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someone ripped Apple's interface for their iPhone and has now published the interface for other, non-iPhone Smartphones. my questions is this:
what would Apple do if someone ripped off their MacOSX interface and ported it to Microsoft Windows, or Linux. or, what would Microsoft do if Joe Shmoe ripped off Windows XP's Luna interface and ported it to MacOSX, or Linux? (I don't know if MaxOSX is capable of being `skinned' or not.) would they do the same thing? or would they just ignore it, or encourage it?

YouOS has been around for a while, and it's part of a growing trend of online desktops (I refuse to refer to them as "Online OSes", because they're simply a desktop page that launches programs, an alternative to Explorer at best).

If you're interested in this area, check out also:
FlyaKiteOSX
the 30Boxes Webtop
EyeOS
Computadora (in Spanish, even though .de ?)
Goowy (it's in Flash though)

And of course, because this is Slashdot, I couldn't go without mentionning that Google is probably preparing their own, since their recent focus on releasing equivalents of desktop applications online (Notes, Excel, Word, Calendar, Picasa, etc) :)

FlyAKiteOSX?

...and then I installed FlyAKiteOSX. Now I'm really confused :(

http://osx.portraitofakite.com/index.htm Just run OSX on your CPU and forget about the PPC vs. Intel stuff. =)

Google isn't making an office suite. Instead, they are probably instead building a browser based OS of sorts that will run other people's software. From what I've heard, it's part virtual network computing with the ability to do a lot of the processing locally.

http://osx.portraitofakite.com/ is cool too.

Hey mister elitist /. user who think only Google engineers can program, take a look at this and tell me this is the work of imbecile teenagers.

BTW the tech behind all this is AJAX. AFAIK none of AJAX's components are the work of Google.

Google can be credited with a lot, but people use their AJAX applications not so much because they are better than the others, but because they have better visibility thanks to Google's name.

All the best.

Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with you there. I just sold my Powerbook, the first Mac I've owned in 15 years because I couldn't stand how mouse-centric it was. When I'm working, I reach for the mouse only when absolutely necessary, but what made OSX' app-switching more annoying was the fact that you used one key combo to switch between apps, and another to switch between app windows. I tried using Witch for a while, but it was too slow to be usable. Using the keyboard AND the mouse (Expose'=f9+click) was just too much work. Good for you that it works for you. I thought the interface was very nice, but too difficult to use for someone who was keyboard-centric. In fact, I use Fly-a-kite on my Windows box to implement the good parts of the interface, but with a better user experience (for me).

I tell ya, the one thing that drove me absolutely insane was the Home & End keys. On every other OS, they take you to the beginning and end of the line, but on OSX, they take you to the beginning and end of a document. Shortcut keys should be used to speed common tasks. I'm much more likely to jump around WITHIN a document, than to the beginning and end. And, don't even get me started on jumping between words! :)

Xp and FlyakiteOSX look better than the real thing!

OS X skin for WinXP