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O'Reilly Thinks Mac OS X May Be the 'Next Big Thing'
Arkham writes "Tim O'Reilly gave a speech at WWDC called 'Watching the Alpha Geeks: Mac OS X and the next big thing', in which he suggested that Apple is doing the right things to be a big success. Specifically, Apple should continue to 1) adhere to standards, 2) keep things small and modular, and 3) document as you go -- man pages and RFCs. Anyone who has used Mac OS X can see that Apple is trying hard to be a good open-source citizen (for example, the new zero-config Rendezvous technology). The question is, at what point will these efforts pay off (more users, and thus more money)?" What is this "money" you speak of?
Typo in the title ... ffs ...
/me hopes it is just some bad pun he doesn't get.
O'Reilly Thinks Mac OS X Bay Be the 'Next Big Thing'
Posted by pudge on 2002.05.10 11:30
from the next-big-thing-in-a-nutshell dept.
... Pudge, those letters aren't even adjacent. What's your balfunction, boy!?
STOP ME BEFORE I POST AGAIN!
Never tried OSX yet, but i've heard too many good things to let it just slide by the and not be used. Hence this week im gonna grab a G4 from work to have a try on :)
Anyway apple are playing the Darwin core, and gettin the Open Source community to take a look at it...get the support of the people and you will have a excellent OS...linux for example :)
"What do you mean you have no ice? Do you expect me to drink this coffee hot?" - Random Customer, Clerks
Apple isn't in it for the money.
I am just a simple Caveman... your money and technology frighten and confuse me. But there is one thing I can understand - user interfaces with built in Alpha blending are l33t.
_sig_ is away
Yes, OS X has real multitasking, got a unix core, has transparent menus and it's nice and all, but unlike OS 9 and below, it does not support keyboard input of right-to-left languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, any other languages?)
As a result, it's uncommon to see people in the middle east who use OS X. Those people still use the now dead OS 9, or more likely, Windows.. (yes, how bad and evil MS are, I must admit they did a great thing when they forced everyone to use the unicode standard, which is harder to display, but makes sense in every other aspect - searching, sorting, etc)
hemi
Actually, if Apple could be convinced to write developer documentation it would be a blessing.
Too many APIs are are shoddily documented at present.
I'm sure Apple is saying the same thing.
A few (obviuosly biased since I'm typing this in in OSX) points about Apple and OSX and it's relation to OSS.
1. Apple has become very successful over the last few years because they started catering for those consumers who don't like to fight with the computer and who have difficulty comprehending computers. Most of us who have been at this for years with various OS's and computers (WinXXX, Mac OS XX, Linux, BSD , x86, PPC etc) have become used to working out how the things work. We all have that certain contempt for users who have difficulty comprehending how to use a contextual menu, a config file or the labyrinth of MS control panels. Apple addressed this with the iMacs, iBooks and Mac OSX IMO, by providing a simple "dumbed down" UI (and this will go even further with the next release of OSX, which has a "simple finder" option) and by continuing to use single button mice. Until you've seen a friend who uses windows and look at astonishment at you as you use the contextual menu, you won't be able to appreciate this.
2.Apple made a very wise decision to mix it's OS with an "OpenSource" core (Yes I know) and a propietry GUI. It gives Apple plus points with O'Reilly for instance and some possibilities for dvelopers to influence where the OS is going. At the same time Apple remains in control of the OS and GUI and can concentrate efforts and resources where they are needed.
3. Using NeXT's technology was a big bonus, because ObjC is not that much harder than Java and quite a lot easier than C++ (although many will still use C++).
4.Apple does actually sometimes seem to listen to their users (Spring loaded folders coming back) and does actually seem to bring useful innovations (Rendevouz, Ink, Firewire)into an industry which is scared of taking risks.
5.Also very importantly, and this is not brought up that often, Apple doesn't have the reputation of absolute ruthlessness that Microsoft does. Make no mistake, Apple is still a business and will go over the occasional body (Retailers) but compared to MS they are angels. They seem to have realised that brutal EULA'S only make for bad press and bad attitudes. Apple doesn't care if you run PPC Linux next to Mac OSX and doesn't care if you run an MS emulator, because you bought the hardware.
