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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.

48 of 660 comments (clear)

  1. Apples Target Market by coene · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You've seen the commercials and all the marketing dollars they are putting into this campaign...

    Apple wants people who are looking for a computer that just plain works. They are going after the "as long as it works I dont care about X, Y, or Z" crowd, which is (for the most part) completely opposite the Slashdot crowd.

    As always, the real tweakers will find a way to do what they want with their computer. Its not a big deal...

    1. Re:Apples Target Market by dconder · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, but this is the same company looking to make itself accessable to artist, etc, who want to display their creativity. Now they are going to lock it down so that everyone's Apple looks the same?
      A lot of the standard computer interfaces -- hierarchical menus, contextual menus, even Aqua itself -- were dreamed up by people working in bedrooms or back offices, now they want to curtail this?

    2. Re:Apples Target Market by foobar104 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, but this is the same company looking to make itself accessable to artist, etc, who want to display their creativity. Now they are going to lock it down so that everyone's Apple looks the same?

      I know a lot of artists; I sort of move in a circle of friends who are all artists of one kind or another. Know how many of them like tweaking their Macs? None.

      See, to the creative person, a Mac is just a tool. It's like a paintbrush or a typewriter or a videotape deck. Nobody wastes time and energy rearranging the buttons on their tape deck, or changing the way their pencil works. It's a tool, and you use it so you can get the real art done.

      The tool should be effective, simple, and reliable, in that order.

    3. Re:Apples Target Market by clmensch · · Score: 2, Insightful

      My GOD that's a generalization. I know plenty of graphic designers that are comfortable with a computer and like to tweak their machine to personalize it. It's still a tool to them, but it also makes it THEIRS. They're people like everyone else...some users DO like to do this.

      --
      There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
    4. Re:Apples Target Market by Speare · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The best of the artists I've met love to tweak the tools, whether it's a new pencil, brush, table, welding iron, or computer. That's how new techniques are developed, how inspirations become expressions.

      Who said, "The reasonable person adapts to his environment. The unreasonable person tries to make their environment adapt to themselves. Thus, all progress is made by unreasonable people."

      --
      [ .sig file not found ]
    5. Re:Apples Target Market by mttlg · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Nobody wastes time and energy rearranging the buttons on their tape deck, or changing the way their pencil works. It's a tool, and you use it so you can get the real art done.

      And just what are you supposed to do when the tool has a slight problem that makes it a pain to use? Think of how simple a pencil is, and now think of how many different kinds of pencils there are. If an artist doesn't like the way a pencil works, he can get a pencil that works better or change the one he has. Now scale that up to the complexity of an OS (much more complexity, very few choices). If I don't like having my screenshots come out as PDFs in 10.2 (TinkerTool could change this in 10.1), what are my options (besides going back to 10.1)? The truth of the matter is that nothing will be the best choice for everyone. I want my tools to be customized for how I work; I don't want some idiot in Cupertino deciding how I want to get things done. It seems like Apple is aiming for the market share of Linux and the user satisfaction of Windows, but still falling short on both counts...

      (Note to moderators with the reading comprehension skills of a turnip (no offense to turnips): the above is not a troll or flamebait, it is just an honest description of the frustration that comes from watching your favorite tool do little things that really piss you off sometimes.)

    6. Re:Apples Target Market by Tenebrious1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      What kind of artists do you know? According to your thinking, all artists should be buying brushes at Wal-Mart, since a brush is a brush, just a tool. They'd all buy #2 Ticonderoga pencils there as well since sketches are always done with the point of the pencil. That's all there is to art, right? Fine line drawings and paintings done with a 4" nylon brush?

      Every painter I've met spends time tweaking their brushes before use. After buying a new brush, they shape it, trim it, thin it out, whatever they think they need to make that generic tool a specialized tool.

      Sketch artists have a variety of pencils of different hardnesses and thicknesses. Most carry around sandpaper or knife to shape the points to suit their needs.

      Photographers are probably the best example of tweakers- they have a half dozen lenses and a slew of filters. Half of photography is the subject material, the other half is getting the camera set up properly. Ever heard of breathing on the lense to soften the image? There's a pretty good tweak.

      Mac users tweak just as much as anyone else. Any graphic artist using MacPaint? Or do they have PS and a couple hundred plugins? Where did those plugins come from? From tweakers of course. Why is PS the premiere graphics program? Because Mac users have been prodding Adobe along, asking for tweaks to the program they couldn't make themselves.

