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I've tried Expression, Canvas, Flash, and Freehand. I stick with Illustrator. I enjoyed playing with Expression's natural-media tools, but as a Mac owner, I'll probably never see another version now that MS ate it, and I don't want to find myself depending on an orphaned app...

Mac OS has a five-button mouse, it's just that four of the buttons are on the keyboard.

Even the most extreme X11 user with a MIT double-bucky keyboard wouldn't have thought of command-option-control-click (also here and here) or command-option-shift-click (also here)...

Having a contextual menu button from the beginning would have discouraged developers from adding a bunch of chord-combination clicks to make up for the lack...

Apple has a long history of writing (or collaborating on) uber-cool System Software and abandoning it (anyone else remember PINK? or how about OpenDoc?).

It looks a bit different with Darwin for x86 though. As long as Apple keeps to its word and publishes changes to Darwin, the x86 version will track the cnages made to the PPC version (even if it is a bit behind sometimes).

If you head over to http://www.gnustep.org/ you will then find out about a very active GNU project to duplicate OpenStep 4.4 (the last version before the purchase by Apple). It is almost complete, and if you look through their roadmap, you will see that they plan to track the cnages forst to Rhapsody and then work toward the OSX changes.

What does all this really mean?

Well, right now, it is possible to load up Darwin (or linux) and make sure you have all the GNUstep libraries installed, then you would be able to head over to http://www.omnigroup.com/ or http://www.stone.com/ and grab the old versions of OmniWeb and Create for OpenStep x86 and you can compile them yourselves!

If you are interested in recreating the NeXT experience, why not go whole hog and load up the linux distro called Simply GNUstep (which only includes GNUstep tools and GUI stuffs wherever possible).

What would all this really give you?

Right now, all you would get is outdated versions of OpenStep applications (most /.ers would not be happy with that).

If Apple did a port of its own, you would probably be able to run all Cocoa apps but not apps that are Classic or Carbon (because those depend upon parts of Old MacOS.

In fact, that was the reason why I believed the x86 rumors back in the days of beta. Most apps were Carbon and Classic. An x86 version back then would have servered as an advertizement and not a complete threat to Apple's hardware business.

I would look to Apple playing with other more exotic chipsets and not x86. They need low power consumption, faster chips, not x86 compatibility. It's too bad that AMD Hammer Macs or SPARC Macs never materialized.

Something like them may happen (especially since projects like PearPC have gotten better at emulating the PPC chipset) but look to Apple to move up the food chain toward Workstation Hardware and across the chain toward advanced Embedded Chips (maybe adding Cell Phone or some such function to its iPod) and not down.

The eMac or something like it will continue to be the bottom of its line. At $699 including a well-built monitor, its a pretty good value actually.

LyX --LaTeX for What You See is What You Mean Document Processing.

LyX 1.4 is coming along splendidly and is becoming much more intuitive, daily.

LyX 1.3.4 is excellent, flexible, extensible and quite intuitive with a buttload of Free Support from the LyX User List.

LyX for Mac is Qt compliant--Ronald Florence maintains the port. I'm looking into what it would require to do a Cocoa port but I can't imagine it would take much to do.

Try the damn software out. It is the one I use for writing Novels, Tech Publications, etc on Linux and OS X.

When I want to do Graphic Layout I'm using Scribus for Linux--growing better daily and quite useable with CMYK Color Separations, Secure PDF Exportations, etc.

Hell get smart and try Create! (Stone Studio). My friend Andrew Stone knows Document Publishing, Graphics Design and Layout. He even works with PStill Creator (PStill PS/EPS to PDF 256Bit Encrypted Conversion), Frank Siegert and has a wonderful PStill Utility for OS X.

If you can't grasp Create's Power than you've got issues

Free Upgrades for Life! Not to mention Andrew is one of the most talented, seasoned and professional individuals you'll ever speak with or meet. Great Company and Family. Highly respected since the early NeXT Days and now Apple Days.

Where else could I write a 13 line word processor?

You can also use Create from Stone Design.

Pick whatever Layout program fits your needs.

And for another interesting use of Applescript, Stone Create has a Save As option that will create an Applescript that will recreate the entire document. This is very useful if you want to create a script for some very graphic intensive forms. Set up the form with default data, Save As Applescript in Create, and then you have some very minor script editing to replace default data with variables. Very nice if you are not a full time programmer. Somewhat time saving even if you are one.

so why is it unfinished? well first of all the UI is quite slow for certain functions. mostly it's the transparencies and other Aqua-isms that can't be accelerated with a typical 2D graphics card, so the CPU is working overtime to render the screen under heavy loads. many of the slow downs can be directly seen in the Mac's most important application, the Finder, which is why you'll hear the Mac folk screaming bloody murder. many have suggested that as Quartz (the UI rendering engine) is optimized for 3D cards, the interface will speed up substantially.

The Quartz engine has some Altivec enhancements that should give significant performance boosts on the G4.

It's important to note that application specific drawing implementation can have sizeable effect on drawing performance. Back in the NeXT days, an Adobe employee would tweak the drawing code for open source screensaver modules and games and end up making them an order of magnitude faster. Intelligent drawing or lack thereof can make or brake the performance of an app.

Finally, let us not forget that the new Finder, which is the source of most of the OSX bashing, is not even a native Cocoa app and is written in Carbon. Give a nice native app like Stone Design Create a whirl and see what a difference it is. BTW, Create is a badass drawing program and the only 3rd party app that has run on EVERY version of NeXT ever released, all the way back to the early days and including OpenStep for Solaris and HP Gecko.

In any event, everyone knows that operating systems are never "finished" and 1.0's are always euphemisms for Beta software. NT 3.1 anyone? OS-X is a very ambitious project and it's amazing that the thing works as well as it does with backwards compatibility.

Burris

The reason words are usually left out is that it makes it less expensive to internationalize a product, but that's at the expense of usability.

They got this stuff from OpenStep. Some of the old OpenStep software companies (like Stone Design) offered bounties (like free software) for people that translated their apps to other languages.

Burris