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No More Mac Tweaking?
netphilter writes "Apple is trying to "close the operating system to tweakers" according to this story on Wired. The addition of the BSD kernel and the command line left me thinking that they were trying to open the OS a bit more to tweakers, not close it. I'm not a Mac user, but I have been thinking about trying out OS X. However, if Apple is trying to CLOSE the OS (contrary to the impression that I had) then I'm not going to waste my time."
Jamie adds: life may be harder for them, I guess, but many developers are
still tweaking Mac OS X.
I think what this refers to is that third party apps that use the toolbar are relegated to something of a second class citizen status, and lack some of the capabilities of Apple-sponsored toolbar items.
For instance, my Proteus icon doesn't stay on the toolbar if Proteus isn't running, and I can't easily rearrange it on the toolbar by dragging while holding the Apple key down. I can do this(or remove the icon entirely) with the system-related icons approved by Apple(modem status, volume, resolution).
As a disclaimer, I am still using 10.1.5, so I can't speak for 10.2.
I have 10.2 on my iBook, and I am able to tweak many, many functions to my heart's content. The first thing I did was get rid of that stupid "favorites" heart in the top of the finder window. Removing that button (and adding other finder tools to the top bar) was as simple as drag and drop. Resizing or relocating the dock, and changing its behavior is also simplicity itself. Don't like the funky way Macs have the scroll arrows grouped at the bottom-right corner? You can set it to the traditional layout with a few quick mouse-clicks.
What is really going on in this article is the owner of the company that makes Kaleidoscope (a third-party UI tweaking program for older flavors of Mac OS) has been rendered obsolete, not by Mac breaking Kali's tools with updates... which often happened with versions 7-9 of MacOS, but because OS X is already tweakable enough withough their app.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
"Before 10.2, the API had been reverse engineered and was being widely used by shareware developers. WeatherPop, for example, used it to show the current weather, while Homeland Alert shows the U.S. government's level of terrorist alert. These utilities were broken by the Jaguar update. Unsanity recently released a utility, Menu Extra Enabler, to restore them. "
Not true.
I've got both WeatherPop and Homeland Alert running on 10.2 and 10.2.1 without Menu Extra Enabler.
This article is all fluff. You've got the one guy who wrote kaleidoscope complaining that the UI now has closed API's. In fact, if a user wanted to change their interface, the pxm resources can be easily edited with resources available.
Not only this, there are several themes available.
The complaint here is that although Darwin is open source, (with most of the core components of the OS), the window server is not. Being a UNIX system, however, you can make a new one if you cared to. Simply running strings from the command line can pull most API functions out of a binary, so emulating them would be a tast, but not an impossible one.
From the beginning, Apple has discouraged used from using elements in the Aqua theme file (extras.rsrc) which are copyrighted by them. However, a full replacement of that resource file that contains no Apple IP can't be pulled by Apple.
Please don't listen to this argument that the OS is closed to tweakers. It's different now to tweak things, but you certainly can.
See? A Titanium theme, a Rhodium theme, a Gunther theme, a Totally Aqua theme.
Hey, even a tool to make them.
Quit complaining.
Mac uses OpenFirmware (http://www.openfirmware.org/) which is much more standard than all the crappy PC bios... And Sun's OpenBoot PROM is also derived from OpenFirmware BTW...
There are at least 3 different programs to change themes; Duality4, MetamorphX, Chameleon.
There already is a program to change system icons, Candy Bar.
There is another coming, Xpression.
There are a myriad of menu items, dock enhancements, window enhancers, custom menu builders, and just great all around utilites that enhance and extend the OS.
The thing to remember, and what everyone forgets, it that Classic Mac OS was a mature OS that people had years to hack and discover. OS X is new enough that Apple is still changing APIs.
Mac OS X is a very customizable OS and Wired is showing very little research and fact checking in thier article.