      Zen artists were known for dipping their hair into ink, slopping it on a sheet of paper, and turning that slop into an image of a flowing river. Dipped a chicken's feet in ink, let it walk across paper, and turned those prints into falling leaves. Can you call a chicken effective, reliable, or simple? It produced art nonetheless, because the ARTIST knew how to create. Art doesn't create itself if you have the right tools, the Artist creates with or without the right tools.

      --
      -- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
    7. Re:Apples Target Market by emil · · Score: 3, Insightful
      And you [i]certainly[/i] never know when a tweak could corrupt and endanger your machine.

      While I've never used it, Mac OS X is based on BSD UNIX, and enjoys protected memory and filesystem permissions when configured properly. Any GUI tweaks that do not involve root authority should not impact other accounts or system hardware. It is quite common for UNIX users to create separate accounts to run untrusted apps, and this can be done with moderate to high confidence on patched systems. Unless a root exploit is involved, the worst a rogue app can do is trash your account (fork bombs excluded).

      I realize the fear that many Mac users have of applications that crash the system. Under UNIX, this propensity is greatly reduced if not eliminated.

    8. Re:Apples Target Market by MrAndrews · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Being an artist, a mac user for years upon years, I would have to say the analogy is close, but not right. Artists will buy the best brush, fine-tune it so it's just right, and paint. They won't however, etch little drawings into it, change its overall shape, colour or function just for fun. Tweaking OS X is very much like that: you get some 3rd party tools to adjust the dock etc, but you really only completely skin your interface when you're bored out of your skull and are trying to convince yourself that what you're doing is really creative expression.

      Not to knock people who do that. I just happen to know that a lot of good creative energy tends to go into things you really can't put in your portfolio with clean conscience.

      --
      The world's only surviving livewriter.
    9. Re:Apples Target Market by foobar104 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No, the tool should be COST effective, versatile, and reliable, in THAT order.

      Wrong. The tools pay for themselves. If they don't, then you aren't using them right.

      In other words, if you don't need a Mac to get the job done, don't use one. This says nothing about Macs; it does, however, say something about your own needs, talents, and abilities.

  2. UI != OS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like Apple is trying to close access to UI tweaking, not the OS.

  3. This isn't tweaking.... by word+munger · · Score: 5, Insightful
    What the article talks about isn't tweaking... It's cosmetic changes to the user interface. Apple isn't preventing users from doing useful things like modifying printer drivers, or creating time-saving macros.

    Keeping a standard user interface makes it easier for people to move from computer to computer. There's nothing that irks me more than working on a different computer at the office, and some wiseacre has removed the menus from MSIE.

    Besides, most Kaleidoscope interfaces were ugly as sin....

    --
    ScienceSeeker.org
    1. Re:This isn't tweaking.... by trb · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Keeping a standard user interface makes it easier for people to move from computer to computer. There's nothing that irks me more than working on a different computer at the office, and some wiseacre has removed the menus from MSIE.

      If a GUI is flexible enough to allow the user to have a Salvador Dali melting widgets look and feel, it should also be able to provide a way to get the standard look and feel back with a simple command.

  4. Yet more speculation running as news. by BitGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful


    Ok here's the deal: There are private APIs in OSX. They are undocumented and marked that way- these frameworks are in the private- frameworks folder.

    Apple isn't deliberately breaking peoples products, it is changing internal APIs.

    Many of these APIs start out internal and when they are ready for prime time, become public, supported, documented, standard APIs.

    Until then, you use one and it doesn't work in the next rev, its your own damn fault.

    And this is the right way for things to be- OS X is far more theme friendly than any other OS- hell the graphical eliments are all easily accessible pdf or tiff files and easy to replace. Want a different looking dock? Trivial. Want a different looking login window? no problem.

    But the areas where things can cause instability in the OS should not be left wide open for people to change in an uncontrolled manner.

    Quicktime has an API for skinning it. MAYBE Apple will release one for OS X, but if they are smart, they won't.

    Standardized controls are what makes OS X much easier for newbies to use than other operating systems.

    Let people change the look of their computer, but not the feel. That's the right strategy and the one apple seems to be following.

