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."

Comments

spinning beachball

[goombah99]

It looks like taking 5 years to plan a new OS from scratch is _finally_ paying off.

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?

Right

[FrankoBoy]

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 ;)

SubEthaEdit is a great name

[cbuskirk]

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.