Categories... Well, that's one possible interpretation. Another is that they're a really elegant solution to the fragile base-class problem... you only have to look at things like NSString (AppkitAdditions) to see that.
I have to think that applications like Aperture and Motion are "big programs", and they seem to work pretty darn well. Aperture 2.0 especially seems to be all Cocoa (no C/C++ back-end) and it simply flies on my machine.
Hmm - I have to assume you've not used ObjC much or at all - you have to take it with its class library (Cocoa), similar to Java, but it's ridiculously easy to use once you've spent a week or so learning it. Literally, it took me a week to be proficient in this "new" language.
Applications don't need namespaces - frameworks do, but applications should be perfectly happy being run in their own (default) namespace. I think most people will be writing applications on the iPhone, not frameworks.
As for tools, XCode comes with data-modelling tools to create entity relationship diagrams/models that integrate with your code, it comes with fantastic dtrace-driven graphical performance monitoring tools, and an excellent integrated gdb-based debugger which does things like fix-and-continue, step back, etc.
The point I was trying (and obviously struggling) to make is precisely that! To see what was recorded by privately owned cameras, the police need a warrant. There's no "central station" where all this video is fed.
The CC in CCTV means "Closed Circuit", which generally means it's a camera being recorded to a local video-recorder somewhere on the premises, and perhaps a TV to watch it live.
It seems most people think there is this huge government-funded network of cameras watching every move of every person in the UK - this just isn't the case. The vast majority (~80%) of this camera network are the ones in shops, on transport (buses, trains), on ATM's, etc. etc. In other words, they're privately owned and run for the benefit of the business owner, not for the police.
Of the remainder, the vast majority of them are traffic-cameras at junctions, in speed-cameras (yes, these count, for some reason), etc. What's left are the police-owned ones which watch people in high-crime areas or (usually in partnership with the businesses) high-people-traffic areas (eg: Regent St., Oxford St. in London).
I lived in London for ~15 years before moving to CA. I don't feel any less "observed" here than I did in London. I'm on-camera in CA if I get money from an ATM; if I drive across a junction (try looking up once in a while); if I get on the BART; if I get on Caltrain; if I go to a bank;
I really wish people would stop pandering to the tabloid press trying to sell copy. Sure, there are cameras. Everywhere(*). Deal.
So, how does that not apply to the Thinkpad ? Does IBM/Lenovo/whoever-makes-the-damn-thing-these-days pay for arbitrary 3rd-party hard-drives that you plug into your machine ? Do you send them a receipt or something ?
Or is replacing-the-internal-drive just pretty much the same as plugging-in-an-external-drive ? 'Cos it seems very much that way, except a bit more inconvenient...
Seems to me you're bitching that Apple didn't help you do something that you *didn't* want to do!
Thank [insert random deity] *someone* else gets it.
Slavery is bad, no argument, but the removal of the possibility of owning slaves is indeed a restriction on your freedom. Conflating the freedom of the slave with the freedom of owning a slave, and mixing the abhorrent nature of slavery itself into the argument is all just to try and obscure the fact that the GPL *does* remove more rights than (say) the BSD licence.
Now the GPL has high motives; I've released a fair amount of software under GPL (v2, I'd never use v3), and even sold websites which used GPLv2 data to make sure that data was forever open to public use. I've released under the LGPL as well, when that suits my purposes... However, most of the s/w I release these days is under BSD - it's a pure, simple licence: "here's my stuff, do whatever you want with it, just credit me". *That* is freedom, though it's incompatible with the GPL. Tough. My software, my rules.
Software "freedom" in my eyes is about letting the author do whatever (s)he wants with the software (s)he created, even if that doesn't meet my or anyone else's personal preference. Just like freedom of speech, it's easy to defend that right when the speech in question is something you agree with. The true test of the principle comes when what is being said is repellant to you. Under this spotlight, the GPL (especially v3 with its company-hostile approach) fails dismally; the politically-driven viral nature of the GPL is a serious hinderance to my freedom in this regard. BSD fails slightly (it imposes the accreditation and distribution clauses), but it's a whole lot more free than the GPL.
[sigh] yes, I know I'm going to karma-hell on this one. Such is the price of stating a non-rabidly-pro-GPL opinion on slashdot... thank [insert the deity again] we have that freedom of speech thing, huh ?