    --
    Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/ 1816257
    1. Re:Yet more speculation running as news. by tomhudson · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Look, the use of undocumented APIs goes way back to the earliest days of DOS. People use it, then the manufacturer has to either continue supporting it, or break it. Unless there's a valid technical reason to break it ... (sake for the sake of change breaks a LOT of things).

      Maybe Apple should have looked at the flame wars RedHat provoked with their attempt to create a "common" user look-and-feel between KDE and Gnome.

      People think - and rightly so - "It's my computer, I should be able to do whatever I want with it."

      Regards...

    2. Re:Yet more speculation running as news. by CaseyB · · Score: 3, Insightful
      But the areas where things can cause instability in the OS should not be left wide open for people to change in an uncontrolled manner.

      Why? These people aren't modifiying the shrink-wrapped boxes Apples sells in the store. They're modifying their own machine as they see fit.

      This has nothing to do with stability. It's all about dictating to people how they can use a product they own by adding arbitrary restrictions.

      Standardized controls are what makes OS X much easier for newbies to use than other operating systems.

      Newbies aren't the ones doing this. Give your head a shake.

      Let people change the look of their computer, but not the feel. That's the right strategy and the one apple seems to be following.

      Why is it reasonable for a company to restrict the way we use the product? This isn't Apple designing a product to be consistent, this is Apple locking down an existing product that people are using is a way that they didn't anticipate, because the creativity these users are demonstrating angers them.

      "Think Different" indeed. Try "Think the way we want you to think.".

  5. Misleading Crap Reporting! by ErnstKompressor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wired has truely become a worthless source of factual information...

    "For example, the API that allows for custom menus and icons on the right side of the top menu bar, next to the clock, prohibits all but Apple-approved menu items. "

    Funny, I'm running Jaguar and have both LaunchBar and FuzzyClock running just fine in my menu bar...

    I can't speak for all menu-apps but I don't think this article really speaks the truth.

    --
    We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
  6. Not a helpful story. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I have been using MacOSX for a while, since
    swiching off of Linux/KDE as my desktop. I
    still have Linux, solaris and BSD machines in
    the closet as servers which work well through
    XWindow on Aqua.

    I'm a developer. There is no indication at all
    that Apple is trying to "do" anything at all.
    gcc is there, all the tools too, the base OS code
    is OpenSource... I've not once been hindered by
    anything being closed.

    IMHO, this story is fear mongering.

  7. Enough already by Golias · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Damn, I am so sick of so many people, especially on /. say "I would totally buy a Mac if it weren't for nitpick $FOO."

    Nearly everybody must realize by now that such statements are usually a load of shit. Most of you will never buy a Mac, or switch to a Linux desktop, no matter what, because Windows is all you know, and all you care to know. You don't want to invest the added cost of a Mac (or the added effort of Linux) to discover if their virtues are worth it. You are lazy and groping for excuses.

    Just fess up. You don't like Macs, you don't want a Mac, you will not buy a Mac. That's fine. Use whatever the fuck you want, just stop with the constant whining about features that you (or some underpaid web journalist) think are missing from the platform.

    --

    Information wants to be anthropomorphized.

    1. Re:Enough already by the_rev_matt · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I would argue that most of the web journalists who whine about tech issues (or most issues) are overpaid, rather than underpaid. Even if they don't get paid.

      --
      this is getting old and so are you

      blog

    2. Re:Enough already by GigsVT · · Score: 2, Insightful

      or feigned moral indignation about

      I think almost all of us "zealots" are very serious about Free (liber) software.

      Most (geeky) people that run Windows at home don't pay for most of their copies, at least the Windows using people that I know don't. Sure they may have a legit OEM copy from when they bought a laptop or something, but all the rest just copy it. Same with MS Office. I don't see your price argument very compelling when comparing Linux to Windows users.

      I do agree with your cost argument if you are looking at Windows/Linux users as a group, compared to Mac users, however.

      --
      I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
  8. Double standard? by Osty · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Ok here's the deal: There are private APIs in OSX. They are undocumented and marked that way- these frameworks are in the private- frameworks folder.

    Apple isn't deliberately breaking peoples products, it is changing internal APIs.

    Can you say "double standard"? When Microsoft has undocumented, private, internal APIs, everyone cries "Foul!" and accuses them of hiding these APIs from developers. When they then change those internal APIs, everyone again cries "Foul!" and accuses them of breaking these internal APIs intentionally. But when Apple does this, it's okay? I guess I just don't get it.

