Slashdot Mirror
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.
Where is the DOJ and state attorney generals ? I expect a lawsuit to be filed immediately giving me the source to the MAC user interface so I can make adjustments to my hearts desire.
Oh wait, this is an anti-Mac article, not an anti-M$ article, guess my karma is headed down now
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
First, this is in reference to GUI tweaking, which I think is a fairly bad idea anyway. Many OS X apps have features based around the GUI, such as "dock-aware" applications and the likes, so if you go in and be a super-h4x0r to make your OS X box look like a Wind0z3 machine or something dumb like that, applications would probably get very, very pissed. OS X will always be tweakable as long as it has the BSD kernel. As this is the whole purpose of OS X, I don't see this fact changing any time soon.
-agent oranje.
Whoops. Why did you post again?
Most Kaleidoscope interfaces were ugly as sin...
but they weren't all. I remember some, you-could-almost-say-beautiful, kaleidoscope themes. When I lived in Japan there were clubs where people would design clever and attractive ones. Floral patterns, space patterns, favourite cartoon characters, whatever...
It's hard thing to explain to someone whose idea of 'themes' comes from the microsoft default 'options', but the immediate and powerful impression you got when you saw a mac really decked-out with customizations like kaleidoscope was real. It was one of those things non-geeks could do that bullt a relationship with their machine. Sure, it sounds corny and belonging to the 'get-a-life' category, but it was one of those things that made people love their macs the way windows users rarely did.
Furthermore, they (kaleidoscope ultra-themes) were the one feature of the Mac I have never seen even remotely equalled outside the mac world. (I don't discount that it may have been done in the multi-window-manager world of the unices, but i've personally never seen the equivalents, and as far as windows? forget about it.)
Being able to customize their their interfaces, right down to the shapes and design of the scroll bars, the location of the close/windowshade buttons, the title bars... it let you feel your mac was truly yours. (And the smilely mac face gave a bit of personality, too.)
I think apple's new policy sucks. IMHO.
My house mate bought one of those titanium macs. Its slow, its expensive, its not compatible, and all he does with it is reconfigure the "look and feel" of his desktop, or play with the usb "wheel knob" adjusting the volume of the mp3 player. Why bother? Why not just get windows. It works out of the box. It runs on _really fast_ hardware, and its cheap. And there is less messing around prior to getting work done. At any rate, as soon as Microsoft gets pissed off at Apple again . . . no more office => no more mac sales. Already the files produced by excel on the mac aren't quite compatible with excel 2000 on windows!
BlackBolt