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No More Mac Tweaking?

Posted by michael on from the think-the-same dept.

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.

3 of 660 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Apple... by Golias · · Score: 5, Informative
    This whole story is BS.

    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.

  2. Huh? by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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.

  3. Not closed to tweaking. by udecker · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.