Third Parties Already Taking Advantage of Tiger
tezbobobo writes "Tiger been out hours and already the Apple download page has been updated to take advantage of the update's new features. These cover areas including Spotlight plugins, Dashboard plugins, and Automator plugins.
These allow a range of actions from searching within omnigraph documents (spotlight), to resizing photoshop documents (automator), and (my fav) a dashboard wireless locator. The best bit -- a cursory glance indicates about half are freeware."
Yeah, but this way it can be combined with non-Photoshop operations. You could build a script to generate an index and filesystem with an integrated browser to build customized demonstration CDs.
I read the internet for the articles.
In no time at all there are going to be a whole slew of Dashboard-centric sites, Automator-centric sites, Spotlight-centric sites, and so forth. Just like there are a myriad of PHP, Javascript, CSS, etc sties, we're going to see a bunch based solely on this new Mac OS.
You gotta hand it to Apple. They create an entire industry around an iPod (don't you love how Belkin, once a patch cord company, makes loads of money off iPod accessories) and are now already sporting sites all over for an OS just recently (and in some places not even out yet) released.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Photoshop can be driven by Javascript, VBscript and Applescript. Those aren't limited to Photoshop. Although, now that I think about it, the premise of Automator seemed to be that you could easily create scripts. So it's probably just using the existing scripting capability of Photoshop, but exposing it to users in a simpler package.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
I could argue the "Cult of Mac" thing. The fact is, every group trolls here. Apple threads get Windows- and Linux-fanatics. BSD threads get "- is dying!" trolls like nobody's business. And SCO threads... well, in that case it's pretty much deserved. But nobody is spared. In a community this large, everybody hates something.
It's just plain old garden-variety groupthink, where a lot of people receive a stimulus and respond similarly. It's not a cult, but it's just two or three steps removed.
Now, as for the success of Apple on Slashdot... you need to go back a ways, but it wasn't always the way. Practically any thread mentioning Apple would attract its share of detractors, anonymous and virtiolic. Then something unforseen happened: Steve Jobs returned.
I'm not really fan of Steve Jobs either, but I will admit that a (mostly) benevolent dictator is the best thing Apple could have gotten at the time. He challenged -- and changed -- computer culture, to the point that those silly looking triangular bubble-shaped iMacs that every "expert" at the time pooh-poohed still pop up in some clip-art collections.
Over time, Apple apparently started doing some things right. Not everything, but enough to continue their survival. "Apple is dying!" went from troll's battle cry to last bastion of the hold-outs, and now where it's used, it's sarcastic. Even you admit in your post that they're doing some things correctly.
In this case, the customizeability isn't quite programming, nor should it be. The fading of Hypercard from the public eye was enough warning that most people don't want to deal with programming. There's enough control under the hood on OS X that those people who want to can play with perl, python, ruby, c, c++, obj-c, java, emacs, vi, pico, php, etc. For the rest of them, there's this neat thing that does what they tell it -- programming in essence, but not in name. And that might make it easier for people to swallow.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
There are at least two markets that Apple matches 100%
1) The clueless Windows user that call the tower the hard drive.
2) UNIX geeks that are tired of messing with Linux
Windows gamers do not match. Windows gamers match 100% using an XBox or PS2 for gaming. They would save a bundle in hardware upgrades as well...
Your Average Joe