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Mac OS X, XML, and Aqua
Gr1nderX writes, "Ars just posted a large Mac OS X DP3 technical article that talks about the structure and functioning of OS X's (UNIX) filesystem, and how that impacts the Aqua GUI. IMHO, the most fascinating part of the article concerns the extensive use of XML that Apple makes in managing application resources, file meta-information, service configuration and startup options, etc. The XML parser that's built into the core OS basically gives you the ability to use either the GUI or a text editor to completely control and configure every aspect of the OS. " Lot of good stuff in this one: if only powerbooks weren't so expensive...
I am happy to see people give notice to the under-glorified but all important file-system of the OS. This is what drew me to the Mac.
File management problems(you know all those f$cking dlls and other crap in the windows directory) used to piss me off. I spent about all my damn time trying to 1. getting rid of the shit that new programs installed and 2. playing around with the goddamn registry. End(of windows rant)
I woke up and threw out the damn wintel pos about two years ago. Just because I didn't want to deal with all the filesystem garbage.
Yes the Mac is more $$$, but I have seriously been rewarded. There is way less crappy shit to deal with. Yeah there are trade-offs like not enough slots(which sucks) but has been worth sacrifices like that.
This news on OSX is a little disturbing, but I have heard some rumors that this developer release is definitely stripped down. So I am still waiting for the good punchline to all of this Aqua crap(esp the dock).
Anyway I am real happy about the XML and filesystem news. This is something that moved me to the Mac and I hope that it keeps getting better and that more geeks start noticing this too.
You give me a system that is easy to configure, and I am there man. This is something that is worrying me now that I am playing with LinuxPPC. I am an engineer and love reading manuals but I value my time too much to sit and read about what every f$cking file on the machine does.
Cheers
1) Apple has tried mass-marketing a few times, before. It always flops and also ruins their regular business.
2) I read some of Woz's comments a few weeks ago (linked from Slashdot). Apple is not interested in selling more units at lower margins. They intentionally market to those who want the best and don't mind paying for it, similar to Sun in the midsize market and Lexus in automobiles.
Actually, the NIB files (serialized objects used to construct the interfaces) that Interface Builder generates have apparently become XML-based as of DP3.
The serialized objects include event source and target information, plus methods to be generated by specific events, so most of what you're suggesting is already there.
NeXT beat you to this about 11 years ago, although the format didn't turn from binary serialization to XML until a few weeks ago...
It's interesting. I think there are more articles on /. about MacOS X DPx than about Win2K. I like this. Gives me funny feelings.
Is it really true that Apple has removed window-shade?
/etc.. isnt Gnome /etc
I mean thats the best way to hide an app..
not in a taskbar with 20 other things, bad move Apple..
How much work would it be to XML:ify
and KDE using XML to store its configuration files?
It would totally rock if XML became the standard for all those crazy files in
I really looking forward to seeing MacOS X..
A SMP G4 with a 22" Apple Cinema display..
Cant wait!!!
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
It probably will be one big window that replaces your mac desktop. But it is possible to have X clients coexisting with native windows. The Xwin32 server for windows can do this.
--
A buddhist walks up to a hot dog stand and says ``Make me one with everything.''
Actually i belive that John Carmack is working on a port of XFree86. He has a port for MacOS Server already working, and has said that once XFree86 4.0 comes out, he will work on a version for darwin and MacOS X.
--
A buddhist walks up to a hot dog stand and says ``Make me one with everything.''
I agree about the mouse buttons.. and I must add I don't see the point of newer, five-button mice.. should I start binding buttons to keys so I don't need to put my right hand on the keyboard anymore?
The extension manager is cool but it is required, because extensions break so many things. The majority of them (in my experience) are just patches to the toolkit, the interrupt table MacOS calls its system api. load about 30 extensions and I guarantee you won't have five days of uptime.
Most of my bad macintosh experience is through netscape.. I routinely couldn't make it through loading netscape without locking the machine. It took me a long time to realize this was Apple's fault, not Netscape's, because no application, even if it is written 'wrong' like Netscape apparently was, should cause a machine to deadlock like that.
I'm looking forward to OS X
Having a common library can be beneficial even if these binaries link it statically. At least programmers would have a common set of debugged xml-parsing functions so that they wouldn't have to roll their own.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
see post 20
"There is no spoon"-Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!"-The Tick, The Tick
I read it a couple days ago on Ars, after following a link on, i think, macnn.com.
:P) PLus w/ Java i' have out-of-the-box support for HTML, Networking, CORBA, database interfaces, plus lotsa other stuff :) Anyone like to help? :)
Anyway, about the XML, that would be awesome if Linux on other unices could use xml as a standard config layout, however, getting the unix comunittee and alllll its little utilities and unsupported apps etc, to do this would be like trying to move a mountain by blowing on it.
Im thinking of restarting a Operating Environment called HotsOS (hotsos.8m.com) using this technique, plus all the apps would be in pre-compiled java (run about as fast as C++ or Objective-C programs, so dont flame me about speed
"There is no spoon"-Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!"-The Tick, The Tick
This has been gone over many times here and elsewhere, and the point that trying to redo all configuration files as XML would be of very limited benefit is well taken. I do like what Apple has apparently done in terms of using XML to represent consistent meta-information for their configuration files. That makes a lot more sense to me than the SYSV-style run-level directory structure, and I hope that some brave Linux distribution grabs on to the idea.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Tough to beat!
Folks need to remember that this is the next version of MAC OS, not some unix varient. for the most part the folks who are gonna be installing this major and terrific update are going to find their years of MAC OS experiance and knowlege essentially flushed, which is to say the XML deal is great. It will allow Apple to bulid an simple happy GUI interface to control the zillion dispersed config files in the system, a far cry from the old Preferance system where all config files were located in the system folder. It also would seem that XML is a good choice as it is powerful and becoming widely accepted, over all well suited on several levels to be used a a base language for configs.
Surely this is not going to be so hard given that Darwin is OSS and we'd be _replacing_ the proprietary GUI, not tapping into it?
I think there's a misconception here that affects most of what you're saying -- Aqua isn't part of Darwin, and I don't think Quartz is, either.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Most of my bad macintosh experience is through netscape.. I routinely couldn't make it through loading netscape without locking the machine.
This gets said a lot here, but it's worth repeating -- the MacOS of today is obviously is need of an overhaul, but it's considerably more robust than the versions of a few years ago. The days when Netscape would routinely knock it over are gone. A lot of people, like the guy above daring me to do work while a file is copying, and I think probably you as well, would be surprised if they sat down at a current Mac.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
In addition to the previous replies about kernel debugging slowing the system down, I believe you must have misread some portions of the article because the article actually states that DP3 ran better on the G4/350 with 64MB RAM than the G3/400 with 256MB RAM. As illustrated by this quote from the "Performance: Aqua in Motion" section of the article:
"The G4/350 handled all the transformations effects (sheets, genie, etc.) noticeably better than the G3/400, even with only 64MB of RAM (which is the minimum RAM requirement for Mac OS X)."
Re: "Windows has API calls to manipulate the registry"
...and Mac OS X has APIs to manipulate XML property lists. There's nothing about XML files that make them any less applicable to high-level API access than binary data files.
Re: "The registry is considered a persistant information storage for an app."
Unfortunately, unlike the classic Mac OS "Desktop Database," it cannot be perfectly recreated based on the contents of the drive. In other words, delete the registry and you're hosed. Delete the desktop database in classic Mac OS and it just rebuilds itself the next time you start up.
(A variant of the desktop database is present in Mac OS X DP3)
Re: "Also, I don't really see why an XML based registry is any easier to use than a binary registry." It's not an ease of use issue (although XML files at least provide the option of editing by hand with a simple text editor), it's about leveraging existing open standards instead of dealing with multiple reinventions of the wheel.
For completeness, add to the powerbook feature list:
- USB
- video is a R128 mobility with external CRT output on an AGP bus
- 16bits/44KHz sound ouput & input (+built in mic)
- hot-swappable media bays
- Cardbus & zoom video
- irda
The advantage, though, is that you remove a whole gamut of complexity. I know how XML works, and therefore, reading configuration files, even though they are for different DTDs, I still know how it works, in general. Also, having a DTD gives a standard way for a user to find out what options are available in a configuration file. With current config files, I can't even tell if my configuration file is valid. This also enables better GUI tools, because they only have to have one parser.
Engineering and the Ultimate
IMHO, putting ALL of /etc in one XML document would not be a viable option, however, using individual XML documents, like sendmail.xml, is an excellent alternative.
99% of all statistics are made up on the spot. -- Bruce Karsh
A/UX and Mac OS X are on opposite ends of the UNIX spectrum. Yes, both look and act like UNIX at a certain level. After that, things are different.
A/UX doesn't have:
Cocoa/WebObjects
Quartz/Aqua/OpenGL
Carbon
transparent (rootless) Classic Mac OS support
Darwin (open source underpinnings)
PowerPC support
Mach
transparency to UNIX (Mac OS X won't require UNIX knowledge at all)
and all the various components built upon the above.
In A/UX, there was no bridge between the Mac OS environment and the UNIX layer. There was no future migration strategy or technology to get off of classic MacOS. It was basically a UNIX for 68k Macs that happen to run Mac OS in a virtual machine in take-over screen mode. Kinda like what the Mac On Linux project would get when it done on LinuxPPC. Interesting for its time, yes. A future for Mac OS, no.
The One killer app the PowerBook run that a Sony Vaio can't is Mac OS.
The one reason anyone should bye a Mac is Mac OS.
- Henrik
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
I explain now, Have you ever tried to open 7 or 8 Netscape windows under MacOS? Well unless you have hell-crazy resolution then its a real biatch to flip between windows.... and to have Photoshop, a text editor, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and a filemanager open all at once is a multitasking nightmare.... all this transparent crap annoys the heck out me.... get a real OS... Like hmm lwt me think, yah Linux?
Over-zealous users that have no clue. A friend of mine who is a Mac-O-Phile askes me if using smaller Icons saved disk space. After he left I nearly pissed myself laughing..... and he argues about OS issues w/ me. These are typical MAC Users... remove head from @ss before using computer. Sigh MACOS is still a joke, and this X-crap is finally running a real kernel, but whose wants all that eye candy. Give me a damn machine with 2 years of uptime, no memory leaks that I can do my work on and then Quake like a Mo-Fo...
