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Freshmeat Launches Mac OS X Section
Liedra writes "After announcing Mac OS X software surreptitiously within its main section for the past several months, freshmeat has now launched a section totally devoted to the platform. Read the article by scoop and visit the section directly." Since I switched my primary laptop to OS X, I'm glad to see scoop do this. (Note, Freshmeat & Slashdot are both owned by OSDN.)
IIRC, someone here on slashdot speculated that OSDN was going to attempt to be bought out by Apple, hence the significant number of Mac-only topic icons here on slashdot, plus the dedicated apple.slashdot.org address.
Though it makes plenty of sense for freshmeat to have a dedicated Apple section, this certainly provides more fuel for the Sell-to-Apple hypothesis...
-A
One of the things that's kept the Mac software distribution under the radar of most sites like FreshMeat is the fact that for quite some time they've had VersionTracker doing quite well at it. VersionTracker's just starting to get into the PC aspect of things, and remains highly Mac-centric even though PalmOS software is supported as well. VersionTracker may be a pay service, but I discovered a very nice set of features is available with the "Pro" subscription for $50 a year. Not only do you get the daily list of new software updates, but a nifty little application to run on your machine that acts as a new app ticker. Quite nice. But the really nice part is the fact that for your $50, you get 10 licenses and are able to use the Pro software on both PC and Mac platforms.
Maybe someone ought to look into getting a *nix section started with VersionTracker?
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Since I switched my primary laptop to OS X, I'm glad to see scoop do this.
The great Taco isn't using Linux? Oh, what sad times are these when passing ruffians can say "OS-X" at will to old ladies. There is a pestilence upon this land! Nothing is sacred.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
All OSX really is involves an updating of NextStep (for good or ill), and a replacement of X11 with something more bulletproof using interface guidelines. Was NextStep *nix? Nobody I know disputes it. Why're you disputing OSX? Because it's proprietary? That horse has been beaten to death, and nobody hammers on SGI or Sun for proprietary OS'es. Is it because of Aqua being closed source? Okay, so compile (or download the binary for) Xdarwin and use regular X apps. Of course there you have to worry about dependencies, and libraries for GTK, window managers...
I hope more people re-engineer X11 apps with a Cocoa frontend. Or, perhaps someone ought to start a project similar to WINE, but for the Cocoa API? Just don't put the look and feel in exact, and do it for interoperability... who knows, maybe you can slip under Apple's legal radar.
Or not. Bleah.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
What makes a unix-like os unix-like?
Bash/tcsh/sh/*sh ? OSX Has it
X11? OSX has it
Unix kernel? Got that too
ssh? Yup
Stability? Yup
Bad UI that's hard to use and not fully intergrated? Hmm... maybe OSX has a ways to go.
Hell... it *should* be possible to port any unix app to darwin and run it in an xserver on OSX.
Or, perhaps someone ought to start a project similar to WINE, but for the Cocoa API?
I really don't know why, but GNUStep doesn't seem to be very popular. GNUStep is an implementation of the OpenStep specification and they even track changes from Apple! It's what you are looking for - with a little effort, applications can be made to compile under both GNUStep and Cocoa (completely legal too, since OpenStep is open(duh)). Foundation seems to be pretty much complete and AppKit lacks just a few Apple-specific things like Drawers and Sheets (which will be added at some point in the future).
Really, GNUStep needs a little more exposure - I switched to a Mac, but I still think GNUStep is great and could be something better than GNOME/KDE.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
Sorry man, you are actually wrong again =) The kernel of Mac OS X is something called Darwin, which is heavily based on *BSD, and specifically is highly inspired by FreeBSD. It is 100% UNIX. Not like Windows+cywin, since the kernel of OS X is actually a 100% fully blown UNIX. People are running it on x86 hardware too!
You also say that "the GUI isn't UNIX." Well, I challenge you to tell me of a GUI that *is* UNIX. UNIX and windowing systems have nothing to do with each other. You need to have a better understanding of the issues before you blast Freshmeat for this.
Freshmeat's policy of UNIX-like operating systems holds perfectly true here. OS X is as much a UNIX as Linux, FreeBSD, AIX, Solaris, or OpenBSD.
And, you can't interpret "UNIX-like" loosely enough to call Windows + Cygwin UNIX. I don't even want to have to argue that =)
Replying to my own post, I think a better example than Mac OS X is PalmOS. There's no way that you could reasonably count PalmOS as a Unixlike operating system (or at least, any such definition would be so broad it would have to include almost any modern OS). Yet Freshmeat happily lists PalmOS-only software. Windows software? Oh no, we can't have that, this is a Unix site. Please, Freshmeat, consider ditching the Unix bias (particularly as a large chunk of Mac OS X applications will not run on any other Unix system) and accepting submissions for software running on all operating systems, even that one from Redmond we're not supposed to like.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com