    1. Re:Double standard? by BitGeek · · Score: 4, Insightful



      You're talking about two different situations. Just go to your mac in /System/Library/PrivateFRameworks and you can see all the private frameworks.

      Private is a lable-- it means "Don't use this, it may well change".

      What microsoft did was make the OS react different ly to different programs that were accessing published APIs. Microsoft was making its APIs not fit the specification, and it was providing hidden hooks into its OS.

      The private framworks are there for everyone to see-- you're just told that they will change. When they do, you don't get to cry foul.

      When microsoft releases a new product that breaks your own product that was using the public apis, then its legitimate to cry foul.

      The difference is microsoft was making it so products could only work if they approved them.

      Apple is merely saying "you're responsible if you use these, they will change".

      Yeah, that's a double standard. Nope.

      --
      Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/ 1816257
    2. Re:Double standard? by roukounas · · Score: 2, Insightful
      When Microsoft has undocumented, private, internal APIs, everyone cries "Foul!" and accuses them of hiding these APIs from developers. When they then change those internal APIs, everyone again cries "Foul!" and accuses them of breaking these internal APIs intentionally. But when Apple does this, it's okay? I guess I just don't get it.

      I guess the argument here is that Microsoft uses these internal APIs to give their software an edge in the competition. When they change these APIs, they make sure to update their software in advance, so that again the rest of the world is lagging behind. Standard business practice, I guess...

    3. Re:Double standard? by ivan256 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Can you say "double standard"? When Microsoft has undocumented, private, internal APIs, everyone cries "Foul!" and accuses them of hiding these APIs from developers.

      You're right, you don't get it. The difference is that Microsoft uses undocumented APIs in their products that are sold outside of windows, while other application vendors don't get the benifit of those APIs. Apple's undocumented APIs are internal to the OS, and they don't use them in software that they sell in competition with third party application vendors. If an API is undocumented because it's internal to the OS it's OK, but if it's undocumented to give you an edge over other application vendors then it's wrong.

    4. Re:Double standard? by WatertonMan · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The difference is that these calls are obviously better documented than the ones Microsoft was using. Further the big problem with Microsoft was generating APIs for MS Office that they wouldn't share with Word Perfect or Lotus. This gave Microsoft a competitive advantage with respect to things like OLE integration or the like. Now if you've used Apple's software, you'll notice that just getting them to even make use of the supplied APIs is a problem. Break out AppleWorks. How much of the OS calls does it even make use of? How does it handle fonts? Does it use that nice font chooser? No. How about all those other nice features of OSX? Nope. So Apple isn't really utilizing those calls except for system software that comes with the OS. If anything, even half of those apps don't utilize them enough. (Although thankfully the Finder works better in 10.2) Unlike the MS situation, it seems 3rd parties utilize these "undocumented calls" more than Apple does.

  9. My take by Auckerman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm sorry, but this is rubbish. The skin resource file for OS X (even 10.2) is understood and people continute to "skin" 10.2 (Keildoscope author not with standing). The same 3rd GUI apps for OS 9 are available for for 10.2. I've talked to people who hide their dock and use OTHER apps with other functionality. So there is no Apple sanctioned "Appearance Manager" in 10.2. Frankly, I would say, Apple only grudging supported the Appearance Manager, after pulling their own skins from 8.x after the beta process.

    The problem is that no developer has steped up to plate to make a good PreferencePane for Skining and Icon changing. There is a difference between saying it's not possible and noone has bother to make a good app to do it.

    I would go with the latter.

    --

    Burn Hollywood Burn
  10. Re:And Apple isn't a monopoly ? by reallocate · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Apple is the only company that makes Apple computers and Apple software. Ford is the only company that makes Ford automobiles and parts. Neither is a monopoly in their industries. There are lots of other people willing to sell you PC's, operating systems, and cars.

    --
    -- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
  11. Many of the old Mac hacks were really evil by Mars+Saxman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's easy to customize the interface when the system provides a mechanism for patching any system call and offers no memory protection. You can hook yourself right into the UI code and do whatever you want. Of course Apple doesn't want to support this sort of thing anymore: it practically guarantees instability. INITs were always hard to do correctly, and I'm glad to see them go even if it does mean it's harder to customize the UI.