LLAMA
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
Heh, I like the play on your name there. Mine, there's not much you can do with.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Making an LDAP daemon part of the system would make a lot of sense. At its heart it's really just a generic hierarchical information storage system. It could then be used by all applications to store settings. It could also be used to replace the archaic security files on Linux. Using LDAP would give you a nice single entry point to all settings, and make it cross-platform compatible to boot.
Note: just because Microsoft is using LDAP in W2K for security doesn't in any way lessen its appeal. A lot of people outside the MS camp consider LDAP to be A Good Thing(TM). Using it would also make the settings file formats immaterial, though would of course not preclude XML in any way.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
And you (sir?) are obviously...14?
...if you feel there is only one app for OSX...
...before you start calling it a failure...
...and thus is different from the outdated one you hate...
...you forgot to bash the lack of a floppy drive.
> MacOS currently is a tradeoff, as anyone
> will admit many aspects are dated.
That's precisely what I claimed, nothing more, nothing less. It's DATED. If you like reading between the lines, extrapolate some real meaning.
> The multitasking isn't great [...]
> I'm pretty much doing a few things at a time.
Golly for you, and shame for us who would like to do a couple more things. So what you're saying, basically, is that my criticisms was well founded, but I'm clueless regardless. Hmmm...
>
Huh? Far from it, I heard there were over twenty. And once they finish the Pops ports, they'll go quite well with the Cocoa ones.
> yes, OSX is different, but if you look at
> Steve Jobs history, he likes to make surprises.
Yeah, no kidding. Like "now we're going to write it, now we won't".
> There's no way in hell he's given the general
> public all the details 6 months before release.
Quite possibly because he has no clue? I guess you were still waiting for Rhapsody until recently. Take heart, X is definitely GOING to happen!
>
Now when did I do that?
>
Hate? That would mean I care. More like contempt and ridicule. Or maybe bored indifference.
>
That's what made me guess 14 or so. While your grasp of syntax and grammar is quite remarkable, your semantics are less so.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
>> Regarding multitasking, I believe we're still
>> talking cooperative there.
> Wait are you talking about MacOS or Win98?
> They both are subject to this shortcoming.
While I hate defending Windows in any shape or form, in the spirit of fairness, I must correct you there. Provided you run ONLY 32-bit apps, Win9x multitasks preemptively, and quite well at that. And that's hardly a caveat, since I haven't run 16-bit apps for many years. There are still 16-bit DLLs around in some apps thunking away, but that's more the exception. Our company writes exclusively 32-bit apps, and they multitask very nicely, even on Win9x.
> All I know is that I reboot maybe once or twice
> a day as opposed to Win9x when I was rebooting
> 4 or 5 times.
I rest my case, you reboot at least once a day. More often than not, Win9x crashes due to misbehaved drivers, since they run in privileged mode. This is a problem and should not be excused. However, Intel users on average also use many more peripherals than Mac users, increasing the likelihood of bad drivers. They also run on very unpredictable hardware, while Macs always come from Apple. Many Mac users live an entire Mac life without using any third party peripherals. Video, sound, storage are all built-in with Apple drivers, which have been pretty well debuggeed. However, with the emergence of USB that is going to change. Mac users are going to finally experience the wealth of peripherals (sort of) that Intel users have enjoyed, along with the pitfalls of shoddy drivers cooked up at the last minute. From what I hear, that's already starting to happen.
Incidentally, we should compare apples to apples, and oranges to oranges. Let's pick the top OS of each camp, which would be NT (and now W2K) and not Win9x. I ran NT 4.0 for years, and for the last few months I've used Windows 2000 exclusively. I never reboot my machine, except to add new hardware. I never turn it off either, and it sits on a UPS. I have uptimes of weeks, sometimes months. And I use it very heavily as a development machine. Depending on what I work on, I might once in a while get a lockup--buggy TCP/IP socket apps are the best way to bring down NT. Then again, not even Linux can claim rock-solid stability under heavy debugging. While my experience might not be echoed by everyone, once you've settled on good hardware and stable drivers, NT can be very solid as a workstation. As a server, that's another story.
> Not really, but, this is the same situation for
> Win9x going to Win NT.
Not at all. There's no difference between 32-bit applications written for Win9x and NT. It's the same binary. The one exception are NT services, which aren't supported on Win9x, but those aren't end-user apps. You're making a sweeping assumption there in the hope to equalize the two platforms, but that's simply not the case.
> Well you can use the other 9 for counting all
> the apps CURRENTLY written for Win2K.
W2K is Win NT, period. While the driver model has been changed and many user interface modifications were made, it's still the same NT kernel underneath. Any NT app is a W2K app. There's no such thing as a W2K app per se, other than possibly ones taking advantage of some new UI features, or the new Active Directory or middleware features.
> But you are forgetting the thousands of UNIX
> apps that will compile and run on OS X already.
What you don't seem to get is that OS X then simply becomes a me-too. The only difference between X and any other BSD-based Unix will then be that Apple provides you with a neat software emulator that lets you run all your old Mac software. It's simply a piece of software that makes it look like OS X can run Mac binaries, which of course it can't any more than NT or Linux. If Apple so chose, they could also provide the emulator for Linux or NT, but of course they won't.
I admire the skill with which Apple is pulling the wool over its devotee's eyes. They're totally marginalizing the fact that they're switching to a completely new, unproven platform. Their user base might at this moment as well move over to BeOS, Linux, or even Windows 2000, and the difference would be the same. It's a platform switch, and anything goes. Mac users simply stick with Apple because of the warm fuzzy feeling that gives them, the particular look of the Apple hardware, and a certain Pavlovian conditioning. Anything else is just fairy dust.
It's ironic that I would defend Windows this way, and frankly the Mac is the only thing I would ever defend it against. Even more ironically, I do use a platform that's eerily Mac-like in look and feel, as well as usability: my trusty Palm Pilot. And even there I start to feel confined.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
>> Now when did I do that?
> To refresh your memory: "except X is an
> admission of failure of sorts" Of course I
> suppose my failure to master the english
> language at my tender age of 3 kept me from
> understanding that you meant "we'll have to
> wait and see what happens when it hits the
> market"
That's not at all what is meant by that phrase. What it means is that its current OS track was doomed and they needed a fresh platform. They admitted that the old OS was finished by releasing a new one. You don't abandon a product when you have a winner.
Don't panic, you just have to spend a bit of time in Comprehension 101, that's all. And please don't give me the old run around of "that wasn't obvious from what you said."
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I haven't been able to play with DP3 (anyone wanna send me a CD? I promise not to tell! :-) ), so this may or may not apply. But...
/usr, /adm, /etc, etc. folders were all actually symbolic links to /private/XXX. That way, all configuration files that made that machine "unique" were located in a single place, that could then be remote-mounted from an NFS server, for truly thin (even diskless, ignoring the need for swap) clients. Also made backup a lot simpler...
...one really nice thing about NeXTSTEP was that the
david.
One thing I wonder about, every time I hear about MacOS X, is whether the development tools will be provided with the actual release? The operating system looks well-designed (well, not the GUI, yet), but as a hacker (-wannabe?) I like to have development tools to play around with.
GCC is free, so it shouldn't be too difficult to just get the C/Objective C compiler. But the cool NeXT Project/Interface Builder suite should be either included in the OS, or free(beer)ly available.
Just as a side note, since MacOS X is the successor to both NeXTSTEP and MacOS, Apple should make the UI more-or-less exactly like Classic MacOS, with an option to go NeXTSTEP-wise as well. Just my opinion (as a WindowMaker user).
-Joe
fuck! .. that's all I can say to that screenshot. Nearly made me lose my lunch.
... no way I'm coming into work to face that.. bad enough to have to use wincrash nt anyway..
People SHOULD ignore it.. please!!!!
1 BSOD already today and it's middday.. prolly will have another one in the afternoon if it stays 'on quota'
--
Delphis
It helps the developers, who are trying to build a unix-like system into something which is as transparant as the MacOS.
Not new users trying to learn to edit config files by hand.
You're looking at this from the Unix user's (your) point of view. I can tell you right now that 99% of Mac users will refuse to edit configuration files by hand -- if MacOS X requires it, for any reason, the OS will be considered a failure by the user base.
Note that a structured config format is really nothing strange in the Mac world. The old OS has it's proprietary "resource forks" where code and data and pictures and config settings all live happily in a structured, user-editable format. And, guess what, 99% of the users don't have ResEdit on their computer, and don't care to either. (My understanding is that NextStep had something similar.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
>If only the PowerBooks weren't so expensive...
Dude, Look at them again at apple.com. $2499 for the 400MHz G3, with 64 RAM, 6Gig HD, DVD, AGP graphics, FireWire, USB, 56K modem AND 10/100 Enet built-in?!?
Compare that with any IBM StinkPad, Dell Dimentia, Compaq Armadillo or Gateway So-Low... comparably equipped (none of them comes close) and the Apple is way lower!
Granted, if you buy sucky no-name clone laptop for $1299, it's cheaper. But you ain't getting no 400MHz G3 contender, that's for sure...
Come on, you got $2500 burning a hole in your pocket... go for it!!
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
XMLifying anything makes it signifigantly harder to edit in text mode (all those ), and does not offer THAT much advantage for graphical configuration...
Why bother? Why bother?
Just jump ahead to the next level, natural language processing. It offers voice configuration and zero learning curve.
"Find a large file and start copying it to the floppy."
heh heh, you're funny. Actually MacOS wouldn't do that to begin with... it won't try copying a file to a drive if there isn't enough space. (I assume that by "large file", you mean 10+ MB)
I know that actually checking facts before posting is a rare art, but how about checking out http://www.publicsource.apple.com/
Darwin is certainly open source, and getting it to build cross-platform is certainly possible. What isn't open source is Quartz/QuickTime/etc.; the graphics layer built on top of Darwin. Apple considers those bits its crown jewels. Some people here think that Apple should just give them away. How would Apple make money, then?
-jon
Remember Amalek.
After all, if your theory were true, the clone manufacturers could've kept making Mac clones. Instead, Apple sued them out of existence.
Apple didn't have to sue anybody because you had to use ROM chips to run the Mac OS. So, while it would have been perfectly legal for Power Computing to include off the shelf copies of the Mac OS with thier computers, it wouldn't have done any good if they weren't able to get ROM chips from Apple.