Whereas the names and addresses of these people is a matter of public knowledge, is their email address and SSN also open ? If not, despite what you may think of their actions (public urination ? Really ?), it's not fair of the site to "blur" the relevant details so poorly.
I read the daily WTF, and usually I think it's pretty good, but Alex has made his own WTF here, IMHO.
On my Mac Pro, I have 8 3GHz CPU's. Consider that the baseline.
I have 2 8800GT cards to drive the 30" and 2x23" (rotated, one each side of the 30":-) monitors. That gives me 224 1.5GHz stream processors in the GPU. Even harmonising GHz, thats 8 compared to 112, and its a lot easier to get a parallel algorithm running efficiently on a GPU than on multiple CPU's due to differing hardware designs...
Now stream processors aren't quite the same as general purpose processors, but the way they're implemented these days, they can be programmed in high-level languages (see jon stokes' article) and if their architecture suits what you want, they can be very very quick. See here for info on programming them...
A language that only runs on one platform, even Microsoft Windows isn't going to gain my interest unless I have no choice.
Um, ObjC/Cocoa isn't limited to one platform. Sure, it's the preferred language-of-choice for the Mac, but it's available on Windows, Linux (various), BSD, Solaris,... If you have a problem with GNU, there are other ports of Cocoa (there's a couple, but from memory, the cocotron was the best).
ObjC itself has been one of the supported compilers within gcc for as long as I can remember. Basically, the ports above are providing the class-library - they all use the gcc compiler to do the actual compiling. In no way is ObjC a "proprietary" language; it may not have portability as a goal (like Java), but it will compile on far more machine-types than a JVM exists for, because it's just a front-end to gcc.
We've established that the reality distortion field is in fact correct (TFA), and that it self-evidently (look at Apple's recent sales) is transmitted as a meme throughout technological society. We know that the human condition is regulated by culture - that the human brain is evolving to cope with the phenomenal rate-of-change-of-culture it is being exposed to. In doing so, it must also cope with (adapt to) this reality distortion field created by Apple.
Steve Jobs is screwing with your mind, people. And your children's nascent minds too. Be afraid (of non-shiny things). Be very afraid (of anything not cool).
"dialup" is a modem account, it gets a maximum of ~56 kBits/sec, or ~7kBytes/sec, yes. "EDGE" is the wireless iPhone account, it gets a maximum of ~240 kBits/sec, or 30 kBytes/sec.
ADSL and Cable are not "dialup", but will of course be faster than EDGE.
30 kBytes/sec is far far faster than 7 kBytes/sec. That's my entire point. The OP was claiming "Since the I-phone is not 3G capable (read far slower than dialup transfer rates)", which is just bullshit.
Since the I-phone is not 3G capable (read far slower than dialup transfer rates)
Got this far, and stopped reading. EDGE is far far faster than dialup (which maxes out at ~56kbit/sec).
reference: a blog not particularly kind to Apple, which contains:
EDGE: An acronym for Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution, this is what experts call a bolt-on enhancement of GSM. It takes a second generation (2G) network and makes it roughly 2.75G. EDGE can carry data speeds up to 236.8 kbit/second for 4 timeslots. AT&T's EDGE network was delivering roughly 40 kbit/s before it was upgraded in advance of iPhone's launch. Today several sites are reporting download speeds of better than 200 kbits/s over the same network.
which links to engadgets tests verifying the speed.
So, that's not a veil of secrecy around APIs, that's a veil of secrecy around *unreleased* APIs. There's a world of difference. Until I read your second comment, I was thinking "what's that guy smoking ?" Apple give away the complete "professional version" of their developer kit, they publish documentation on all their APIs on the net, and frankly they seem a lot more open to developers than Microsoft are, to pluck an example out of the air.
But what *you* mean is that they don't want their thunder stolen before a major release. Well, duh. Apple get a huge PR circus for free precisely because they don't pre-release information, and that's quite literally priceless (sometimes). You can't pay for advertising like they get, and I can see them not wanting to rock that boat.
Now, in the grand scheme of things, NSDictionaryController isn't going to rock the world, and I can empathise with your frustration; however, there may be APIs at some point that probably would have given too much of the game away - APIs into Spotlight (before spotlight was announced), or Time Machine (before TM was announced), or the Core Animation framework for example. If you're Apple, do you go through every API function/method and decide whether it gives too much of the game away ? Or do you issue a blanket statement covering all new API functions/methods ? The latter is obviously the better course legally, and practically too I would imagine.