6. Apple's marketing is an order of magnitude better than MS'. Apple almost never brings technical details into the advertising and relies on celver associations. Compare this to the MS OfficeXP campaign where they showed the smart tabs on the shoulder of a naked woman. What were you supposed to think? OfficeXP = built in porn?
7.Apple does however have one extremely week point, and this is the CPU. NO amount of "Myth" marketing makes up for the fact that they are very far behind in terms of processor peformance. Their reliance on a floundering company, Motorola, for the core of their machines is dangerous. There is still no sign of the mythical G5 and nothing has been said about it for the near future. IMO Apple would be better off buying the PPC area from Motorola, but what do I know.
I know that Iran has no copyright laws, so MS doesn't earn a penny there. And although the major OS in the middle east is Windows, Linux is making good breakthroughs there. Companies like Hancom who develop explicitly with international users in mind (Asian, Middle east) are apparently quite popular.
I do not hate Microsoft, nor do I worship Apple. I think MS could be a little more friendly, but business is business, as long as it's legal of course.
So, having said that, when I was in the market for a new laptop a few months back, I compared all of reasonable laptops on the market, regardless of who made it and what OS it ran.
I finally went with the 14.1 LCD'ed iBook for several reasons, and I can honestly say that I have not been unhappy with any feature, whether hardward or software, and that is saying something.
OS X is the best OS I have ever used. It has the darwin core so I can program while out of the office (I have apache, mysql, php, perl, and emacs, it's more of a server-top really). Plus you get the beautiful GUI front-end and excellent gaming support for when you need to relax.
All in all, the best OS I have ever used.
visit my free wallpaper collection, wp.erasei.com
"Apple is trying hard to be a good open-source citizen"
What projects do they contribute open source code to ?
All ive heard is that they use *bsd code, do they improve and contribute the code upstream ?
What other projects do they contribute to ?
Hey don't get me wrong. I'm delighted - yes delighted - that O'Reilly likes OS X. And everything he outlines as being good ideas really are good ideas.
But there is a slight element of ridiculousness to this whole post. The idea that what Apple needs to do to be "a big sucess" and make "more money" is create more man pages is absurd.
Golly gee, maybe they can be as sucessful as Linux next! Do ya think??
If you don't even understand the irony of the above line then you really need a reality check.
Anyhow, like I said I am positively giddy about O'Reilly's love for OS X. I myself benefitted directly from the Apache Web Serving In OS X series of articles which appeared under the O'Reilly banner not long ago. But still...the idea that pandering to the uber-geek is going to do wonders for Apple's marketshare or bottom line is absurd on it's face. They should still do it...but it's consumer products like iMovie, pricing and marketing that affect the bottom line, not man pages.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
.. I can get decent pc hardware cheaper. Okay I saw the onay vs mac comparison where Sony was only a little better than the Mac and Mac was 1/2 as expensive, but I paid 800 for my current computer almost a year ago, including OS (RH 7.1 at the time). I don't think I could have gotton a Mac for that price. Okay I probably could have gotton a Mac for that price, but not one with 512Meg of RAM. Not NEW. 1.2Ghz CPU, 32Meg video card, NIC, 52x cdrom, SB live sound card.
Only 'flamers' flame!
"Well if by "few" you mean "twenty" then yeah :)"
Apple was doing very badly in the mid '90s and losing a lot of money and customers until Jobs turned the company around. He did this mostly with the iMac at the time. He refined and simplified the product line which also helped a lot and introduced OSX which has done more to get users of other OS's to switch to Macs than any other previous OS (which tended to do the opposite)
"Um...Again it sounds like you are unaware that Apple has been all about ease-of-use for the last two decades"
OF course I know this, and agree that the classic Mac OS was easy to use. But the OS was very unstable and crash prone and quite backward. I sort of include not having to reboot your Mac three or four times a day under ease of use.