    I don't blame Apple for messing with internal API calls. If I were in their shoes, I'd deliberately break anything that used undocumented calls in every release. This keeps hack developers on their toes, as they are forced to upgrade their OS and re-test their hacks for every release; there's no more of this "well, it worked back in 1987 on my Mac SE, so it should run fine on my G3 using OS 9.1" crap Mac users have been living with for so many years. It also preserves Apple's ability to change the OS implementation internally; if they leave undocumented APIs static for too long, developers will start to take them for granted and users will complain when Apple breaks them. Better to break them on purpose and prevent anyone from getting too comfortable.

    -Mars

  12. Re:Doesn't seem like a problem to me... by bcrowell · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Yep, sounds like a good decision. Customizability is the enemy of stability and usability. A case in point was extensions in pre-X versions of MacOS. Everybody had different extensions, and extensions would conflict with each other and with various apps. You'd get a buggy app that would crash all the time, and tech support would try to blame it on extension conflicts, even if that was BS. (Adobe tried to tell me PageMaker was crashing because of extension conflicts, even though I wasn't running any extensions except for Apple extensions and Adobe extensions that were required in order for the software to run!) I've heard some people complain because X no longer has extensions, but personally I'm blissfully happy. It was a mess.

    Anyhow, if the Slashdot crowd wants to get under the hood and tinker, they can run BSD with Darwin, and not run MacOS or Aqua. Apple never pretended that Aqua was going to be anything but a proprietary piece of software.

    --
    Find free books.
  13. ugh by khuber · · Score: 2, Insightful
    This is the OS I'm supposed to like more than Linux?

    No thank you!

    -Kevin

  14. Steve Jobs is the problem. by PrimeNumber · · Score: 2, Insightful

    He should stick to marketing, which he is very good at, and let the users decide what to do with their own computers.

    The reason that the apple was such a huge success in the first place was because of openness. Woz made it a point that the apple manual include a schematic diagram of the early Apple II, because he knew it would encourage third party development.

    Jobs also forgets he doesn't have the "mindshare" among commercial software developers and users, M$ does. This means that most commercial developers/software companies will put up with MS because they have too, because their clients for the most part use windows.

    So all of this essentially means that he is pissing off the few(er) remaining MAC OS developers left, and not to troll (I have a MAC), and they are becoming rarer and rarer.

  15. There is no problem here. by Have+Blue · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Apple has always tried to maintain control of the GUI; they publish the HI guidelines and provide standard controls to keep the UI uniform, standardized, and consistent across apps and machines. Of course they aren't happy about utilities that change this interface around. Remember, one of the biggest pieces of criticism leveled at Linux and one of the biggest reasons commercial development hasn't taken off is that the GUI is a moving target: There are too many different window managers, versions of window managers, and theme options to present a stable platform for interface design. Apple knows that have exactly ONE gui is a very good thing; look especially at the mention of tech support issues. You may not care about that but Apple's target audience does and therefore Apple has to.

    And besides, we're making mountains out of molehills here. Apple gives you a built-in shell and a free IDE, and you bitch about not being able to put icons in the menu bar?

  16. Big Deal by wazzzup · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The only people worried about this are the ones that like skins on media players so you have no freaking clue where the minimize button is. They are also the ones that code web pages that change the color and style of your browser widgets for no apparent reason other that the fact that they can. They also bitch when companies like RedHat take the next step in unifying the desktop experience to help Linux move forward to greater acceptance.

    A consistent UI is a good thing people.

    Besides, why is everybody aping about how pretty Aqua is if all they want to do is change it and muck it up?

  17. Christ by Jobe_br · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Some slap-happy journalist at Wired interviews a few folks and makes a broad statement about Apple being anti-tweaking. Talking about APIs not being open - hell, many of the OS 9 APIs weren't open, people just had ResEdit to tweak the hell outta things - big difference!

    Apple's lawyers may turn the other cheek, but its engineers have taken a more active approach. To prevent interface changes in OS 10.2, known as Jaguar, the software prevents programs from taking up certain bits of screen real estate. For example, the API that allows for custom menus and icons on the right side of the top menu bar, next to the clock, prohibits all but Apple-approved menu items.

    Aww, c'mon. Let's not rehash this. What the hell is an "Apple approved" menu item?!? Its not like a developer has to get an "Official Apple Menu Item" seal for his app or anything - just that previously there were multiple APIs for placing something in the menubar, now there is one definitive API. Big deal!

