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History Of The NeXT Platform
ToothBrush writes "OSNews published an article about the BSD/Mach-based NeXT Platform, discussing its history and its capabilities back then. The article has lots of screenshots and it is generally a good introduction --of the once innovative platform-- for younger readers who are unaware of the inheritance that lead to Mac OS X."
As long as it's internal competition, and not complete downtreading of either OSs features.
The thing that introduced me and kept me on the mac was the UI of OS7.6.1 of all things, when I started doing prepress work. The consistency, the pure simplicity, and an OS that did what I wanted without me needing to think about the OS itself. That sounds awfully cliche, but it was all just -there-. I could design, draw, colour correct, print, network... no thinking of the OS needed, all my thinking could go on producing good work.
OSX 10.0 lost quite a few obvious things. They're slowly coming back, and not losing any of OSX's advantages either. It's shaping up well I think
In case anyone didn't know Window Maker is the free implementation of GNUstep. From the website "In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NEXTSTEP[tm] user interface." It's actually quite a nice lightweight window manger and runs great on older hardware (for which GNOME & KDE are much too bloated) and has a pretty good developement community.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
OSX 10.0 lost quite a few obvious things. They're slowly coming back, and not losing any of OSX's advantages either. It's shaping up well I think
I don't really agree to that... the 10.3 (panther) finder is supposed to grow back towards OS9 friendlyness, but it still sux imho. That right-half bar is almost useless (you can go to all these places with the Go menu, or put stuff in your dock. Its big, takes up space and sits in my way. They should at least have assigned a keyboard shortcut to show/hide it.). The network browser is a MAJOR pain in the ass. Still doesn't connect properly. Printing got somewhat better now that they have a print icon per printer.
I don't think 10.3 will bring us closer to the feel i had with OS8. The jump they made from 6 to 7 was insanely great. From userfriendlyness point of view, they never surpassed or even approached that stepsize.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
My point was that the original HTML viewer didn't do a great deal.
Nor do any HTML viewers. I mean, come on... It reads laid out text and places images. The point is not that it does a lot, the point is that it is convenient (clickable links).
Many apps would do well to take that message to heart.