"Yet again...this feature has been available for years in previous versions of the Mac OS. Quite useful, I'm told, for very young children.
"
Again, I know this. I was referring to OSX, which hasn't had this until now.
OSX is the future on Macs. Classic Mac OS is not.
If you restrict the topic to Mac OSX only and exclude Newtons, WinCE etc OSX has had the technology since the days of the Developers Preview releases. In the public beta days, just before OSX 10.0 came out Apple announced that it had "developed" handwriting recognition for the OS (No, I can't remember where, possibly Maccentral archives?) but didn't include it in the product at the time. The lack of tablet drivers and applications made it completely useless at the time. In XP it is also useless unless you have a tablet or a TabletPC. I assume that Apple will release it's own version of a tabletPC this year sometime.
Any chance of a Cocoa emacs or xemacs with variable width font support from Apple?
:-(.
I don't like running emacs from the terminal, and running xemacs through the integrated X-Window system just shows how shoddy the fonts are that we've been tolerating for so many years
I'd even be willing to pay for that (although I shouldn't have admitted that or RMS would have me shot). I know the standard answer is to dive into the code and do it yourself, but I'm simply not familiar enough with emacs or x-windows internals to give it a shot.
D
Since OS X came out, I have seen some changes that could be perceived as fodder for the "next big thing" argument, even here on Slashdot. For instance:
The reasons for these changes are, to be sure, numurous and loaded with opinion such as those in my own case: No more switching back and forth from Mac to Linux just to get a "full featured" desktop machine. Open a Word doc, make a movie, use your firewire and USB peripherals, surf with IE if you want, jump on the command line, drag and drop, run Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Bash, Grep, etc.... All this and I get hardware that was designed as if someone read my mind (iBook).
Actually becoming the "next big thing" would be great for Apple and it's users but seeing how I've been waiting for years for the next Beatles and the next Michael Jordan, I'm not holding my breath.
Tim O'Reilly is keynoting this year's MacHack. It will be interesting to see what all this *nix influence will do to MacHack attendance, easily the most intense Mac-specific wireless LAN party on the planet. ;) See you here!
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
One FreeBSD Kernel Hacker I know (and I don't have permission to use his name, so he will for now be anonymous) said to me "Cocoa is what X-windows should have been." I think that it is fair to say that he is a convert...
Dog is my co-pilot.
What i like about OS X and Aqua, as an unexperienced linux user, is that it helps really well bringing linux to people who don't know how to use it that well, there is no need to use shell at al, but if you want to you can use it, in 'normal' linux that's not the case, there the shell is always a large part of the operation. and people like my dad who love Aqua, but can't work with Linux cans till feel the power, without knowing any specific commands etc.
In his blog today,(http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1395)Tim says more about his WWDC keynote, including:
Hackers push the envelope to make technologies do what they want before vendors and entrepreneurs package them for other people. My point is that a lot of the things that the hackers and other alpha geeks have been incorporating into their lifestyle for some time - wireless, chat, web services (even if only created by web spidering and screen scraping), peer-to-peer (rendezvous), etc. - are all starting to show up in a nice package with OS X.
So to me, this is a good predictor that Apple is really on the right track with some big trends.
My question wasnt meant as a troll, Thanks for the constructive responses.
It would be nice if in time, apple could change their license to be Free one, at least they are in the right ballpark.
So why isn't it mentioned in the site? I wish they had more details in their "new features" list.
hemi
...for me, it's ALL about the OS. I guess it depends on what you do, but most people interact more with the OS and software than the hardware.
Quite frankly, I could care less what the underlying architecture is, as long as it runs an OS and software I like working with.
Sure, I know I can get faster, more expandable, and cheaper PCs. But I won't get a PC because none of them run MacOS X. It's not that I'm not famliar with anything else (I use Windows at work, tinkered with Linux+GNOME, and use a Solaris box at school), it's just that I prefer using a Mac over any other alternative.
---
Open Source Shirts
I am in Apple's target market. I am a long-time Unix user. I appreciate quality! I lust after their laptops. But I just can't buy one, yet.