    Apple isn't losing any users, at least not ones that will spend $$ (after all, Apple's a business - they care about the Mac culture, yes, but they care more about the $$). Professionals that use Macs want stability. So many of the hacks for OS 9 would demote the stability of the OS to the ranks of Win9x or worse. Combining hacks would be even worse. Heck, even legit plugins for things like Photoshop could wreck your system. Apple knows this, so they're trying real hard to develop a system that provides what will hopefully become 'legendary' stability.

    Keep in mind, also, that Apple may be keeping its private-APIs private, not only to prevent instability from encroaching on the system, but also to prevent competitors (read: Microsoft) from easily stealing enhancements made to OS X. Obviously Microsoft can also steal an idea and reimplement it, but Apple doesn't have to make that easy on them. I understand that having the API isn't equivalent to having the source, but defining an API isn't exactly a piece-of-cake, either. It takes a lot of careful thought and a tremendous amount of time to develop a stable API and corresponding documentation.

    Musta been a slow news day at Wired.

  18. Steve Jobs's anality--some good, some bad results by hyacinthus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There's an irony in the Wired article praising the alterable nature of old System 7; one of the reasons why using System 7 was such a pleasure was that nearly all of the applications looked much the same and used the same interface elements. The readily available tools for constructing interfaces, notably ResEdit, tended to enforce uniformity as well. Yet appearance and behavior _were_ alterable, although it wasn't easy. I wasted a few months playing with custom WDEFs and CDEFs myself--with effort and trickery, you could do almost anything, but it was a great way to crash the system too.

    The main thing about System 7, though, was that it didn't really _need_ much modification. Oh, there were some useful little add-ons--toolbars like the Control Strip which floated above all other windows, menubar additions, Apple Menu tweaks. But mostly, the system was just fine the way it was, until Apple started fucking with it--the introduction of the "Platinum" (or Copland, or "Aaron", or whatever) look is when Apple jumped the shark, in my opinion. I played with Kaleidoscope for a bit, but I never used it for more than a few days, partly because it rendered the behavior of the system somewhat unpredictable (you never knew when some application's interface might not look really strange with Kaleidoscope enabled), partly because making the system look _pretty_, as in "ain't this a wonderful screenshot?" pretty, also makes it more difficult to use.

    But for whatever reason, many people think that the ability to set your system font to 48-point Wingdings and your window frame colors to be yellow and purple is the ultimate freedom. Hence the Enlightenment window manager, for example. Lots of fun to play with, great for amassing an album of pictures of people's desktops, but good and useful? Not really.

    Having a locked-down interface isn't necessarily bad. The BeOS interface (remember BeOS?) was even more closed than Apple's (either System 7 or MacOS X), but since it was spare, functional, and worked reasonably well, most BeOS users, including myself, didn't really mind.

    The trouble with Steve Jobs's obsession with preserving the Aqua look is that the Aqua look stinks. Not as badly as it used to, but the Dock is still an abomination, everything still takes up too much room, and if you're running a system at all limited in capacity (a 2nd-generation iBook in my case), the GUI's performance is irksome and slow. The beauty of System 7 was that it looked good whether you ran it on a Mac Classic or a PowerMac 8500. But Jobs's attitude seems to be, "Well, you should just buy a faster computer if it's slow, and a bigger monitor if it takes up too much room. Get with the program." (Ironic, considering that Apple is notorious for providing packaged systems with not enough built-in memory and small monitors.)

    hyacinthus.

  19. No one cries foul by ACNeal · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The only thing I cry about is how stupid I was for buying something that some undereducated corner cutting developers product.

    The only thing I yell at the developers of a platform about are depricated fucntions, and even then not loudly. I get so mad when a function I start to rely on gets depricated. Then, as soon as I find out it was depricated, I have to do the math, do I go replace it now, costing my clients money up front, or do I wait until the depreciated function is actually removed, and then charge on the backend. Justify it now, or have a crunch situation that I can obviously blame on someone else later.

    But I have never heard anyone complain about MS undocumented API's that I gave credence to. It definitly isn't a mainstream complaint. And if anyone (MS propoent or opponent) complains about an undocumented API changing, they deserve a swift kick in the pants, and whatever else they get.

  20. It's an Instrument, Not a Freakin' Religion!!!! by ausoleil · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I've got Windows, Linux and a Mac machine in the house. They all know their roles, and they do them reasonably well. I wouldn't trade any of them for any of them, if that makes sense to you. Cats meow and dogs bark. SFW. Point is, I care about getting the job done, not the tool I use to do it. Computers are just machines, not religions worthy of jihad.