Apple had contracts with the cloners allowing them to use the Mac OS up to version 8, at which point the licenses would be renegociated. So Apple just called the next version of the OS version 8, bought off Power Computing and shut everyone else out. End of story.
Not that I'm defending Job's decisions here, we'd have much faster Macs today if he hadn't pissed of Motorola (who had invested a lot of $ in making Mac clones), but make sure you get your history right.
And as for the tired argument about how Apple should have become a software company like Microsoft, that wouldn't have worked. Microsoft does make a small profit on thier operating systems, but they earn the big bucks on thier applications, like MS Office. Apple has never had big money making apps, so they get thier money off hardware sales.
First of all, I don't think all of Darwin is Open Source. The important (i.e. proprietary) parts will be closed source.
Why didn't you just post a message saying "I'm an Apple bigot and will always hate them, no matter what" and get it over with. Darwin is the core of the OS, and yes, all of it is open source. It doesn't include the GUI, but it contains the kernel, the networking stack, file system etc.
Easily enough done. You've been able to copy in the background since MacOS 8 came out. Of course, lots of recent Mac users would have a problem carrying this out, since they don't have floppy drives ;)
Supreme Lord High Commander of the Interstellar Task Force for the Eradication of Stupidity
Erm, if you read the article the G4 only had 64M of RAM. Both machines (G3/400 256M, and G4/350 64M) performed well, the only difference that I noted was the G3 didn't do QT movie playback when restoring from the dock.
Put a floppy in the drive. Find a large file and start copying it to the floppy. While the copy is in progress reply to this comment in your Netscape window.
BTW, I find Windows only marginally better than MacOS. I use Linux at home and work.
--
Here is the result of your Slashdot Purity Test.
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
ADC (the apple developer connection for novices) membership is quite cheap(per year):
:-)
99$ for students (all Macos updates, not including macos X server, and Codewarrior for Java)
199$ for the mailing edition (all macos updates also without macos X server)
499$ for the "all the stuff" edition (this one even includes macos X preview CDs and FTP access to apple's servers...)
Once you're a member you can buy Macos X server for 99$, and that's cheap because it includes a Webobjects license
So if you're a student, there is absolutely no reason not to subscribe...
even if you're not a student, the mailing edition is a bargain...
Why compare it to a ridiculously expensive Thinkpad? My Sony Vaio F360 cost around $2600 and has a :
... bit chicken and egg though.
PII-400
128mb RAM
12gb Drive
DVD 4x
Firewire, and USB
Built in modem
14.1 visible screen
.. etc
and runs Windows and Linux like a dream. I must say I can't think of any killer apps that the Mac can run that those two OS's cant (even Photoshop is nicer on Windows now than the Mac, and the GIMP rules Linux)
Maybe mass-marketing the Macs would drive prices down
The iMac and the iBook seem to stand in blatant contradiction to both of your claims.
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This space unintentionally left unblank.
I evaluated xml for use in a product recently (for configuration data and inter-app communications), but was swayed by a number of really good arguments. The most convincing was the readability factor.
mx
load about 30 extensions and I guarantee you won't have five days of uptime.
49 Control Panels
24 Control Strip Modules
7 Contextual Menu Items
404 Extensions
All that, and I get pissed when I have to restart. And it's almost always to install a new extension. These include some that do some low level tinkering to get some nice GUI effects. I routinely have 5+ day uptimes, and I have a very heavy usage. I generally have at least 7 background tasks running, but 5-7 foreground tasks, constantly switching among them.
I crash for two reasons: One, my current coding project blows up in my face, or Netscape randomly quits. Neither requires a restart except after a few days. The MacOS is quite stable, even when you push it.
And it is Netscape's fault. No other program randomly quits like Navigator (maybe once per day or so).
Oh, and a last point to all you people who really can't understand a one button mouse, you have to realize that the MacOS was written to be used with a one button mouse. I honestly don't understand why you think it's a shortcoming of the platform that you can operate it without a two button mouse.
The Happy Blues Man
The Happy Blues Man
I accept on blind faith that Cincinatti exists.
The current Mac OS has a reputation for being easy to use, but it's far from perfect out of the box. There's a long history of third party apps and extensions designed to improve usability. For example, utilities like Boomerang and Default Folder addressed serious shortcomings in the system-wide Open/Save dialogs.
I expect we'll see similar utilites spring up in response to user complaints about OS X. One request I've already heard multiple times: segregating the dock by type of object (application, folder, document) so you can develop a "muscle memory" about where the item you're looking for is, rather than searching the entire dock each time. If Apple doesn't provide this (OS X is still in "preview" stage, after all) I expect a third party will step in with a shareware or freeware solution.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
the vaio is a sexy machine, but a pii 400 isn't running at that speed b/c the vaios are super slow, and if you're lucky, you'll get 2.5 hrs of battery life. (i say this as i type on a vaio...)
i want to live life, not just go through the motions
Pretty funny, but unfortunately not true. The new iMacs have hundreds of small air vents sprinkled around the top handle.
Marko Karppinen
Actually the Sony 1394 port (called iLink) isn't totally FireWire compatible. In fact, I think the only thing that it's rated for is for DV Cameras.
Firewire hard drives, Zips, and that neat portable RAID are pretty much locked out, at least at present.
Gee, I guess I better tell all those folks at Tommy Hilfiger, Conde'Nast, Time Warner, et. al. to just hang it up.
Macs dominate one pro area for good reason. Desktop publishing. Quark Xpress, PageMaker, Photoshop, (sorry GIMP fans, but the GIMP is no Photoshop) all these things work far better on the Mac than their Windows ports. Check out your high end Heidelberg scanners, digital camera backs, or the work being done on your bus wraps and it'll generally be a Macintosh. It has nothing to do about what's the faster CPU, the OS window widgets, whatever. It has to do with where the software tools that do the work in the less time are. I've seen DTP departments in several companies forced by idiot IT and accountant people to trade in their Macs for Windows machines, and watch their productivity curves go to hell until management wakes up and brings the Macs back.
Macs may not be the proper tools for command-line warriors and ISP Server gods, but they have a place in which they rule and second place is a distant second.
Font Management. Windows font management is a joke and Linux font management is... nonexistant.
Right tool for the job, it's as simple as that.
It is GOOD that XML files can be validated while you edit them. You should only edit them using a real XML editor of course, like the one Apple is apparently supplying in MacOS X. Then at least you'll know that you have a file with valid data in it, if not the data you'd want.
Letting people edit important files using a plain text editor always struck me as insane. Any simple misspelling can completely kill the application.
Actually, believe it or not, a binary registry is much easier for the end-user to edit. (Not sysadmins with their scripts.) Firstly it has a much nicer implementation with the API. Windows has API calls to manipulate the registry. You can change your part without affecting other apps. Doing this in a text file is really hard because, well, there text files. One never edits the registry directly, it has to go through the system, either through Regedit or one of the APIs. This keeps the registry in a controlled state and faccilitates keeping all information in one place. If you've got the level of computer experiance needed to navigate your way through the mess of ASCII that is /etc, then you can edit the registry. In addition to providing a consistant access to the registry, it is still flexible enough that C programs can edit the registry, thus it is not hard to script. Also, the registry is not used in exactly the same way in UNIX and Windows. The registry is considered a persistant information storage for an app. UNIX could actually learn a lot from this approach. For example, instead of all the path statements and environmental variables, storing everything in the registry and providing and API for shell scripts to access it would be much better than what is in place now. Also, say I want to install an application that loads some image files from a certain directory. Instead of the hardcoded or assumed directories that are common in UNIX, you can store the value in the registry and retrieve it from there. True, it can also be done with a text file, but it is more clumsy that way. Say you install a large shared library, and a program wants to check the installed libraries version number. If it is in a registry, it would be easy for a library to post its version in a known place (yes I know that is an assumed or hardcoded link. But the registry could also be searched and searching a 4 meg registry is easier than searching for all directories on a system) and the app could access it from there. On the other hand, with a text file, the app would have to leave a file in /etc or something, which wastes space, inodes, and is risky if the user deletes it. In addition, it adds another layer of clutter to /etc. Of course I'm not saying that the /etc method is so bad, hell beos uses it. I'm just saying the registry method has some advantages. The only reason that you like windows any less is not the technical merits of the registry. Regedit on a window 95 machine is just as accessible as vi in Linux, you can easyily write C programs to edit them, and you can access regedit (or variations thereof) from telnet. The only reason you don't like it is because thats not what your used to.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I never said otherwise. Manipulating XML is probably significantly easier than manipulating the raw text files that most UNICIES use. I wasn't really talking about MacOS and its database, I was mostly talking about text configuration files in most other OSes I've used. Also, I don't really see why an XML based registry is any easier to use than a binary registry. In addition Windows keeps numerous copies of the registry. It fairly rare for a normal uses to screw it, but when it happens, there is a big blowup.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
A VAIO is nice, but imo a 400MHz G3 beats the PII-400.
For $300 extra, the PowerBook comes with a 12GB disk,
but that's more than a lot of folks need.
For ~$60 you can add 64MB of 3rd party RAM.
And the PowerBook has the better graphics card, no?
Not to mention the built-in antenna, if you want 802.11.
Plus the PB will run Mac OSX when it's out.
Right, but aren't most laptops limited to the screen resolution?
The new PowerBooks do something like 1280x1024 on the external display.
It's like a portable desktop machine. (Yes, I own one.)
I agree.
/etc/hosts could be created by special utilities from the XML files that contain host information
/System/Config would be where the XML files exist.
> System would be where the operating system really lived and things like
And
BTW, what's happened to the Standard Linux Base project ?
IMHO, Apple is doing a very smart thing in releasing all these Developer Releases.
/nutt
Changing so many things in an OS can be devistating, so when they realease a Dev Release, they get feedback.
Most things have been said 1000 times but I really want to say...
Bring back the windowshade!
It is so much easier to go through windows by clicking on thier title bars, and not having to go all the way to the bottom of the screen. (a la The Dock)
Also, something I don't know if Apple's though of.. what happens with 2 monitors? And with full screen games?
Common apple. This is the feedback you want. Redo the Dock. Pleeeeez.
What I find somewhat interesting, or not, is the path that the OSes have taken on config files.
Win: from text (win.ini, etc) to the stupid binary registry.
Unix: always (for the most part) easy to use text files.
Mac: from resource forks/resedit to xml text files.