This is because I can't use their laptops' keyboards. I need the key to the left of the 'A' to be a Ctrl key. This is not just a want; it is a genuine need based upon ergonomic reasons.
Apple's cost to satisfy my keyboard desires is small: re-design their laptops to use USB keyboards just like the rest of their line. Unfortunately for me, Apple hasn't done this yet. Their laptops still use the ADB keyboards, which are horribly broken-by-design. ADB keyboards are a vestage of the old insanely-bad input devices days, when Apple didn't have an industrial-strength unix core.
Apple: Please fix your laptop keyboards! Please re-design your laptop motherboards to use a modern up-to-date USB keyboard, to go along with your robust and mature modern up-to-date unix OS!!
Note: is is now possible to use the keyboard with Debian GNU/Linux, but as of yet, Apple has not made it possible for unix old-timers to use with OSX.
My standard rant follows:
Apple Laptop Keyboards are Unacceptable to Unix Users
Apple designs horrible keyboards. ADB keyboards (which are still used on all of Apple's laptops) are unusable to unix users who need a Ctrl key to the left of the 'A'.
Proper Keyboard Design
- When a key is pressed, the keyboard sends a keyPress
event.
- When a key is released, the keyboard sends a keyRelease
event.
- Each key is assigned a different keycode.
Nothing more, nothing less.ADB Keyboard Mis-design
- When the key to the left of the 'A' (CapsLock) is
pressed, the ADB keyboard sends both a keyPress event
and a keyRelease event.
- When the CapsLock key is then released, the ADB keyboard
sends NO events.
- When the CapsLock key is next pressed, the ADB keyboard
sends NO events.
- When the CapsLock key is then released, the ADB keyboard
sends both a keyPress event and a keyRelease
event.
- The above cycle repeats over and over.
This is WRONG ! Apple's ADB keyboards are broken by design.Unix Users Cannot Use Apple's ADB Keyboards
What this means is that unix users who need the key to the left of the 'A' to be a Ctrl key cannot use Apple ADB keyboards. You can easily reprogram the CapsLock key to be a Ctrl key and get rid of the badness of the CapsLock key, but you can't get the required goodness of the Ctrl key to the left of the 'A'.
Apple Loses Sales to Unix Users
All Apple laptops have the horrible broken-by-design ADB keyboards which are unusable to unix users. I want to buy an Apple laptop, but I cannot and will not until Apple builds input devices usable by unix users.
But unfortunately, for more than 12 years, Apple has been ignoring unix users who want Apple hardware with a usable keyboard... namely a Ctrl key to the left of the 'A', and/or the ability to re-map the CapsLock key on their keyboards.
Even though they now have a true Unix OS, Apple has still not satisfied unix users; their entire line of laptops still has horrible ADB keyboards. For more info, see this Slashdot post.
For those of us that use Macs, and want to show some support for Apple stock (which has _always_ been badmouthed by investors, although that may have changed a bit), a good idea is to buy one share.
Go to Oneshare and buy just one share of apple stock.
Since these stocks aren't resold, it's a way of inflating the price a bit; provided enough of us buy a share or two. Since I'm not an investor I'm not sure how many people it would take to actually make a dent though.
Bzzzzt. I do not believe you.
Note: I might believe you if you told me that you started using computers relatively recently (since the early-mid 1990's), started on MS OSes, and never used a proper keyboard until you were horribly mistrained on an IBM PC AT keyboard (with the Ctrl key in the wrong place).
If you were a true emacs user, and/or a long-time Sun user, you would demand that the Ctrl key be to the left of the 'A' key, where it is ergonomically useful.
All Apple laptops still have ADB keyboards, and it is not possible to remap the CapsLock key. This makes it generally unusable for unix users.
Mod this ever-repeated, redundant, ill-informed post down.
this post is really getting on my nerves he repeats it everywhere
You must be one of those filthy Solaris users. Filthy, filthy, filthy! Why don't you get a keyboard from a real UNIX vendor, like HP, IBM, or SGI? Heck, even DEC used standard keyboards before Compaq swallowed them.