As for the argument that other companies do this, well other companies have less to lose. Apple aren't doing this to spite developers, or because they haven't considered the downsides. They've looked at it, decided that what they have to lose outweighs what they have to gain, and chosen their course of action - just like *every* company does. A few billion in sales and PR is a hard benefit to overlook, and IMHO a fair chunk of that comes from the very clever and precise manipulation of the media. Apple wouldn't be the Apple of today, if they were just another no-surprises, we-all-know-what's-coming tech company. Design is important in Apple's markets, but it doesn't translate directly to sales, and Apple are doing very well in making that translation at the moment.
Besides, it seems to me that Apple at least *try* to release-it-right rather than release-it-now. I'd like to keep a company with that attitude around a while longer, I don't think it's very common any more.
Right, because the iPhone has suffered terribly from the lack of 3rd-party applications. Sales are in single digits, and frankly owning one is an embarrassment. Not.
I'm an iPhone app developer. The API is actually pretty nice "under the surface". UIKit is a lean-and-mean version of Cocoa, and behaves just like it in most respects. Being able to write Leopard-style ObjC on a device that goes in your pocket is frankly awesome. Unless you have *specific* examples of this "ragged" nature, I'm just gonna call bullshit on your entire comment, and leave it at that.
Now a proper SDK will be a step forward, no doubt, but that's because we'll get things like named-constants rather than use 0x02 to specify values. Classdump, which is how the API was recovered, can only give you the method signatures and names. We'll also get the official C compiler, not one that works 98% of the time, real debugging, and perhaps even a simulator built into XCode, so you don't have to deploy to a target device in order to test the code. Oh yeah, and I'd expect to see some documentation too...
Lacking any of these things doesn't point to it being "ragged" architecturally, every single point is a consequence of the hacks that were required to get *any* development going on the iPhone. Apple don't have that problem...
... and it's a pretty amazing place if you're at all geeky. They don't let people into all of it these days, but I went down before it was fully operational, a few years ago.
The blast doors are a sight to be seen - they're about 4 feet thick of solid steel. There's blast doors on every entrance and at locations inside. Even the taxman would have a hard time getting through that [grin]. Then there's the air purifiers, which can filter out all known airborn toxins for the entire complex, and several diesel generators for backup power. The diesel tanks are large enough to keep the whole place running for weeks.
There's the room that was always guarded when the place was operational, and didn't appear on the blueprints... There's the fact that everything everywehere is tempest shielded, and there's the fact that it has sufficient fibre coming into it to carry most of the internet traffic worldwide - literally metre-thick bundles of the stuff. Oh, and it's H U G E inside; they'll not be running out of space any time soon...
Even *if* you had been correct, and (s)he was hiding behind it, the problem is still in the domain of the listener. There's nothing wrong with using "niggardly", and if someone gets all hot and bothered about it, and is then made to look like an ignorant ass just because (s)he jumped to an unwarranted conclusion, that's the listener's problem; it's a problem that probably won't happen again once discussed, which means the listener learnt something. It's never too late to learn...
It's not my desire to countenance ignorance, and I don't support the idea of restrictions being placed on the innocent, just to placate the ignorant; that way lies mediocrity in all things.
So, at first I wondered why an anti-virus man was basically blowing huge holes in the usefulness of his industry by coming out with quotable nonsense, for example:
But if a hacker breaks into the password files of a corporation with 10,000 machines, he only needs to guess one password to penetrate the network, Tippett notes. "In that case, the long passwords might mean that he can only crack 2,000 of the passwords instead of 5,000,"
No. If you mandate long passwords on the server, there are no short passwords. That's sort of the point.
But then, I read on in the article (yeah, I know, it's/., but what the hell), past the flawed car analogy and it became clear - he's making nonsense statements at the start to try and hide his introduction of the meme that an anti-virus program that doesn't really work is still a "really good thing"(TM).
Now, don't get me wrong, *any* protection is obviously better than none, but this is basically a surrender - instead of selling the common (wrong, but common) "I have an up-to-date anti-virus package, I am protected" perception, they're now moving towards "Hey, we did the best we could; all those *old* virus's/virii(+) are *definitely not getting through". Woo Hoo.
So perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but it seems to me like a corporate piece with quotable sound-bites (so it gets wide distribution) that tries to deliver the message "hey, we suck, but keep on buying our software", in a more acceptable-to-the-people manner...