Text files are pretty damn nice. Always easily accessable, you can easily write utils to edit them, and you can do it from telnet. I was never a big fan of binary (or whatever you want to call them) config files, like resource forks or the registry. It may speed things up in some cases, but for this use I'd prefer the easy access. This is just another small round of ammo that makes me like windows less.
Just pondering.
Jason
> Ummmm, not to know it or anything, but there
> aren't many laptops that DONT support an
> external monitor...
The PowerBooks can use an external monitor in one of two ways, though. Either mirroring the internal display, to put on a presentation, for example, or as more screen real estate, in other words, dual displays.
They also have an S-Video out that you can plug onto a TV monitor or a camcorder or whatever.
Heh. For some people, $2.5K is a non-trivial amount of money. I just had to scrape for $80US for a SPARC Classic on eBay, and I'm doing a happy dance at just though thought of having another box to play with.
-- benton.
Whoa there cowboy. Forget the valium this morning?
Except that a 400 G3 is well over twice as fast as a 400P2 in a laptop. At the same MHz, the G3 is faster than a P2 in a desktop machine. The P2 laptop chips are toys compared to the P2 desktops.
So comparing the powerbook to the fastest Pentium notebook made would still be not be an equal comparison, since there is nothing that compares performance-wise in the laptop arena.
You can run Linux (LinuxPPC, SuSE (beta), Debian (beta?) ) on the powerbooks and it will be much faster.
Photoshop is not nicer under windows. You're still stuck with all your windows and tools in one big window. Most people use Macs with Photoshop because it runs better.
---CONFLICT!!---
I will be submitting my changed to the Xerces folks at http://xml.apache.org but a little more work is needed before I do. Until then, email me privately at crawford@goingware.com if you want to try it out.
I haven't got it working yet, but I'll also be building the IBM International Components for Unicode (ICU) library on MacOS.
Mike Crawford
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
So yes the Thinkpad has a faster CPU (smaller cache) ...
even if you don't believe the marketing figures that the G3 is "up to twice as fast" as a PII/PIII at the same clock speed, i'd still like to know why you think the PIII/500 would be a "faster CPU" than the G3/400. the PowerBook would be at LEAST as fast as this ThinkPad, probably a good chunk faster, especially under, say, Photoshop
but otherwise, i agree with you completely -- i don't think the PowerBooks are that expensive at all, and in fact, i purchased one just a few months back. i did a lot of research into laptops, and the PowerBook blew away the competition in ALL regards. there's not way you can consider it expensive when you compare it to any similarly-stacked quality brand PC notebook. and that 14.1" screen is phenomenal! i don't know how anybody could live with 13" or less.
it was a bit of a pain for me to get used to the MacOS at first (i had never owned a Mac), but now six months later, i know i made the right decision. not to mention the fact that i've used the IR port, the S-Video out, the SCSI port, modem, and the Ethernet port in situations i never would have dreamed. it has made my life a lot easier.
so take that comment back Taco! :)
- j
And what did opening up to competition for IBM do? It killed their PC sales and almost sent them out of business...
IBM's big mistake early on was trying to keep their architecture proprietary. Remember Microchannel? Two problems: 1) it was incompatible with legacy hardware, and 2) IBM refused to license it, which isolated them into IBM and everyone else. And the people bought everyone else.
But what if IBM had kept it proprietary from the start? I think a case could be made that the IBM architecture wouldn't have gone anywhere, and eventually the industry would have invented a new standard a la CP/M.
Besides, with Darwin OpenSource, what's honestly stopping anyone from making a computer that can't run MacOS? Didn't IBM release an open spec PPC motherboard? I have a hard time believing that motorola will refuse to sell chips to anyone but Apple.
First of all, I don't think all of Darwin is Open Source. The important (i.e. proprietary) parts will be closed source. Also, I'm certain that Apple will have some sort of proprietary EPROMS that will be necessary to make the thing work. After all, if your theory were true, the clone manufacturers could've kept making Mac clones. Instead, Apple sued them out of existence.
--
Powerbooks are LinuxPPC enabled:
http://www.linuxppc.com/about/hardware/apple/
The new 2000 models are not yet supported but they will probably gain support within about 4 months or so).
Just recompile your apps and they shoud work on PPC unless they depend on something in hardware (or you have a prog with no source available). There are probably some other reasons out there but I don't think there are many
- Sig
MacOS at the moment is bobbins. I won't run OS9 on any of my machines. MacOS is not multitasking, it;s just that someone wrote the appswitcher to make it look like it is
Despite all this, i love my Macintoshes (powerbook 100, duo 280, 3400c and Lombard) and I won't run anything else.
Why? Well, the hardware is thoughtfully designed, the OS is simple to use (Very handy for slow witted technology journalists such as myself) and I know where I am. If there is a problem, I can generally wrench it.
I can and do run ten applications in the finder at once. Sure only the front one works, but I still get my email, and I can rmmage in quark or BBEdit whilst a page is loading in Exploder. The point I'm trying to make here is that most of the time I don't need the power of a Linux box. Sure, it's nice, but it's complicated, and I've only scratched the surface when it comes to learning it. MacOS is simple enough for me to be able to swap advice with the techies we employ at my workplace, who, by the way, really dig X DP3 because they develop apps for Macs.
I think Apple is going the right way by junking legacy code and starting from scratch with a proven core OS. I will be first in line to buy OSX, because it will make many of my boxes run better. I get the advantages of Unix with the userfriendlyness of the MacOS. i can't wait. And, no, I don't find a one button mouse a problem. I've used five button mice in the past when I was forced to use Win95 with Quark, and I'm not missing much, to be honest.
Enough! Next!
Golf; a good walk spoiled. -Mark Twain
Well, there are a few killer apps, actually... I use a Lombard 333mhx for Quark Xpress. Whatever you say about the PC version of Quark, the Mac version is a hell of a lot stabler. Believe me. I've also got a 2gig partition runnning Linux.
Oh, and if I *really* want to, I can run Windows using any number of Windows emulators. But there's not need to, really. I use my Powerbook as a desktop machine in the office, and whilst the graphics performance is not nearly as good as a loaded blue and white, it's good enough. Other benefits: Synthetic dolphin skin cover. _ooooh!_ Light up Apple logo on the cover. _Style!_ Curvy design. Not boxy! I like the Vaio, but there's nothing to beat the Lombards and Pismos at the moment IMHO. It's a personal thing.
Golf; a good walk spoiled. -Mark Twain
What is the problem with pressing apple-tab to cycle through applications?
I apologise if this question has already been answered - if it has, please point me to the link. Much of the talk relating GNUStep and OSX has been about porting - with a finished GNUStep, it would be easy to port apps to Linux. But what about binary emulation, like iBCS2 does for many SVR4 binaries for Linux? This could result in a perfect opportunity to instantly gain many commercial applications for the PPC versions of linux. Is this possible?
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Visit
The G4/350 handled all the transformations effects (sheets, genie, etc.) noticeably better than the G3/400, even with only 64MB of RAM (which is the minimum RAM requirement for Mac OS X).
This is probably as a result of much of OS X being optimised for Velocity Engine (Altivec), especially the Quartz layer. Not to mention the fact that the 2xAGP graphics cards in the newer G4s will easily blow away a G3
Pete C
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
I agree. Is anyone thinking about implementing anything like this in Linux? It seems like as Linux moves to the desktop and to a graphical desktop in particular, bundles are key. Application files could have configuration data attached to the bundle, image files could store previews, and application bindings could be handled in a clear way without obscure registries.
Are GNOME or KDE working on this at all? Could GNUstep support this scheme?
Actually, Apple has provided a nearly-complete Java-to-Cocoa layer for quite some time, which includes full access to Apple's XML tools. While you could use Sun's new XML API, then, it really gets you no benefit, and you'd probably be better off -- especially since your tool would be Mac OS X-specific anyway -- just using the Cocoa XML routines.
A/UX wasn't based on any sort of microkernel. It was a traditional monolithic kernal based on System V release 2. (which came out around 1984)
A/UX was neat in what it could do, but I don't know how much longer it should have lived.
The most interesting bit for me was how he complained about the dock. I always felt a bit suspicious about the dock, and the article just told me why... I sincerely hope Apple is going to change this in the near future.
Another thing that was interesting (and sad) is that Apple apparently doesn't want to make it's OS themeable. This brings up the "GUI standardization" issue again that has been discussed a lot recently. My opinion is: Force different applications to have a similar, standardized interface, but don't force different users to have the same standardized interface.
Just look at Gnome, for example. It's closest equivalent to the dock would be the panel, which is configurable enough that it can meet most user's ideas about a usable UI. I, for example, have three docks, one for launching applications (with buttons for those I need most frequently and the others in menus), one for switching between different windows and one with various status informations like CPU load etc. (ok, I could live without this one...). They're all corner panels and have auto-hide enabled.
This is MY idea of a productive panel... now, try to reach this level of customization on the Mac... or even Windows.
"We won't use guns, we won't use bombs, we'll use the one thing we've got more of and that's our minds" - Pulp
Actually a 400Mhz G3 is a faster cpu than a 500Mhz PIII and it also spends a hell of a lot less energy. All in all i agree with you though people have had this weird marketing ideas drilled in theri head about the prize of apple computers for the past few years and now nomatter the evidence they keep repeating the slogan over and over "if macs were cheaper maybe..."
I sent this story in days ago, but they didn't post it. Curious. This seems to happen whenever I send a story in.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Tower of Babel (Genesis 11): A temple-tower was to be built, rising high to the skies, to demonstrate mankind's power. God gave people different languages to prevent this being built. I think XML just makes God's job much easier :-)
liusn
Not to mention Plan9...
-jjh o|
Is a really good tool to modify an arbitrary text file, that reads commands from lines starting with #. Then all you need to do is modify the config files.
/etc/hosts.
Typically you'd do something like this in
#TABLE "IP Address" "Name"{n}
#FORMAT %3d.%3d.%3d.%3d TEXT
Which would be ignored by the system, but the configure program would read it and assume that it meant that it should display a config menu as a table with a column containing the IP number, and n columns containing the name.
Okay, I only had this idea about 2 minutes ago, so there's probably lots of things wrong with it, but it would make a universal system configuration tool very easy to write.
The people who call the X Window System will continue to call it X Windows.
Now, people talking about Aqua will now start calling that the X Window System.