    The means is irrelevant to the ends. Do you edit a digital picture to make it more aesthetic, or to make it look like a MAc edited it? Do you type a letter into Word to show off your word processor or to convey your thoughts to the recipient? Do you serve web docs to the world to demonstrate Apache or to share your idiotic blogs to all who care to waste time reading it? You get the point.

    Maybe I am old now, and remember life before all three of the aforementioned OS's, but the fact is that each have their place and do certain things better than the other -- no matter what zealots, evangalists or underinformed Luddites would like you to believe.

  21. Re:Yes and No. by Lazaru5 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The fact is also that for most users and Apple's target market, they neither care that some unknown UI hacker won't be able to change her interface anymore, or make such such changes available for others. What this means is:
    1. They won't be turned off of Macs because of some rebellious "fight the power" attitude (a reference to the submitter's not switching to a mac because of this).
    2. They won't be interested in, or even be aware of, any such mods.
    And the AC whom you responded to was talking to the Slashdot audience in general (and the submitter in particular) and not the typical Apple user. And the /. audience is quick (sometimes too quick) to get riled up over a misunderstanding of issues. I applaud them for trying to stop it before it started. (Course, 5:Insightful is a bit over the top for something that's obvious.)

    I dunno, maybe the original submission wasn't well thought out. The article is clearly about UI changes but they responded as if Apple had said they were tossing out the APSL and ceasing all further open source projects.

    Having said that, I don't really think that UI changes affect Apple negatively. As you said, Apple has a target market. That target market expects the OS to look and work a certain way. That target market isn't GOING to change their UI. That target market will continue to Perceive the Reality that Apple puts forth unto them.

    It can be argued even (and the Wired article touches on this) that UI hacking by those who care actually _help_ Apple. Many changes to MacOS over the years came from someone a hack. Even MacTCP (though not a UI hack) was a hack for a long time before Apple took it as their own.
    --

    --
    My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
  22. This is an issue, how... ? by Warlock7 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This has got to be the most ignorant one yet. Really, do you think that the "tweakability" of the interface is what draws us zealots to the Macintosh? Not even close. So, get over yourself here. This has got to be the silliest argument yet.

  23. I knew a 'tweaker more than artist' before.. by angelo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    He had his mac tweaked out, and tried constantly to change something about its configuration, that he never got his 'art' done.. his 'art' consisted at throwing filter after filter in photoshop onto a photo (usually something along the porn lines) at low res until it 'became' art or something. I called it crap. You can tweak all you want, but you are missing the point of 'just works'

    --
    Lowmag.net
  24. Re:I too know a lot of artists by Spyky · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The Apple monitors are *not* incompatable with the rest of the PC world. The connector is based on a basic DVI connection and adds power and USB. You can get an adaptor from Apple themselves. And if you are considering spending $3500 certainly $150 is hardly a problem, as the entire package is still cheaper than most other LCD monitors.

    Apple in recent years has gone to great lengths to use standards, realizing that they cannot make Apple Bus and AppleTalk etc. and expect companies to design hardware that works with their proprietary protocol.

    In fact I'm hard pressed to think of a single proprietary protocol or otherwise that is in use in any modern mac. USB, Firewire, ATA, standard SDRAM, DVI, TCP/IP, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, 802.11b, etc.

    Not trying to say that Apple doesn't do dumb things, but I think they've gotten a lot smarter in the last few years, and I think its worth giving them credit where credit is due.

    Spyky

  25. Misses The Point by johnos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The thing is that Apple has done something remarkable here. They have put Unix on the desktop of ordinary users. The flexibility and extensibility of this OS is beyond belief. They haven't dumbed down Unix, they have transformed it. My kids can set up an Apache server in about five minutes. They can't do that with any other OS.

    I use Windows, Linux and Mac every day, and like them all. But objectively, OSX is light years ahead of anything else. IMHO, that is. It will take another year or two before this becomes clearly apparent.

  26. Which is it? Customizability--good or bad? by g4dget · · Score: 3, Insightful
    "Whereas Apple pioneered the completely customizable system, they are now headed in the other direction, trying to close most APIs that deal with the interface,"

    This sounds like making lemonade out of lemons. The Macintosh was "completely customizable" because it was a real-mode operating system. People could hack into its data structures from user programs whether Apple wanted them to or not. To bring at least some order to the madness, Apple added some APIs.

