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X11R6.4 And Apache On Mac OS X Beta
Adam Attarian writes: "Tenon has released public betas of two new products for Mac OS X, XTools, an X-Window Server/Desktop based on X11R6.4. They integrate it with Aqua using both Cocoa and QuickDraw, with OpenGL support planned (the screenshots are cool, very cool). Also out in public beta is iTools, an Apache Port, that looks to have all the goodies like sendmail, DNS, and SSL. Now, if only we could get an AltiVec dnet client for X..." I should have been more clear - you can order this stuff right now - but their site so slashdotted, you can't really get through.
This one article has caused the letter 'X' to move from the 24th most frequently used letter (in the English language) to the 22nd spot, surpassing 'J' and 'K'. If this keeps up, Huffman encoding will have to be completely re-written.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
I have avoided a flame such as this for as long as I reasonably can, because I'm well aware that you are all human beings, that geeks are stereotypically bad in the grammar department, and it's generally not that big of a deal anyhow. However, the headline:
XFree86 And Apache Or Mac OS X Beta
is so wildly different in meaning than the proper headline of:
XFree86 And Apache On Mac OS X Beta
that it merits a bit of a slap on the back of the wrist.
You, the /. Editors, run a much appreciated and much used online web service, and I am extremely glad that /. exists. I do not deny that you all have a whole lot of stuff that you need to tackle, and I do not think for one second that you are anything less than intelligent, inspired and driven individuals. However, the fact that single paragraph, front page articles regularly have the most basic of typographical and grammatical errors is cause for some embarassment, IMHO. Slashdot is recognized as one of, if not the premiere online geek news source. It's readership has grown to the point that only the strongest of web clusters can survive a fully-blown Slashdot Effect. Major international news sources (AP, Reuters) have begun referencing quotes and threads from Slashdot. Slashdot is now in the Big League(tm). Please, please put in that extra three miunutes of reading, re-reading and re-re-reading front page stories for typographical errors. Think of them as bugs in your code, and each front page post as a final version release.
I know that you're proud of Slashdot, and you should be. It's an amazing website. But please, take the next step and start making the content delivery a bit more professional. It's easy to do, and it'll help make Slashdot a better news source.
Trolls: If you must, go ahead and attack this post for typos and grammatical errors. I'm still in the process of learning this danged AZERTY keyboard, and there is in fact a difference between an editor-approved front page article and a comment in the attached thread.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Apple's MacOS X does not come with an X Windows server. Apple has no intention of developing or releasing such a beast. Apple instead chose to develop a PDF-based display system called "Quartz" upon which runs their UI named "Aqua".
Tenon, a respected developer of Mac software, has developed an X Server that runs on MacOS X. This is significantly different from John Carmack's port of X to Apple's open-source OS Darwin (upon which MacOS X is based.) Tenon's X Server is driving the Quartz PDF-based display and utilizes the Aqua toolkits to produce a fully MacOS X-integrated display. In short anything run under Tenon's X Server is immediately available to the rest of the MacOS environment as just another PDF (cut-'n-paste, etc.) as well as appearing as Aqua-like as possible.
Thus with Tenon's X Server one can run a generic X application and it will appear as simply another Mac OS X application obeying as many of the Aqua UI principals as possible. Indeed with many X applications trivial changes will be required to make them appear to be native Mac OS X applications (mostly menu placements, dialogue boxes, etc.)
As one can imagine, this is both good news and bad news for Apple They undoubtedly welcome this product as it gives the connectivity they so sorely need; particularly in their important scientific research market where they're already fairly popular. On the other hand there is likely a fear that developers might 'port' to MacOS X by simply running their apps in a X term session (possibly a cut-down server licensed from Tenon) and not go native.
As to Tenon's other 'ports' - are they ports? Likely yes. Getting a unix application, particularly one already native to BSD to run under Mac OS X isn't much effort, if any. Constructing a native user interface for it, while not very difficult, does take time and some (presumably) skill. Since we already talk of ports to other such brother/sister OS's the same would seem to apply here. The argument is strengthened with the added effort of creating an Aqua UI and integrating other Mac OS X conventions which Tenon has done.
-- Michael
No affiliation with any Mac developer currently, nor have I ever purchased any Tenon product. However I do look forward to running their OS X Server.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
X11 is a protocol
By implementing an X server on top of MacOSX's GUI, X clients can connect to it. This allows all our current X apps to work, network transparently or even from the Mac itself. That is a Very Good Thing.
And since X is a protocol, it is neither slow, buggy or holding anything back any more than HTTP is slow, buggy or holding the web back. So can we please stop with the "X is bad" rhetoric?
Ita erat quando hic adveni.