I'm going to produce a GUI add-on for Windows and call it aquamarine, so that people get really confused.
As someone mentioned, what's with the one-button mouse? The notion of TWO is not that hard to grasp,
Not for you, but it is for you mom. Besides Macs (especially) OS X support two button mice.
The whole UI with the top menu bar and Desk Accessory and Finder menus is strictly single-task oriented.
This is how it is designed. Humans can't multitask, we can only deal with one app at a time. Seeing File, Edit, etc. on every window is inherently confusing for a mere human like myself. This was an intentional UI feature.
Regarding multitasking, I believe we're still talking cooperative there. Even if they grafted some preemptive capabilities in, the vast majority of apps live in me-only-me land.
Wait are you talking about MacOS or Win98? They both are subject to this shortcoming. That is why MacOS X is Unix.
-the Mac is still a happy crashbox, as any heavy Photoshop user must oblige.
Which I am, and I just don't see it. All I know is that I reboot maybe once or twice a day as opposed to Win9x when I was rebooting 4 or 5 times. This argument goes totally out the window when OS X(UNIX) is involved.
All fine and well, except X is an admission of failure of sorts, because it pretty much throws everything old out.
Not really, but, this is the same situation for Win9x going to Win NT. This happens.
And the apps written for X can be counted on all the fingers required for a Mac mouse.
Well you can use the other 9 for counting all the apps CURRENTLY written for Win2K. Win2K will have more apps and so will MacOS X. But you are forgetting the thousands of UNIX apps that will compile and run on OS X already.
Actually, the name of the product is "Oh Ess Ten"
Not "Oh Ess Ex" that you are thinking of.
>Which is that XML files are required to be valid. XML files are not required to be valid. They are required to be well formed. And making mistakes in configuration files can screw you whether or not you're using structured markup. I'm not sure I really see huge advantages to using xml for configuration files, and I like xml a lot and have found it quite useful in other situations. On the subject of error checking you could use a validating parser to ensure that the configuration file was at least a legal configuration file for the app that you're configuring, but that doesn't guarantee that it's a configuration file that does what you want, and then you are stuck with a dtd or some other schema for every app. Like I said above, I think xml is great in some contexts- it's saved me a fair bit of time in the last few months. But it seems like a lot of people want to use xml for the sake of using xml these days. I particularly agree with your last sentence. Retooling every working Unix tool out there to work with xml seems like way to high a cost for the payoff.
NeXT used gcc as their compiler, and have continued that tradition into OS X. In fact, Objective-C support has been used and mantained over the years largely by NeXT Inc. and NeXTSTEP developers.
.o files don't get mingled.
I might add that Project Builder makes nice clean makefiles that build into separate Debug and Release directories so the
I agree that the MAC OS has become fairly stable. I do want to add to the list of unstable programs though. First off Netscape does force many restarts, especially if I want to run LIGHTWAVE 3D afterwards, though it is nothing compared to Microsoft office. I am running OS 9 and Office causes probably 5-8 crashes a day. I am running Macsbug and it is always caused by office an done memory error or another! And about the two button mouse thing I use a Kensignton turbo mouse and a turbo ball so I have four buttosn to play with. If you really want more buttons, buy a new mouse.
Mozilla uses James Clark's expat parser -- Hervé - http://altern.org/mozillazine/
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I think you have that backwards. I own a Mac and I never use MacOS. You couldn't pay me enough to run 1984's operating system. Apple's hardware is very good for the price--my PowerBook has every feature I need built in, a large bright screen, even SCSI, and very good battery life. Why would I want to run an operating system that still doesn't use protected memory?
--
And the Powerbook has the Airport slot under the keyboard, and it supports an external monitor. And it has the same Rage128 chip set that the new iMac and iMac DVs have...and it ain't shabby playing Quake3 or UT on.
Of course the Airport adds 100 bucks to the price, but the Lucent PCMCIA cards are...$140? Or was it $170?
I'd think it more valuable to, on a case-by-case basis, adopt libPropList. That provides the benefit of a relatively generic format, but, more importantly, with the merit that it comes with library calls to modify data, and to do so in a safe way.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Who would this really help??
1) Not new users trying to learn to edit config files by hand. With the current system, they have to learn the format and nuances of each config file. In an XML-based system, not only would they need to learn the DTD for each config file, but they'd need to learn XML before they could do anything at all. Don't know about the rest of you, but I'd rather edit a plain old text file than muck around with XML.
2) Not new users interested in using a system administration tool. We already have several that work just fine w/o XML.
3) Not exisiting users. They've already learned how to do it, why should they have to re-learn a new method that is of rather dubious benefit???
I think XML is great and all for document storage, but let's be cautious about shoehorning it into other areas.
Bundles are something they have been needed for a long time from a user standpoint. New users almost always nuke a needed linked library or some file because they didn't recognize it and therefore didn't think it was important. I have missed the Extentions folder several times on my PB because of the trackpad and my big fingers. Windows and Linux devheads ought to take a que and try to incorpoarate a similar system into their apps. Windows 98 had CABs which were never much implimented by developers and therefore never seen by much of anyone. XML is another nice choice for congifuration, especially with the parser embedded in the core of the OS. Aqua on the otherhand bothers me, it seems like a nice idea and it is cute but is it going to get in the way of people like me who use professional apps like Photoshop? I don't want to fight with the UI when I want to apply a filter or scale something. I'd like OS X's stability and robustness but I really don't want a massive GUI hogging up my Powerbook's resources just to minimize a window. This was much longer but IE refreshed and nuked it.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Just an FYI.
;)
I am running MacOS X DP3 on my B&W G3/350 with 128MB of RAM and it runs "smoothly". I find it just as fast or faster than MacOS 9, for window drawing, updates, that sort of things. The only thing that is a little slower is launching apps and that is probably mostly due to debug code.
As we've been discussing with the author of the article on MacOSX Talk... this is review of a "Developer Preview" a.k.a. pre-Beta. You can't expect much.
Anyone remember how stable/fast W2K (then NT5) was when it was still in Alpha? I do.
The main benefit to having everything in XML is that it gives you a standard means of modifying the config files. You could load up anything into, say, Conglomerate, and edit away. (Emacs/vi will work too, although XML is less plaintext-editor friendly). But more importantly, things like linuxconf and your typical next-gen admin tool will finally have a clean, standardized way of parsing and modifying those files, rather than the black magic being used at present. It's much easier to attain that you-can-use-a-text-editor-or-the-gui-tools-equally -well balance with XML, regardless of the number of particular DTD's involved.
iSKUNK!
I noticed a few comments from macOS users, but too many from clueless wintel slaves. Here's a little information for the ignorant (just as I am ignorant to the depths of being an admin for an winNT server) :
Working on web and pre-press design
projects I will run (remember this is a powerbook):
Netscape Navigator (up to 10 or 12 windows open especially if I am using some online tutorials, or references)
Netscape Communicator (checking email in real time from email server)
BBEdit with numerous files open
Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator/Pagemaker/Acrobat - drag and dropping between apps, and with probably up to 20 files open of various sizes depending on the project at hand.
Three copies of Hotline1.2.3 connected to servers
ICQ (when their damn server isnt down)
NiftyTelnet 1.1 SSH r3
and SoundJam MP for a little audio caffeine, sometimes streaming in off of a 10mb line into a OC3-T1.
Now this all functions, not because its mac, but because I have a more than average RAM supply and an external monitor in the office. But the system including RAM and external monitor was about $3500.
The system:
400mhz G3 1 mb lvl2 cache (one cycle G3 != one cycle PIII, G3 is faster cycle/cycle)
320 mb RAM
MacOS9
Internal ATA 6gig drive
10/100 Base-T ethernet
14.1 active matrix @ 1024x768
External 21" monitor @ 1280x1024 75hz 24bit color
This is a stock system from apple, no upgrades (except the RAM). Granted I have a great network connection to a linuxPPX server - so the small HD isnt a problem - Otherwise, I dont know what you would need more!
So if the above isnt enough processing power for you, well then you are just way to bad-ass for these little mac toys. For a real computer call 1-800-g-a-t-e-w-a-y.
rm -rf ms/*
You sir are obviously clueless. MacOS currently is a tradeoff, as anyone will admit many aspects are dated. I still vastly prefer it to my linux box and windows box (yes, I am an avid unix user who owns and uses a mac) for desktop usage. The multitasking isn't great, but I'm not running a web server anyway, I'm pretty much doing a few things at a time.
Second, if you feel there is only one app for OSX, you are further demonstrating your cluelessness. There are many great Cocoa apps out there, you have apps being updated for Carbon, and thanks to John Carmack, you have X windows with a BSD core. So let's count here. You can run classic MacOS apps, Carbonized apps, Cocoa/NeXT apps, and some X apps. That's a lack of software? yes, OSX is different, but if you look at Steve Jobs history, he likes to make surprises. There's no way in hell he's given the general public all the details 6 months before release. At least wait until it's released before you start calling it a failure... Of course, you just can't win with you folks, who will curse MacOS because it's to outdated, and then curse OSX because it's been updated and thus is different from the outdated one you hate...
BTW, in your uninformative post, you forgot to bash the lack of a floppy drive. What a bad Mac basher you are!
1) You are correct, I hate how I have to hit command-tab instead of alt-tab to switch between apps. It makes the whole mac useless because even though I can tab cycle through apps I can't do it with the same keys as windows! Man, that's so stupid!
2) Linux users are way more zelous than mac users. While mac users fully understand the limitations of their OS, but still feel it's a worthwhile tradeoff, Linux users tend to go cry to mommy whenever anyone says anything might be wrong with linux (Mindcraft benchmarks come to mind...)
Yeah, the dock sucks and I would much prefer my standard apple menu. But I know jobs likes to make a splash, so I'm sure there will be many surprises by release time, I keep hoping at least... With all the negative feedback about the dock, I would hope they still have time to bring back the apple menu.
As for Jobs being ahead of his time, I think he's a great marketer. NeXTStep was kickass but I don't attribute that to jobs. But, he has a great sense of what the people want. The iMac is really more revolutionary than most techy geeks understand because it represents a shift from a computer as a tool to a compuer as an applience. pretty radical stuff once you realize that average joe doesn't want something he can recompile a kernel on, he wants something like his VCR that just works. But I have some issue with jobs. If I ever met him, I would probably shake his hand and then kick him in the nads...