    For Apple, opening up the APIs that "control the placement, function and look of windows and menus" was a necessity. It wasn't something they "pioneered" either: X11 had those APIs designed into it from the ground up. That's why, for better or for worse, you can use dozens of toolkits seamlessly on the same screen, pick your window manager and lots of accessories on X11 as you like.

    For years, one of the big attractions of the Mac was the ability to customize the operating system. Users could completely overhaul the machine's interface, sometimes to the point where it was entirely idiosyncratic.

    Mac evangelists can't have it both ways. Either they like end-user customization or they don't.

    Out of the box, X11 desktops like Gnome, KDE, or Motif are as consistent as Macintosh, but X11 allows extensive end-user customization, it allows applications written with completely different toolkits to work together, and that's designed in, easy to use, and open.

    But that's not Apple's philosophy: Apple wants to bring a standard, simple user experience to the Macintosh, and having people "tweak" the UI interferes with that. That's another possible point in the GUI design space, and there is nothing wrong with that philosophy.

    But you can't have a GUI that offers both the possibility of, and support for, tweaking and simultaneously doesn't offer it. Apple has made the valid choice of trying to prohibit tweaking in OS X. That will appeal to many schools, universities, and IT managers. But it will also not appeal to many other users.

    Ultimately, Mac zealots have to learn the painful lesson that engineering and design consists of tradeoffs: it's impossible for a single product to be the best at everything. A company can design products that are bad at everything, but here is no "best personal computer", "best user interface", or "best operating system".

  27. Typical fake conflict journalism by ianscot · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Pretty classic bit of modern journalism. Our news channels cast anything as a radical conflict. If a reporter gets an assignment, job one is to identify a conflict, and job two is to categorize all sources in terms of which artificially-polarized side the source belongs to.

    Look at our primary sources here:

    "Apple is uptight about (changes to the interface)," said Brian Wilson, business manager at Unsanity, which has created a number of OS X interface utilities. "But at the same time they haven't given us any grief. We've had neither help nor hassle."

    Sounds like a draconian regime of not caring much, doesn't it?

    "It's the end of an era," said Greg Landweber, co-developer of Kaleidoscope, one of the most popular Mac customization tools ever created. "Under the old Mac system, doing these little interface tweaks was really easy. You could change almost anything. Now, you can't change the way they work, only their appearance."

    Greg Landweber's take, then, is that you can change the appearance, you just can't move the functional elements to completely different locations. Did anyone really use the Kaleidoscope themes that had the window buttons on the side? Those are the ones that just hit the rocks.

    I took delivery on my 17" iMac last Friday. Believe me, there's no shortage of tweaks to the UI. I'm running a handful now. If Apple's making noise just now, it's just to emphasize that tweakers are there only at Apple's discretion -- always the case, right?

    Just another overstated conflict story where there really isn't much of a conflict, if you ask me.

    --
    "Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
  28. Kalediscope... by Justen · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wired, I'm afraid, is looking for a conspiracy where none exist. The team at Kaleidoscope is working on an OS X version of their classic (and Classic) appearance app.

    As a former Kaleidoscope user, I can tell you that it, and just about any other "tweak" or "hack" app broke after most any update (from the System 7 days right up to the latest Classic). This isn't anything new. Apple is constantly updating the interface (Jaguar has quite a few interface changes, behind the scenes).

    No conspiracy, sorry!

    jrbd

  29. Ya know - if you don't like Aqua use KDE by raque · · Score: 2, Insightful

    One thing that isn't being noted here is that you can run X at the same time as Aqua. If you feel like tweeking do that. If Apple can't make good on a claim that OSX - Including Aqua - isn't secure and stable they've got nothing to compete with.

    It is more stable and secure than Windows - with a better tought out UI.

    It is more clean and consistant than Linux - with a better thought out UI

    So it has the best of both without the worst of either.

    It you allow people to muck arround with the guts of Aqua without a clue then you get the worst of both instead.

  30. Apple Menu by Draoi · · Score: 3, Insightful
    For example, the API that allows for custom menus and icons on the right side of the top menu bar, next to the clock, prohibits all but Apple-approved menu items.

    Really? Then what about ASM, which I cannot get by without ...?? BTW, yeah it works with Jag.

    --
    Alison

    "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein