Slashdot Mirror
Mac OS X Software Roundup
zpok writes "The Register runs an interview with the two only Mac OS X coders on the OpenOffice Project. In short: no, OO.org for Mac OS X won't be delayed until 2005, but they could really really use some help."
jeblucas writes "There are new versions of Macromedia's media suite: Macromedia Studio MX 2004 with new versions of Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks. There's also a professional version of Flash (for PDA, phone, and video authoring with direct links to Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier, and Avid Express) to be had for $700."
A user writes, "Cricket Media has released a Mac OS X application for hardcore Netflix users who want to manage their accounts without using the website. The app is an interesting example of what can be done with WebKit."
lordDallan writes "Opera had recently released Opera 6.03 for Mac OS X. Purchase of this version includes a free upgrade to 7.0 when it becomes available."
OSX 10.3, coded-named Panther is at B49 right now, and as of B44 has labels ala the beastly operating system that was OS9.
Also, new Powerbooks are nowhere to be seen, which is leading many, myself included, to believe that we will not seen them until the Paris expo, which is sometime in mid-Sept.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
After all, even a fuckin' teletype can run Linux ;) Too bad the Apple Public Source License sucks so much though, since it discourages many fine programmers to write new stuff that MacOS X could run as well.
P.S. It's not because the parent message was offtopic that my reply is. Anyway, do as you please.
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
Mac addicts proclaim victory over Microsoft as the Macintosh software library nearly doubles in size.
With everyone crying about Apple ripping off Watson, pushing out Adobe Premeire, and basicaly running over a number of smaller developers, its easy to forget what they have been giving back in recent months. Lost in hardware rumors Apple is innovating in the developer scene as much as anywhere.
Developing and then giving away Webkit instantly gets a thousand projects off the ground which were previously only musings and ideas (read: netflix manager). The best of open source is when it facilitates truly independent innovative ideas that would be shot down by 'the corporate machine' and never see the light of day (read: SubEthaEdit). Dont forget Apple saw this long ago with Hypercard and have been listening to users wail about its death. Not just of the product but of the idea and philosophy of "I own an Apple, therefore I innovate."
Xcode, Applescript Studio, WebKit, Services, Java, Cocoa..... It looks like taking 5 years to plan a new OS from scratch is _finally_ paying off.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
And be sure to check outSubEthaEdit This is the renamed Hydra. Okay, the new name is kinda funky, wouldn't MagrathaEdit have sounded better? And be sure to read the interview the the Coding Monkeys behind SubEthaEdit at O'Reilly. It is really amazing what a small group of programmers have pulled off. Give these guys another six months and they may be nearly feature competitive with BBEdit.
Lee Joramo
SubEthaEdit or whatever is a mind-numbingly STUPID name. I'm going to continue to call it Hydra, just like I still call Phoenix "Phoenix" and Chimera "Chimera". Good lord. Any idea on what the BS "legal issues" are all about? Can't be much of a trademark as I've never heard of any software program called Hydra before. Oh well guess when the C&D hits your mailbox you better fold unless you can afford to win.
I would've just named it "Tafkah"...
Also, just because I"m feeling rude: those guys are really dorky-looking. Except the guy on the left he looks pretty cool. Looks to me like he's trying to get away from the others.....
Say, isn't the guy in the OSX shirt a member of Kraftwerk...? Hmm...
Lux 3.0 - the latest and greatest version of my world domination game - was released last week. It's like the boardgame Risk but with random maps and all sorts of bells and/or whistles.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
of course there was that period where steve jobs was sent off to wander in the wilderness of NeXT. being a NeXT owner it was of course shocking how NeXT like mac OSX is. all the way down to the spinning multi-colored beach ball.
of course its not really a beach ball. its really a spinning magneto optical disk. a what??? yep the very first next shipped with a magento optical disk as its main drive. It truly sucked (speed wise) and vanished from later editions. (applications launched so slowly you often ended up double and triple launching multiple instances as you clicked on the icon over and over--that probably also one reason why the apple icons hop and can only be launched once). I've always enjoyed the subtle irony of the spinning beachball.
in any case in the next day, NeXT created one of the best RAD gui tool kit ever invented, and a new language to go along with it (objective-C). and gave them away. lots of little groovy app, not major ones, showed up as a result. anyone could make a calculator or an interface to gnuplot. Oh yeah, there was one or two major ones: Mosaic and Zilla (Zilla was not related to 'mozilla', today the modern term for Zilla is 'Grid Computing'. So this strategy of making awesome developmer tools is not new
Its also clear that given how much the mac of today echos its NeXT look and feel (the file browser, the dock, netInfo, three button mice, DisplayPostscript/pdf, cube shaped computers, and of course BSD unix) that not a whole lot of development has happend since its first incarnation. In other words Steve jobs vision got slowed down and only now its taking root and flourishing
playing "what if", would we be further along if he had not cast out? one might speculate that he had to wait for technology to come along. but remember tim bernardslee invented the World wide web to justify buying a NeXT Station, we had postscript, mime e-mail, good sound cards, ethernet,giant screens, and cube shaped computers back in the hey days of NeXT. so maybe we'd be further along indeed if so much time had not been lost.
indeed I think the reason Jobs performance now seems so amazing now is not because is doing anything different but rather because MS and the beigebox makers did not seize the opportunity to innovate during his absence from the scene. the world did not eclipse Jobs it just waited for him to return and lead the way again, showing how to be an early adopter, how to integrate ideas cleverly, and how to tame Unix on the desktop. He didn't have to leap frog his way to the front. he was amazingly enough still there with his NeXT technology. Nothing in principle Sun or MS or IBM could not have done while he was out. BeOS might have been the only one who actually tried, but it was too little too late.