Somebody stop this guy...
Of course having a separate DTD for each program is silly. But recognizing that a lot of configuration files actually look quite similar allows you to standardize on a particular DTD for a whole class of programs.
All apple did was bring some uniformity in the mess of anarchistic shell scripts. Uniformity is good for two reasons: It makes things easier to understand and it makes things more general.
Understandability is good because that lowers training cost and generality is good because that makes it possible to reuse (parsers, tools and even settings).
Aside from uniformity they also applied separation of concern. They removed hardcoded interdependencies between shell scripts. Unlike uniformity this improves flexibility.
All apple is doing here is apply good software engineering principles (uniform behavior, separation of concern). The unix community should be asshamed that they need apple to point that out. After all unix has been around for some time.
Jilles
How Can You Use XML?
There are several basic ways to make use of XML:
I wish the firewire hadn't been deleted, but I haven't needed it yet. The screen is a bit tight depending on what programs you run.
Thats a real 6 hour battery life. I routinely go 6 hours doing program development.
Definately get the $100 Airport. Nothing like sitting back in the comfy chair or out in the yard handling support calls.
After all, Xmas doesn't have support for the X Window System, either. I hear someone might be doing a port, but Tux is miffed that Santa hasn't relocated to the south pole to take advantage of the large number of linux-literate penguins there, and let's not even get started on what the BSD d[a]emon thinks.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
>Of course, each one of these 'domains' is a standards war waiting to happen, and in the meantime lots of XML is being deployed now with custom homebrew schemas. It has enormous potential to interoperate better than proprietary formats, but it is not the magic solution to data interoperability
This is what I noticed, and why it doesn't seem like XML is all that big a deal... if everyone is going to have their own formats/layouts anyway, it doesn't make much of a solution. Granted, it would make conversion filters far easier to write, but doesn't really solve a lot of things...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Hear, hear... I repeated the same thing somewhere else on this discussion and a coupla older ones: we need to clean up the config files mess. And I even would go one further: clean up man files as well. Man files are an anachronism; they are not hypertext --no links-- and are not easily searchable. When every machine has a browser builtin, why are we still dealing with man files? Let's move manuals to some SGML/XML/HTML based format, that can be viewed through a browser and make 'man' a parser of that format for the old folk.
;-)...
You could then even import annotations and errata on the documentation from the Net... look at how the PHP folk do their manual. It's the future of documentation folks...
But this is Open Source... let's stop bitching and day-dreaming; sit down and write code... who's hosting the CVS?
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
I would be very much in favour of a gradual conversion to XML-based configuration.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Who else hear thinks of the TRS-80 when you hear OS/9 ? The famed UNIX lookalike for the Color Computer. I liked their version numbers: Level I and Level II. I'd like to see an Ars Technica retrocomputing article about OS/9 sometime....
JD
That the pentiun III in the Thinkpad is NOT the genuine article. It is the "mobile" pentium III, a version of the pIII that is intentionally crippled, so as to keep your laptop from melting down into a puddle off thinkpad flavoured goo.
The G3, OTOH, is the full speed desktop version, with NO scaling down to be put in a laptop. And it STILL runs cooler and with less power than even the "mobile" intel chips.
Such things are very important when you consider little nicities like battery life, and comfortable computing. You don't even want to IMAGINE how little battery life you'd get, or how hot your lap would get, if you used a desktop pIII in a notebook.
john
Imagine all the people...
And, excuse me? Web Objects? Back when A/UX was developed, The Web was perhaps only a glimmer in the back of Tim Berners-Lee's mind. Maybe you should have said 'native Gopher support' or something ...lol...
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Hey, look I said "If only apple had persisted".
Imagine for a second if in 1993 Apple had ported A/UX to PPC, then added transparent Classic Mac OS windowing and a migration path to it. Maybe it would have taken another two years but they then would have had a decent OS in 1995.
Instead they wasted 3 years on the Fabled MacOS 8 or Rhapsody or whatever the hell is was called then trying like hell to expand System 7 for proper protected memory and multitasking.
Then they threw all that away, dithered for another year and THEN started with a unix kernel and added the goodies they needed.
Between 1994-1997 there was no significant technological change in the MacOS. Apple wasted three years of development time when they had the right approach all the time and threw it away.
That's my point.
You know it's really really funny. Apple basically had Mac OS X running in 1993!!
Apple's A/UX was unix (I believe an early Mach kernel) with Apple look and feel and I believe even the ability to run Mac OS 7 applications via an emulator.
And Mac OS X is what? The above with a pretty flashy interface on it.
Alas, A/UX was 68040 only and was never ported to PowerPC.
I find it so ironic that apple had a working next generation OS with preemptive multitasking back in 1993 when NT was what? a joke still.
And they threw it away.
it makes me laugh. (otherwise I would cry)
I seem to recall that Glade stores UI layouts in XML and that there's a library for it that lets you load XML User Interfaces on the fly. There are also projects underway to define DTDs for User Interface Markup Languages which define widgets and dialogs and things.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You're forgetting about the big success story: Microsoft. One of the reasons that Microsoft destroyed Apple in the 80s, even with a far inferior Win 3.1, was the open commodity hardware model.
The smartest thing Microsoft did was to work very hard to capture the corporate market. They did this with two weapons: 1) have the best applications, which means court developers like crazy, and 2) multiple source hardware, which means the hardware cost is going to be much lower.
The reason Be is unsuccessful is lack of applications, not lack of proprietary hardware. Don't forget that NeXT tried the same proprietary model, and suffered the same fate. Applications are everything.
What's in it for Apple is focus. They would no longer have the millstone of doing both hardware (low margins) AND software (high margins).
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I've hated Apple for a long time. I think the hardware is overrated and WAY overpriced. I owned a Mac back in '84 when they first came out. I think MacOS belongs back in '84. Today it's a backward, decrepit piece of garbage. All this having been said...
I think Apple has finally pulled their head out of their butt and it looks like they are finally doing a respectable operating system. In fact, I will say it looks damn cool and I find myself being excited about Apple for the first time since... well, 1984.
But I will never buy overpriced Apple hardware. Apple, are you listening? A Mac-hater is interested again in the Mac. But I am not going to buy hardware from a single supplier. And I have a feeling there are a lot of people who feel the same.
Please, Apple, send in the clones, and give them an iron-clad license that you can't stab them in the back with later.
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Fine, but I don't want to run a different OS. I see no reason to splinter things to get this little thing when it should be easy to get minimal support for this in existing systems.
Java has all these nice things because people wrote it for Java and it standardized. Why not do that on Linux, or in Gnome or KDE, and give existing systems the same advantages that an OS written from scratch in Java might have, and that MacOS and MacOSX have now.
In other words, it looks like duplication of effort to write a new OS just to get XML parsing cheaply. I don't object to writing new OSes, but I'd need better reasons than native XML processing to switch. Microsoft's lawyers not withstanding, I think that functionality can and should live in user-space.
In short, I had checked post 20 out, and while it asked similar questions, I didn't think it gave an answer, or lead towards an answer that I was looking for.
I understand why *WE*, the end users, would benefit from multiple hardware sources, but how would it benefit Apple? In essence, Apple would split itself into an OS company and commodity hardware vendor (by putting themselves on a level playing field as the cloners, otherwise there's no benefit to the consumer). Basically, they would be following the business model of Be on the OS side, which doesn't seem to have gotten Be very far. They would lose the advantage they have over PC cloners, which is control of both hardware and OS.
I can see three models for profitable OS development.
Of these, 3 is the only viable one for Apple.
-jimbo
"Hold me Bob!" "I would if I could man!" -Larry and Bob in VeggieTales
If you're talking of licensing (i.e. BSD vs. GPL), they did not have a choice to go with GPL since they based their implementation upon Mach (which has the BSD licence). If you're talking of the layers above the microkernel, that's a whole different matter. They could indeed have based the rest of the system on Linux. How come they did not do this to more extent/some extent I can not tell. Being a major player in the development of MkLinux (Linux on top of the Mach microkernel) they did have experiences with it. I can only guess that they found the FreeBSD base more convenient to use. Oh what the heck, FreeBSD was based on 4.4BSD Lite which is also the base for Lites (the first OS which was built on top of Mach). As such, I would guessed that the Mach implementation is more geared towards supporting BSD than towards supporting Linux.
That said, I can't see the big gripe of going with BSD instead of Linux. What's the big deal here?
He obviously don't want a dock and is ready to drop the baby with the bath. Having used macintoshes since 1986 and NeXT/OPENSTEP/OSXS machines since 1991, I would not trade the dock for the MacOS alternatives. It is amusing to see someone defending the total failure that windowshades are.
Admitedly, the DP3 dock seems to suck, but nothing that can't be corrected. He seems to have a problem because the dock is not the grand-unifier-launcher that he turned the applemenu into, but forgot that such an app is easy to code. Doing a system-wide dock for miniaturised windows is not that easy because it needs to be tighly integrated with the system.
At the end of the article, he rants about the disparition of the apple menu because that was the place where he found most of his desk accessories. Well, I really prefer having them in an equivalent of the Preferences.app, and keeping it on the dock (On NeXT, Preferences.app icon was the system clock. Double-clicking on it put the preferences panel, with item lookable by _icons_, instead of an un-understandable alphabetical list of items in a menu)
Btw, I really miss the OPENSTEP4.0 alpha dock that never saw the light.
(Why do I post that ? this article is old news already...)
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Not "as if" ... it IS.
Everybody goes on about how Aqua sucks as a GUI. Well, yeah, because Aqua is not a GUI. Aqua is to a GUI what a GUI is to the CLI; a whole whack less power, for an order of magnitude reduction in learning curve. It's different enough from a dumbed down GUI ("Bob", anyone?) that it deserves a completely new name, and I suggest AUI, Appliance User Interface.
Think of it this way: What are the top ten things your mother and grandmother (if yours have a clue, substitute your boss, or whatever :) just do not get about their computer, no matter how many times you explain the same thing? Now, how many of those would completely disappear as issues in Aqua Single Window Mode? Pretty much all of them, right? Sure, the Dock sucks for me. For THEM it is UTTERLY PERFECT.
The truly nifty thing about OS X is that a CLI, a GUI, and what I call the AUI will all coexist nicely on a single machine. That's really cool.
Your question is not dumb in the least. Although I've heard a lot of hype about XML, I don't think I've ever seen a trade press article that explains how XML is going to save the world.