... about what developers wanted/needed access to in new versions of the operating system (yes, I know that this article is really about UI tweaks, but figured I'd offer a perspective on what the topic of the post implied). I attended one of the Apple WWDCs (World Wide Developers' Conference) when I worked for the now defunct (well, "assimilated into the NAI universe") Dr. Solomon's Software on Virex, an anti-virus application for the Mac. When OS X was announced, we were decidedly worried about how we were going to get access to the file system areas that we needed to hook in to to intercept file opens and closes, along with other similar things. During a particular mixer, where Apple engineers and architects were around to sip beer and eat free food, we talked to the main architect and engineers of the file system team and had a great dialogue about what we needed and how best we could get it. They were interested to hear how we had worked around so many disgusting parts of the OS 7, 8 and 9 systems, and were honestly quite horrified to hear what was required in certain circumstances :). But, customers want to be protected from viruses in every possible way they can access files, so we had to do it.
Traditionally this is a pretty tough thing to do, even in the best of times. Under OS 8 and 9, we had a hell of a time keeping the on-access scanning parts working with each new release of the OS... they would change behavior in AppleTalk functionality, asynchronous hooks, or whatever and POOF!, what used to work just fine now times out on accesses to remote volumes.
The Apple guys were very open to trying to give us more reliable, sanctioned access to the file system hooks that we needed to have. Unfortunately, Dr. Solly's was soon thereafter assimilated by NAI and I was not able to work on the product anymore, so I don't know what they eventually did with the OS X product.
-"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle." - Arthur Dent
I suggest that you look inside some program bundles. There's a great deal *more* tweaking capability available than previous versions of the Mac OS allowed.
Speaking as an admin whose first mac was an original SE in 1987, I can tell you that Apple has always had people messing around with their undocumented internals and they've always punished them. They don't want people to get the idea that it's safe to muck around in the internals because if any significant dependencies develop, they lose their portability.
Why was the 68k->PPC transition so smooth? Because for the several years prior, Apple was doing exactly the same thing, changing their undocumented code around so that people wouldn't create a large installed base of code using undocumented APIs. Or, if they persisted in that foolishness, to create the expectation that every major OS upgrade was likely to cause a temporary break in this code until they re-did the reverse engineering to make it work again.
With Interface builder and the package standard for software, software is becoming more, not less modifiable. You used to have to download ResEdit to mess around with a dialog in an app, now you can open up the nib in Interface Builder and fairly easily add options, menus and commands. You can even add entirely new languages as the strings are supposed to be kept seperate. That creates an entirely new category of software tweaking as people can add Romanian or Urdu whether the original app maker has a clue about these languages or not.
The story on Wired reports that changing the appearance of the GUI has become more difficult with Mac OS X. Isn't it a little extreme to conclude that the whole OS can not be tweaked. If Aqua may not be reconfigured as easily as some wish it to be, Mac OS X is a UNIX operating system, that runs many open source programs, including XFree86, Gnome or KDE. And I have as much fun tweaking Mac OS X than I have tweaking Linux that run on the same iMac, even if I haven't changed the appearance of Aqua yet.
Can't tweak the interface? What a joke. For Pete's sake, we have the hooks to put rootless XFree86 on top of Aqua and run every Window manager under the sun.
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
Well, since you asked - Apple's DVI implementation is non-standard.
No, it isn't. The connector is unusual, but it's documented, and adapters that break out the USB and power signals are available. This is no different from when some vendors use four-pin FireWire cables instead of six-pin cables. You simply need an adapter cable.
They do support the standard physical and electrical connections, but that doesn't mean you can take just any generic PCI or AGP card meant for a PC, and use it in a Mac.
Sounds to me like some vendors' PCI cards are non-standard. This says nothing about Apple's PCI implementation.
Apple has come a long, long way since the "skinny Mac," in which every single component was proprietary, right down to the nonstandard screws used to fasten the top to the chassis.
Okay, I'm starting to understand your point of view now. When you say "non-standard," you really mean, "I've never heard of it." Torx T-10 and T-15 screws are very much standards; they're just different standards from the ones you're familiar with.