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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.

1 of 660 comments (clear)

  1. *MOST* were by caduguid · · Score: 2, Troll

    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.