bundled with many Mac models.

Lucid Information Systems, one of the companies where I work (shameless plug) has business laptops on offer with most of the OmniGroup products and VoodooPad among many other useful tools pre-installed.

OS X is ready for the business world!

If you'd like to try, OmniGraffle already makes Visio look clunky, and has for years.

The IE 7 "Quick Tabs" feature is very cool. It shows a tiled view of all tabs open with all pages rendered so you can quickly find your way and click a tab. I don't think any previous web browser has this feature.

Omniweb has had it for a little while, here's a screenshot.