Simon
(+) And with this, I hope to equally annoy the grammar and spelling nazis out there. [insert random deity] those people piss me off.
I was recently paying $240/mo for a dedicated 10M/7U at a datacenter in Fremont. When you buy larger chunks you usually get a better deal, so I reckon you could get 100 Mbit for ~2k/mo, worst case.
I don't understand the "windows fanboy" reference. I don't believe I accused you of being either a fanboy, or a windows user. I'm not that cruel. All I can say is that I've never seen Mail.app have the background of all subject lines dark - mine are white.
For this "options window", I guess I'm still not understanding how you can't move/resize the window. Perhaps at this point, if you could put an image up on a webserver somewhere... You're not describing it well enough for me to grasp the problem. Some points...
The Mac doesn't have a launch-bar, it has the dock, which by default is at the bottom of the screen. You can however right-click on the "bar effect" to the left of the trash-can to configure it to hide, reposition on a different screen-border, etc. Perhaps this would help you.
Elves seem unlikely; in contrast to the likelihood of people helping you when all you do is rant.
I'm not aware of any non-moveable windows in Mail.app - even the buttons at the bottom-left of the application are associated with the window, though none of them do mail-filters anyway.
I'm ignorant of why they decided to make the help option tell you the HARDER way to do stuff
It's common knowledge that on the Mac, a right-click is the exact equivalent of a ctrl-click. It's almost certainly documented in your manual, though I don't have one on-hand to check. I suspect the reason they document the ctrl-click is because it is *always* possible to do it that way. Would you prefer documentation that instructed you to 'right click to get a menu' ? If you were unaware of the ctrl-click == right-click, you would wonder how it was possible to right-click a single-button mouse!!
The rest of your post seems to be dedicated to saying "it doesn't do that for me". Well, it *does* do that for me. I tried the drag-and-drop operation before I wrote about it, both from iPhoto and from photo-booth.
Reading this thread again, and given your ranting and general attitude, I think I've had enough - find your own damn ways to do things, and enjoy ranting about how bad they are from now on...
Why is not possible to find out how remove the (ridiculous) darkening on the subject lines? I did every search term to no avail
I still have no idea what you mean by this. There is an option in preferences->Viewing "Display unread messages in bold". Is that it ? There is also a menu item 'View -> Organize by thread', which changes the view, but not to what you're describing...
Did you consider moving/resizing the Mail window, if it's obscuring the dock ? And I'm not sure what this "options window" is either - you are sure you're using Mail.app that comes with OSX, aren't you ?
Why is Apple going out of its way to hide the existence of options for unwanted one-handed people? Why do they think ctrl-click is easier for two-handed people, than right-clicking?
Those questions are nonsense. If Apple didn't want to provide right-clicking, they simply wouldn't. They do provide it, so they obviously do want people to use it. Which is why every desktop and laptop can do right-clicks, despite *apparently* having a single-button mouse/trackpad. You keep on flogging this dead horse, and it's still not going anywhere. Your own ignorance of the extensive use of right-clicking within Apple's OS and apps is not a good argument.
iMovie
I've never used iMovie, but the response from someone above seems reasonable "save frame as" would imply you can both save a given frame, and name it what you want...
iPhoto
The desktop is an example. You can put the files wherever you want. I'm definitely getting a "waah, waah, waah" vibe from you now.
As for the menu item, it does exist. I've just used it. Just in case you're being incredibly dense, the option is "Show File", not "Show in Finder".
iChat
[sigh] No, you don't have to store anything anywhere. Again, it was an example. I'd expected you to delete the file from the desktop immediately afterwards. Since you apparently require deliberate instructions, here you go:
open iPhoto
Click on 'Photos' or some other album, and find the one you want
Drag it to the image well in the top-right of the buddy-list window
Crop/resize it within the dialogue box. Even set effects if you want.
Click on 'Set'
Seems pretty straightforward to me. The same drag/drop works from photo-booth by the way...
But I thought the whole point of the Mac interface was that you never had to read a manual
Then you were wrong.
Macs *are* generally easy to use - my mother has less problems than the gp, and she can't program the DVR.... However, if there was no need for any documentation, however, I seriously doubt Apple would spend the time and money on all this documentation. Note that this isn't just developer documentation, it's everything from games through bundled apps, through code-generation, through hardware references.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough, I retract the ObjC usage comment :)
Categories... Well, that's one possible interpretation. Another is that they're a really elegant solution to the fragile base-class problem... you only have to look at things like NSString (AppkitAdditions) to see that.