I wonder why apple and jobs seem to be the source of all computer creativity?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
( I'm conscious I'm using many ( haha ) vague terms like "many" or "sometimes" quite often here. It's only because I don't know of statistics about this. These are my observations and while I think they're accurate, please take them as so. I don't have higher pretentions about them. )
You're right when you say that nobody would give a fuck about the FSF if only dozens of people would agree with the ideas it maintains. Now, browse a little on SourceForge and look at the projects going on under the GPL ; yes, sometimes prior license issues are the cause of this, but it's obvious many people license their new software by choice. Same thing for the bunch of GNU projects out there. Nuff said.
I'm rather surprised by the remainder of your argument ( "Source code isn't political" and such ). What about source codes for voting machines, privacy and "national security" concerns ? These are very politically decisive examples, don't you think ? Whether it is politicized or not is not relevent since it actually happens and shapes our political systems in subtle ways, whatever you might think about it.
Refusing to see the political aspect of technology is the problem I'm referring to. I'd like to know how you think that me being interested in this perspective is a problem to the programming community.
BTW, I do realize that Apple getting SOME OF its sources public in a way is already a Good Thing. All I was saying in my original post is that it could be better. It matters to me because of its political implications and possible long-term effects on the software community, in practicality as well. Consider that a molehill if you please ; I don't.
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
I definitely agree with you on most of your post. Some restrictions on software you're talking about are my main problems with the GPL, and that's the case I pointed out in my last post ( RMS on Debian offering non-free packages ). I mean, even if I think something is immoral, I won't forbid someone from doing it : that'd be policespeak. I'm all for getting rid of licenses you know, but I do understand that due to the business model mostly used in the software industry right now, some kinds of limits are to be drawn. I'll be quite thrilled if the situation exists where all licenses could be gotten rid of, but that's revolution stuff and I won't get into this here ;)
;)
BTW, I do realize there are MUCH more important issues, and I do spend time on some of the ones you talked about and on others too ( popular education, for example ). But I'm on Slashdot here, not on infoshop.org, you know
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
Slashdot is doing webcopynews of versiontracker!! :)
*ducks*
The Netflix app might actually get my fiancee to use my mac a little more often. It's always the little things...
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Oh come on. Climb down from your high horses.
Webkit is forked of khtml dickhead. They are forced to give it away. If they where not there would be no code for you to look at.
Apple is about as much open source as Microsoft. Only giving away code they have to give away or code noone except Mac users care about (darwin).
Apple is in no way in the spirit of open source. I have used other open source operating systems well before Macs barely could multitask and this OS X you speak so highly about give nothing new to the open source table. All the interessting stuff is locked down so tight you can't do anything with it from an open source perspective.
So please. You have a great operating system there in OS X. Lets stay at that. It isn't particulary open source. Apple is a big company and could bring a hell of a lot more to the table then what they do right now. Until they do, many of us will not consider it to be the next open source operating system.
I guess I'm in a karma burning mode today...
KHTML is LGPL.
Could you restate your point?
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
>code noone except Mac users care about
Surely the Open Source Darwin Streaming Server is of no interest to anyone but Mac users. Also Open Directory, Rendezvous and the Apple CDSA framework for encrypting etc. is completely useless.
Thanks for telling me I wouldn't have noticed that.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
I wonder why apple and jobs seem to be the source of all computer creativity?
It's the kool-aide you've been drinking.
>>it was of course shocking how NeXT like mac OSX is. all the way down to the spinning multi-colored beach ball.
Hang on there. I've been using Macs since the mid 1980s (how I remember the excitement of getting a 20Mb external hard drive to supplement the single 800K floppy...it took me years to fill it. But i digress), and there's always been a spinning beach ball. Of course it started out in B&W since that's how Macs started too (and NeXT was originally launched as a grayscale machine).
NeXT took as much from the original Mac interface as it has given back to OSX.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
Hang on yourself. I've used Macs from day one (1983), as well as NeXTSTEP (although I only started with version 2 or thereabouts, but I've still got my black hardware at home). I assure you the "beachball" in OS X was taken from NeXT. It resembled NeXT even more closely in OS X preview releases, before Apple made it puffy.
irb(main):001:0>
Make that 1984. ;-)
irb(main):001:0>
So how does one get in touch with Dan Williams mentioned in the interview? I would like to help a bit with porting OO to mac os x. Not much of a coder but they mentioned that they could use some warm bodies for other tasks
My Hotmail account is for anti-spam purposes. I use other e-mail addresses to communicate at work and with my friends, but I use this disposable address for public stuff like my Web page, Slashdot, chatrooms and whatnot. I think preserving my inboxen clean while filling MS servers with junk is definitely a win-win situation, moreover when you consider that I got plug-ins to block their ads.