My understanding of what the excitement is all about goes like this: XML provides a standard framework for meta-data across different application domain. Because the framework is standardized across domains, we can write the basic tools (e.g. parsers) once, and have them work for all the different domains (e.g. retail sales, medical records, flight schedules, whatver).
For each domain, you have "experts" (in reality, probably just the largest companies in the domain) define a common way of expressing the data for that domain. This is formailzed as a DTD. Everybody publishes their data using that DTD, and now you can interoperate.
That's my guess, anyway. I hope those who know more will be able to correct me. For one thing, I don't know how it is that XML is any more suitable for the purpose than its progenitor, SGML.
WebObjects 4.5 was released today. The new features (and server platform support) are interesting. A linux version would be interesting, maybe for 5.0.
http://www.apple.com/webobjects/
Supposing you mistag something in /etc/sendmail.xml , this could mean that Sendmail could no longer run.
There is a benefit that XML buys you, which is that you could build a generic configuration tool that doesn't intimately know any individual DTD, but which does know how to:
- Turn an XML document into a browsable tree on screen, and
- Accept modifications and write them out as validated XML (sans DTD)
But as you say, there would need to be many DTDs, which really just shoves the problems around a bit. It doesn't clean them up; it's more like using a dirty rag to clean a window, so that the dirt is getting redistributed to different parts of the window...The big problem would be in getting all the applications to change to use an XML parser.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I knew I should have patented that idea when I posted the idea to the ICOA (Amiga developers) mailing list 2 years ago... damn!
Seriously though - this is what it's all about - if you don't like the tools the OS provides, you can write your own, instead of being stuck in GUI hell. This is how an OS should be.
MacOS X is looking seriously interesting.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
If something takes a G4/350 and 256MB of RAM to run "smoothly", that something is obviously bloated.
I have read ars-tech's report on OS X, and yes, I am impressed with the technology. I hope some form of it will eventually be implemented in the open-source arena - whether it be *bsd or linux doesn't matter - but we can forget about the bloatedness.
This world still needs a slim-fast-and-robust OS. It may not be pretty, but as long as it works wonderfully, it will has its place.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
...but then I realized how pointless that would be. For instance, there's no good way to put, say, /etc/sendmail.cf AND /etc/hosts in the same XML format. So you'd make one type for each file. You'd end up in the same situation that we are in now: multiple formats with confusing structure with the added "bonus" of XML tags littering the file.
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Here is the result of your Slashdot Purity Test.
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
XML allows you to write self describing files that are backwards compatibile.
This sounds pretty useless at first, until you realize that it means that a tool can be written to adapt to changes in the file.
For instance, if you have a DTD that describes the data on a person, you might the fields FirstName, LastName, and PhoneNumber.
A GUI tool can read the DTD, and dynamically created edit fields for each one of those items.
Now if you go and change the file, so it includes EmailAddress, the tool can cope with that change by creating a edit field for that, too.
While you can do something like this with a simple text file with the field names along the top (for instance), the point is that the GUI tool you wrote for the first file will work for other XML files, too - with totally different DTDs.
It has other benefits as well. Because you know from the DTD all the possible field types, you can write generic softwear that transforms the files in various ways. For instance, you can use XML Formatting objects (I think that is what they are called) to transform an XML file into a PDF file for publication, simply by defining how each tag type should look.
This was actually the topic of an "Ask Slashdot" some time back. If I wasn't lazy, I'd dig up the URL.
I'm all for XML Config files and any software I write in the future that requires a config file will most likely use an XML format. Of course, this will make me an oddball for a while.
The problem with XML Configs on Linux and Unix in general is that the platform philosophy is to have multiple small reliable tools. It works, but each of the tools often requires its own configuration file. In the case of Linux, the maintainers of these tools are often working for free on their own time. First, they have to be motivated to convert their home-grown file parsers to XML (or link to xmllib). Then, they have to define a grammar for the configuration file. With XML, defining a good grammar is most of the battle.
For developers who have become accustomed to "linefeed, parse, repeat", converting to XML is time that could be spent on bugfixes or new features.
Also, if Apache, VIM, emacs, sendmail, and ftpd are all using XML files with different grammars, what has improved? We've traded one format for another, but not really improved consistency.
And if you think new users are scared of space-and-linefeed delimited config files, wait until you show them tagged config files with less than/greater than signs all over the place! For XML to truly make configuration easier, it will require a graphical general-purpose configuration tool that reads a DTD for the config file and presents the configuration in a point-and-drool framework.
The good news is that this can been done. I really hope it happens.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
All we'd need is a good DTD for Linux that will more or less follow the GNU options standard. Then, any application could extend the DTD for its own use.
/etc files, b) most importantly, backwards compatibility. (a) IMNSHO is not an issue. Config files should be machine-readable first and human-readable second. Human-readability should only be important when things have gone wrong and you're SOL --under normal use you should use an XML aware config-tool (a meta-Linuxconf) to edit the files. Under emergency circumstances, you can still fire up vi and edit an XML file (unlike, say the Registry).
/. thread: Let's create a centralized config directory, say /conf and a backwards compatibility deamon that monitors changes in /conf files. When an application and/or user changes a /conf file, the deamon parses the changes and writes out the appropriate /etc or /var file. I.e. during the transition period, /etc and /var will be read-only and /conf both read and write.
You don't really have to agree on one DTD standard to see immediate benefits. One centralized XML-system parser that would read config files from one centralized XML depository would solve so many installation issues it's not funny. Think about this example: you're installing say PHP. PHP needs to know where Apache and MySQL are. Instead of bothering you with setting up the --with switches, the configure script calls the system XML library with say application("apache").source.path If it can't find it, it will tell you you need to install it --hey it could even go on the web and look for it... And the possibilities for online documentation and remote administration are too numerous to mention...
I think the two big issues with XML config files are: a) people think they're much uglier to edit than
(b) is trickier. This is what I have proposed in an older
This is just a rough concept. But if there are any takers, let's do something about it... this is Linux people...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
OSX is not BSD! OSX is OSX. Well, actually, OSX is NeXTSTEP.
The BSD that everyone keeps talking about is the unix interface. The OSX unix layer presents BSD compatible APIs, libraries, and tools; just like the classic layer presents MacOS classic APIs. OSX is BSD in the same way that SunOS was. It is not a derivative of {Free,Open,Net}BSD, it's just not System V.
Drinking will help us plan!
Great review. I have three impressions: ... (don asbestos suit now) ;)
1) MacOS is now MacOSNIX, as well it should be. I always thought A/UX kicked major PC butt, but in this I think I was alone in the world. C'mon, now all, you have to admit, Jobs was ahead of his time with NeXT
2) By doing stoopid stuff in Aqua like shuffling around the buttons on the bar and removing the Apple Menu, Apple is going to piss off many end-user type folks who stuck with Macs even when the OS stunk (and don't give a hoot about the kernel). Bad move, with little to argue for it. Pointless eyecandy.
3) That XML idea for sorting out all those config files and scripts is great! Kudos to those who did it and those who've been saying it all along.
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
There is no X support at all. Moreover, there's no ML support at all! Please W3C change the name.
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Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
And yes, that's indeed a standards war waiting to happen - but luckily for 'us programmers', that war is at a level of "are we going to call that field X or Y" and calling it either way is not going to impact our code at all, nor will it require changes in our code. Now compare this to the standards war where two parties differ on the interpretation of bit number X of field number Y, and every single change means grinding over the code again. Now I don't know about you, but once I've written something, it suddenly is a lot less fun writing it again, so if I can avoid that, that alone would already be a Good Thing. Another interesting feature is that once you've got a xml parser, any new communications with a new system doing basically the same thing (for example, another supplier for the widgets your manufacturing dept needs) will mean zero coding - just changing a DTD file.
But... what we have now isn't really broken and I doubt you could persuade all those programmers to fix it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
XML is a data interchange format. Many legacy systems contain data in disparate formats, and with the advent of the internet lots of developers are working on various ways to connect these systems using the Internet. One of their challenges is to be able to exchange data between systems that ordinarily are not compatible. XML might be the answer. Since the XML text format is standards based (implying that many applications can understand it), data can be converted to XML and then easily read by another system or application. For instance it would be a whole lot easier for banks or insurance companies to trade information with each other (epecially over the internet) using an agreed upon XML standard than using conflicting proprietary protocols.
Using XML for Web data. Imagine having an HTML page in which none of the content is located on the page itself. Instead, the content is stored in an XML file, and the HTML page is used simply for formatting and display. The content can be updated, translated into another language, or otherwise modified without an author ever having to touch the HTML code.
Using XML to create a common data store for information that might get used in many different ways. Suppose, for example, that you are writing an article for a magazine or publishing a research paper. The publisher also wants to include the article on a Web site and then submit it for inclusion in a book or journal. If the original article was authored in a proprietary format, such as Microsoft's Word format, the article would have to be reworked for the Web posting and then probably reworked again for the book or journal. If the article was written in XML, however, it could be published to the three different environments simultaneously because the data of the article is independent of how it is being displayed. The formatting, layout, and so on are dependent upon the application using the data and are not attached to the content itself. Furthermore, the application code that displays the data needs to be written only once, and it then can be used to display any number of articles.
These are the three I can remember from all the XML books I've read in the past few months.
Aside from the powerful graphics primitives and coordinate space transformations, you get real WYSIWYG display and printing for FREE! If you can display it on the screen then you can print it simply by sending a message to a print object. You get free output to PDF files. Anyone who has written a serious application that creates documents intended to be printed knows that the printing code is often a major PITA and a substantial portion of the time and effort expended to write the whole application. A lot of applications that aren't necessarily intended for creating printed documents don't have printing support or have extremely rudimentary printing support because it is so difficult.
Furthermore, there is a thing known as "Filter Services" which are little bits of code that register with the OS indicating what file types they accept and what types they convert to. When you create an Open File panel you indicate what file types you want to accept (PDF for instance, which any app can display for free of course). There is already a PostScript distiller filter service that converts PS and EPS files to PDF. If the user has it installed on her system then PS and EPS files will show up in the Open File panel in your application. When they select them the file will be automatically converted to PDF. So even if your app doesn't directly support certain file formats, if there is a filter service available that can convert to one of your supported file formats then you get the additional formats without having to do anything, and without the user having to make an explicit conversion.
