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.

Comments

Mod parent up.

[cmoney]

The article talks about GUI mods, NOT OS and system tweaks.

And like the parent said, Kaleidescope interfaces were real crap anyway.

I too know a lot of artists

[FreeUser]

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.

I too know a lot of artists, and am related to several. My experience does not mirror yours at all. My cousin tweaks the hell out of her Apple (she even installed Red Hat GNU/Linux on it at one time, even though her computer savviness, such as it is, comes strictly from using it as a tool for doing her graphic design work, creating websites, etc.). Come to think of it, so does my other cousin (who is not an artist, but rather a medical doctor), as do several other artists I know. In fact, I can't think of one artist I know who hasn't tweaked the hell out of how their computer, be it an Apple or a Wintel PC, looks.

I should point out (and anyone reading my posting history here and elsewhere will confirm) that I am quite often very critical of Apple, their approach, their marketing, and their often "shoot myself in the foot and ask questions later" attitude, be it closing the source to parts of their derivative FreeBSDesque operating system, or deliberately making the hardware they are trying to sell as incompatible with PCs as possible (23" LCD monitor anyone? Thanks to Apple's idiocy I ended up buying a Samsung 24" instead. That's about $4,000 that would have gone to Apple, were it not for their inability to resist making everything they can proprietary, non-standard, and incompatible, but I digress), thereby losing a potential market orders of magnitude larger than the one they are trying to target. I make no apology, nor bones about criticizing the hell out of Apple for such stupidity when I see it, so I think it is clear I am not an Apple apologist by any measure.

All that having been said, Apple is not trying to close off the operating system, they are trying to prevent application developers and third parties from modifying how their core API and widgets work, in order to insure their "consistent" interface remains consistent. Unlike many here I find nothing of value in a consistent interface vs. a collection of choices, but neither do I find anything wrong with Apple persuing such a policy, so long as they do not extend it beyond their core GUI objects and leave the remainder of the operating system and its libraries open to those who wish to tweak.

Which is exactly what it appears they are doing, misleading WiReD articles notwithstanding.

I don't get it

[dazdaz]

I dont get it, are you loyal MAC users out there just going to accept this rubbish without one hell of a fight? This seems a bad decision by them, in fact it stinks of Microsoft's typical arrogrance, i'm surprised Apple have done this.