:) I've made these animations like last year, and at that time I didn't know much about alternatives to mainstream software so I took the obvious path. Anyway, I've been thinking about new stuff to put in there soon, and of course I'll get rid of Flash stuff at one point. Thanks for your interest in my Web pages sir, any suggestions ? ;)
As for the Flash stuff on my site, it's just getting pretty old
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
No, he's right. I also used both Macs and NeXT boxes, and the spinning colour-wheel/beach-ball/CD was originally a black and white spinning "colour-wheel" on the Mac. If you ever used HyperCard, it showed up pretty often. On NeXT boxes, it became a spinning CD, but was very similar. But you're right, it wasn't the colourful blob it is now until MacOS 10.1 or 10.2, it was the exact NeXT cursor.
I know what you mean but your mistaken I beleive. macs had a 2-d spinning wheel. sort of like a pie chart with equla slices two of which were black and two of which were white. it did not resemble a CD or magneto optical disk. it was just a figure. the Next version was full grey scale, with shading to give it dimension, it was intended to have the diffractive look of a shiny multi-hued disk (and when it became color it became actually hued). the colors are not so much a rainbow as consistent with a look of a CD lit from the right direction.
If you are going produce a piece of software for collaborative editing, why not name it for the fictionally greatest collaborative work of all time the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Thousands of Hitchhikers submit entries via the SubEtha network. The perfect geek name for a geek product.
I didn't seee Director MX mentioned. Everyone appears to be flash centric these days but there has been a Mac OS X version of Director out for 8 months and Director can do a lot of things that Flash can't and even can include Flash inside a Director movie.
Plus with xtras, you can write your own C++ to extend Director's functionality. We just got another SQL database xtra today.
Sorry to not see it mentioned in the software roundup.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
- TeXshop (Apple Design Award winner---modelled on NeXT' TeXView.app --- add in EquationEditor.app to get NeXT's TeX eq -> eps Service)
.pdf files and get a (visual) formatted version of the text therein.
- Fugu - spiffy front-end to some sort of secure file transfer protocol
- Free Ruler (but I wish Mac OS X had user-definable logical screen dpi and that so many apps weren't hardwired to 72dpi)
- rBrowserLite - spiffy free FTP client / alternative file browser
- TextLightning.app (shareware) - way cool fileservice which allows apps to open arbitrary
- sBook5 - nifty AI-based contact / note manager
- Zippist - drag-drop zip program
- Purgatory Design's Intaglio drawing program - AFAIK, the only OS X graphics program which fully supports AAT / ATSUI
- the QT port of LyX (this is way cool on Win32 too)
Un-cool software, which should have been cool includes:
- Macromedia FreeHand MX - this should've been a Cocoa version which was a successor to Altsys Virtuoso for NeXTstep. Instead we got a Carbon program w/ no Unicode or nifty type system support.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Here I see an update for the Flash program, but what about Flash Player? I find it depressing that for a Mac you need a quicksilver dual G4 to smoothly run a typical animation (God forbid if it's interactive), but it runs fine on a low-end PC. When large objects change alpha or multiple movie clips move all at once it's more like Flash Photographer. Macromedia should make a COCOA Flash player that actually remotely approaches the Mac's potential. It feels slower than an emulator, something's really wrong here.
The parent is wrong. Despite all his typos, and Lussarn has it right: LGPL is a recursive license for derived works (e.g. forks). The only difference between LGPL and GPL is for other projects which depend on the licensed one -- if khtml were GPL, then Safari would have to be GPL as well; as it is, Apple only has to release Webkit open source.
However, the big question is -- and this is much bigger than Lussarn gives it credit for! -- why did Apple choose to use khtml at all? They could have written their own rendering engine and kept it completely proprietary. They also could have used Gecko and kept it completely proprietary, since the Mozilla license is, IIRC, a BSD-style non-recursive license. (Anybody know for sure on that one?) Apple had plenty of choices resulting in a completely proprietary Webkit, and they didn't take them.
So saying that "Apple is as much about open source as Microsoft" is just plain wrong. When was the last time Microsoft open sourced anything? Sure, they used open source code in their products -- but they've actively avoided any and all recursive open source licenses.
Apple may not be an angel -- they're a corporation, for heaven's sake, and they're beholden to their shareholders and not to the moral compasses of Slashdot readers -- but they've consciously decided to participate some in the take & give back process of open source when they could very well have just stayed out completely.
And don't try to tell me that hasn't done anything useful for anyone. Or has BSD never pulled a patch from Darwin? Has khtml not examined the optimizations Apple made?