I have to think that applications like Aperture and Motion are "big programs", and they seem to work pretty darn well. Aperture 2.0 especially seems to be all Cocoa (no C/C++ back-end) and it simply flies on my machine.
Simon
Hmm - I have to assume you've not used ObjC much or at all - you have to take it with its class library (Cocoa), similar to Java, but it's ridiculously easy to use once you've spent a week or so learning it. Literally, it took me a week to be proficient in this "new" language.
Applications don't need namespaces - frameworks do, but applications should be perfectly happy being run in their own (default) namespace. I think most people will be writing applications on the iPhone, not frameworks.
As for tools, XCode comes with data-modelling tools to create entity relationship diagrams/models that integrate with your code, it comes with fantastic dtrace-driven graphical performance monitoring tools, and an excellent integrated gdb-based debugger which does things like fix-and-continue, step back, etc.
Just putting some context into place,
Simon
Of course not, duh! It's under NDA.
I guess you missed the announcement of the next keynote, all about SnowLeopard... Starting right now, in fact :)
You're behind the times, the SDK from 2 releases ago ran OpenGL in the emulator...
Simon
The point I was trying (and obviously struggling) to make is precisely that! To see what was recorded by privately owned cameras, the police need a warrant. There's no "central station" where all this video is fed.
The CC in CCTV means "Closed Circuit", which generally means it's a camera being recorded to a local video-recorder somewhere on the premises, and perhaps a TV to watch it live.
It seems most people think there is this huge government-funded network of cameras watching every move of every person in the UK - this just isn't the case. The vast majority (~80%) of this camera network are the ones in shops, on transport (buses, trains), on ATM's, etc. etc. In other words, they're privately owned and run for the benefit of the business owner, not for the police.
Of the remainder, the vast majority of them are traffic-cameras at junctions, in speed-cameras (yes, these count, for some reason), etc. What's left are the police-owned ones which watch people in high-crime areas or (usually in partnership with the businesses) high-people-traffic areas (eg: Regent St., Oxford St. in London).
I lived in London for ~15 years before moving to CA. I don't feel any less "observed" here than I did in London. I'm on-camera in CA if I get money from an ATM; if I drive across a junction (try looking up once in a while); if I get on the BART; if I get on Caltrain; if I go to a bank;
I really wish people would stop pandering to the tabloid press trying to sell copy. Sure, there are cameras. Everywhere(*). Deal.
Simon
(*)Well, every country I've been to, anyway.
So, how does that not apply to the Thinkpad ? Does IBM/Lenovo/whoever-makes-the-damn-thing-these-days pay for arbitrary 3rd-party hard-drives that you plug into your machine ? Do you send them a receipt or something ?
Or is replacing-the-internal-drive just pretty much the same as plugging-in-an-external-drive ? 'Cos it seems very much that way, except a bit more inconvenient...
Seems to me you're bitching that Apple didn't help you do something that you *didn't* want to do!
Simon.
Thank [insert random deity] *someone* else gets it.
Slavery is bad, no argument, but the removal of the possibility of owning slaves is indeed a restriction on your freedom. Conflating the freedom of the slave with the freedom of owning a slave, and mixing the abhorrent nature of slavery itself into the argument is all just to try and obscure the fact that the GPL *does* remove more rights than (say) the BSD licence.
Now the GPL has high motives; I've released a fair amount of software under GPL (v2, I'd never use v3), and even sold websites which used GPLv2 data to make sure that data was forever open to public use. I've released under the LGPL as well, when that suits my purposes... However, most of the s/w I release these days is under BSD - it's a pure, simple licence: "here's my stuff, do whatever you want with it, just credit me". *That* is freedom, though it's incompatible with the GPL. Tough. My software, my rules.
Software "freedom" in my eyes is about letting the author do whatever (s)he wants with the software (s)he created, even if that doesn't meet my or anyone else's personal preference. Just like freedom of speech, it's easy to defend that right when the speech in question is something you agree with. The true test of the principle comes when what is being said is repellant to you. Under this spotlight, the GPL (especially v3 with its company-hostile approach) fails dismally; the politically-driven viral nature of the GPL is a serious hinderance to my freedom in this regard. BSD fails slightly (it imposes the accreditation and distribution clauses), but it's a whole lot more free than the GPL.