So Quartz gives developers and users an amazing amount of power that lets them write extremely functional applications without much effort. This of course is translates to a direct benefit to users. It's more than just whizzy transparency...
Dr. Burris T. Ewell
Well... that's a given. It's quite obvious. But might it be intentional? It seems to me the conventional wisdom is that usability does _not_ sell, and that flash is the only thing that drags in the consumers, many of which will never grow beyond basic web surfing and writing straight text in Word. Under those conditions the faults of OSX's GUI are not relevant, as the person would not be running two things at once except by accident (and guess what? for a change that would be instantly obvious!), and would never have learned any of the useful shortcuts of classic MacOS, whether it's ability to customise the Apple Menu or ability to do a contextual popup menu or use of the Control Strip. It's as if Aqua is designed to default to handhold the most relentlessly AOLish l^Huser. I'm not at all sure this _is_ a mistake.
Then the trick becomes finding ways to replace the dock, to get rid of the default stuff and use other methods. Surely this is not going to be so hard given that Darwin is OSS and we'd be _replacing_ the proprietary GUI, not tapping into it? By that I mean shutting _off_ the Dock rather than altering it, I don't mean ditching Display PDF and running KDE on it. That said, I just bet one of the first replacements is somebody hacking a Windows taskbar and start menu only in Aqua style. Furthermore, I fear and suspect it will be a _jello_ taskbar and start menu, translucent, and will wobble sproingily at all times in a continuing bit of very striking but very distracting animation. (Why??? 'Because we can!' This becomes a hell of a lot simpler hacking Aqua and using a vector GUI.) But... why not? It's not like I'd have to use it. I might prefer something like a root menu, and tend to avoid having desktop objects at all, like I do in X and in MacOS. For me, icons are for keeping in folders in disks- the desktop should have only clippings and work in progress. If I could remove the drive icons in MacOS and get the windows through a popup or something, I would.
There are a lot of things I like about Linux, mostly the freedom to be whimsical with the UI: I don't have to run a desktop if I don't feel like it. I can have taskbars of many different kinds, or not- I can have tiles and icons in many different ways, or not. However, I mostly run MacOS, partly because I know how to keep it running happy and stable, partly because its interface is more consistent (_especially_ text editing semantics- I'm sorry, X mouse text editing is crazed- even the 'windows imitations' are horribly inadequate compared with the traditional, post-Drag-and-Drop MacOS handling of it), partly because of access to tools. I write software for MacOS only- that is because it is a lot _easier_ to do, not because I don't want to code for Linux. I would really like to see some convergence here- in particular, I'd like to see OSX become popular in such a way that writing programs for it is closer to writing for Linux. Ideally I'd like to see some of the _great_ programming environments for MacOS (No I don't mean Codewarrior- I mean REALbasic. It's like a _really_ sophisticated GUI drag and drop object oriented interface builder only you code in Python- not really Python, but I'm told it's very Pythonish) evolve so they output code for OSX- at which point it becomes a lot easier for them to also output code for Linux.
As these companies and programmers start adapting to a more Unix-based environment, they can start coexisting with the OSS world. There _are_ Mac programmers who 'get' open source. It's an active area- one of the biggest Mac gaming hits _ever_, Bungie Software's 'Marathon', recently saw GPLing- Marathon 2 was released under the GPL, and in just a few months has been substantially debugged and tweaked and enhanced, longstanding engine limitations totally obliterated in a delightful burst of free hacker effort. As the Mac converges with Linux (I consider the move to Darwin and BSD underpinnings a convergence all by itself), this sort of thing will happen more often. The end result might well be a massive cross-pollination- tons of Linux code being adapted for use with Aqua, tons of Mac programmers and vendors suddenly beginning to release stuff on Linux as well.
When that starts to kick in, Windows can go pound sand >:)
The new Powerbooks are not that expensive when compared to another top of the line laptop like a Thinkpad.
Powerbook - $2,499.
14.1-inch TFT screen
400MHz/1MB L2 cache
64MB SDRAM
6GB Ultra ATA
DVD-ROM/DVD-Video
8MB video memory
10/100BASE-T Ethernet
56K internal modem
2 Firewire ports
Thinkpad 600X - $3,299
Intel® Mobile Pentium III 500MHz
64 MB SDRAM
12GB Hard Drive
2 Type I/II or 1 Type III CardBus and Zoomed Video support slots
13.3" 1024x768 -- TFT - active matrix
24x max-10x min4 CD-ROM
56K5 v.90 KBps Modem
So yes the Thinkpad has a faster CPU (smaller cache) and a bigger HD, but theres no Ethernet in the Thinkpad, thats an option. Smaller screen in the Thinkpad and no DVD-ROM. If you jump up to the 500MHz Powerbook...you spend $200 more than on the IBM, but you get 128MB of RAM. Plus you are getting the 2 Firewire ports for video and storage. (and if you say..."theres no Firewire devices out there!!!" You need to close your mouth and open your eyes...cause theres alot of Firewire devices out there.)
Apple once again lurches into the forefront in key technical areas even if their user interface standards are slipping. Reading this article really makes me wish that Tog was still back at Apple. What he could do with the power of Quartz and all the things he could fix in the Aqua interface make me sigh with regret. I'm also regretful that Apple went with BSD instead of going over and contributing to the Linux movement, but I can understand their reasoning.
/System layout, at least the concept of it. Linux really needs to sit down and think out a new directory structure from scratch to organize all the files that are needed to run the operating system, along with a few elegantly constructed libraries and tools for manipulating those files.
/System and over the course of various X.9.Y releases, move various system resources over to it.
/usr, /etc and other filesystems in place. /System would be where the operating system really lived and things like /etc/hosts could be created by special utilities from the XML files that contain host information. But the idea there is that would only be for legacy application support and developers would be encouraged to port to the new /System layout.
/System, XML resource files, bundling and Quartz, Linux has plenty of ideas to copy and improve on through the open source movement.
Even so, this setup makes it quite clear that there is a lot that can be done in future releases of Linux. The main parts that strictly concern the Linux kernel involve Apple's cleanup of the system directory structure, it's reorganization of resources and the use of XML heavily for configuration files.
The main problem with Linux for the masses is that managing system resources on a Linux system is nontrivial and really requires a trained system administrator. There are configuration tools that try to simplify it, but the lack of a standard configuration file format really cripples the effectiveness of these utilities. Also, the Linux filesystem really grew without systematic organization over various releases of Unix, rather than being planned out as a coherent and unified set of data files and a parser.
The thing I really like most about OS X is the whole
Such a porting sounds hideous but it can in fact be done in stages. A developer's release, probably Linux X.9 because the final result will be radical enough to warrant an point zero release, could create a filesystem like
Backwards compatibility can be maintained by leaving the old
Bundles are an elegant compromise between the necessity of having a bunch of files together to run a single application while at the same time giving a convenient single box to be handled from outside. Average users will use the box as a whole, advanced users can open it up and play with the contents. This is another feature that Linux needs to come up with some equivalent for, if it is to succeed on the desktop.
Quartz is less critical, though in the long run it will probably make life easier for developers. The fancy stuff there isn't strictly necessary, not yet, though as the range of displays increases, going to PDF and breaking the dependency on DPI and viewing distances will be necessary for the range of devices that Linux will run on.
Unix wasn't so much designed as it evolved, and parts of the system show that. Apple has done a major boon by showing what Unix can evolve into, giving the Linux developers a clear target to aim at for their course of future evolution. Between
I've read a lot about how XML is the greatest thing since sliced bread, apparently enabling many different things, from website interoperability, office documents, making toast & eggs, an XML parser in the core of OS X, and now people are talking about making /etc/ files XML... I don't get it. Not just the /etc stuff, I don't understand what the big deal is about XML. It doesn't seem like the big panacea that will cure all of our standards problems and create world peace that many people seem to be making it out to be. In fact, I don't see very many reasons why I'd use it for *anything*...
This is an honest request for information - please enlighten me.
Thanks!
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
And if the JVM improves for Linux, how hard would it be to port such a tool? Not very, I'm guessing.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
What if there were to be some XML processor built into the OS XML engine that parsed tags for creating windows, creating layout managers, and painting buttons, menus, etc. Assuming such components manage their own event processing and are truly modular (such as javabeans), one could script the creation of an entire UI or application. Maybe other API's could be mapped through XML processors and DTD's -- for instance, a series of XML tags mapped to OpenGL calls could be pretty spectacular.
Granted, this is what scripting languages really already do: interpret chains of characters and map them to native machine functions. XML is the ultimate scripting language, though, because instead of choosing between perl, python, or even C, and being limited to their specific API's and syntaxes, we could simply use XML and choose different processors and DTD/controllers to accomplish the necessary mappings to specific syntaxes and API's. A single XML-crafted application could actually map to several languages if necessary, blending Java, C, perl, etc.
Of course, a very talented team of brains would need to create the API-mapping-stylesheet-DTD pieces for these XML app developers to use, not to mention the XML processors (which would in effect become a virtual machine).
When I first heard about the Mac OS X GUI I was both impressed by the visually clean and clear appearance of the interface and the use of transparency to improve the relationship between sub-windows and the 'main' window. Reading through this Ars Technica article though, I begin to wonder whether all these special effects included with Mac OS X are an improvement to the original Mac interface or whether they are crucifying their principles of simplicity of use in order to appear more flashy.
For example, the Dock bar at the bottom of the screen which progressively shrinks as you add more items to it and magnifies the few documents around the mouse when you move to it. This looks like a neat idea at first, especially when you look at the example screenshots given on Apple's site. But distinguishing between even 10 text documents is difficult using this method (the icon reflects the real document) and the example given of 1000+ documents in the bar in Ars is a nightmare!
The use of a button on every title bar to switch between single and multi-window mode is also odd. I guess this is a more interactive way of minimizing windows for the new user, but it's strange to see an option like this as a window button everywhere.
Don't get me wrong - I'm impressed by much of what I see in the Mac OS X GUI. The clear use of colour - i.e. generally neutral colours for windows, with primary colours for important window tool buttons on the active window - along with the Quartz technology and the XML integration are all worthy additions to the interface. But I do worry that some of the features are more a triumph of style over substance when it comes to real usability. As GNOME and KDE move to improve their interfaces, there is much to learn from the way Apple has designed their GUI. As long as nobody forces me to use a one-button mouse ...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.