[sigh] yes, I know I'm going to karma-hell on this one. Such is the price of stating a non-rabidly-pro-GPL opinion on slashdot... thank [insert the deity again] we have that freedom of speech thing, huh ?
Simon.
Whereas the names and addresses of these people is a matter of public knowledge, is their email address and SSN also open ? If not, despite what you may think of their actions (public urination ? Really ?), it's not fair of the site to "blur" the relevant details so poorly.
I read the daily WTF, and usually I think it's pretty good, but Alex has made his own WTF here, IMHO.
Simon
Simple reason:
:-) monitors. That gives me 224 1.5GHz stream processors in the GPU. Even harmonising GHz, thats 8 compared to 112, and its a lot easier to get a parallel algorithm running efficiently on a GPU than on multiple CPU's due to differing hardware designs...
On my Mac Pro, I have 8 3GHz CPU's. Consider that the baseline.
I have 2 8800GT cards to drive the 30" and 2x23" (rotated, one each side of the 30"
Now stream processors aren't quite the same as general purpose processors, but the way they're implemented these days, they can be programmed in high-level languages (see jon stokes' article) and if their architecture suits what you want, they can be very very quick. See here for info on programming them...
Simon.
A language that only runs on one platform, even Microsoft Windows isn't going to gain my interest unless I have no choice.
Um, ObjC/Cocoa isn't limited to one platform. Sure, it's the preferred language-of-choice for the Mac, but it's available on Windows, Linux (various), BSD, Solaris,... If you have a problem with GNU, there are other ports of Cocoa (there's a couple, but from memory, the cocotron was the best).
ObjC itself has been one of the supported compilers within gcc for as long as I can remember. Basically, the ports above are providing the class-library - they all use the gcc compiler to do the actual compiling. In no way is ObjC a "proprietary" language; it may not have portability as a goal (like Java), but it will compile on far more machine-types than a JVM exists for, because it's just a front-end to gcc.
Simon.
Say WHAT ?
This is humour - lay off the "insightful" mods, will you please ? It's starting to erode my confidence in my fellow man...
Simon
We've established that the reality distortion field is in fact correct (TFA), and that it self-evidently (look at Apple's recent sales) is transmitted as a meme throughout technological society. We know that the human condition is regulated by culture - that the human brain is evolving to cope with the phenomenal rate-of-change-of-culture it is being exposed to. In doing so, it must also cope with (adapt to) this reality distortion field created by Apple.
Steve Jobs is screwing with your mind, people. And your children's nascent minds too. Be afraid (of non-shiny things). Be very afraid (of anything not cool).
Simon.
I really don't understand what you mean by that.
"dialup" is a modem account, it gets a maximum of ~56 kBits/sec, or ~7kBytes/sec, yes.
"EDGE" is the wireless iPhone account, it gets a maximum of ~240 kBits/sec, or 30 kBytes/sec.
ADSL and Cable are not "dialup", but will of course be faster than EDGE.
30 kBytes/sec is far far faster than 7 kBytes/sec. That's my entire point. The OP was claiming "Since the I-phone is not 3G capable (read far slower than dialup transfer rates)", which is just bullshit.
Simon.
Got this far, and stopped reading. EDGE is far far faster than dialup (which maxes out at ~56kbit/sec).
reference: a blog not particularly kind to Apple, which contains: which links to engadgets tests verifying the speed.
Simon
So, that's not a veil of secrecy around APIs, that's a veil of secrecy around *unreleased* APIs. There's a world of difference. Until I read your second comment, I was thinking "what's that guy smoking ?" Apple give away the complete "professional version" of their developer kit, they publish documentation on all their APIs on the net, and frankly they seem a lot more open to developers than Microsoft are, to pluck an example out of the air.
But what *you* mean is that they don't want their thunder stolen before a major release. Well, duh. Apple get a huge PR circus for free precisely because they don't pre-release information, and that's quite literally priceless (sometimes). You can't pay for advertising like they get, and I can see them not wanting to rock that boat.
Now, in the grand scheme of things, NSDictionaryController isn't going to rock the world, and I can empathise with your frustration; however, there may be APIs at some point that probably would have given too much of the game away - APIs into Spotlight (before spotlight was announced), or Time Machine (before TM was announced), or the Core Animation framework for example. If you're Apple, do you go through every API function/method and decide whether it gives too much of the game away ? Or do you issue a blanket statement covering all new API functions/methods ? The latter is obviously the better course legally, and practically too I would imagine.
As for the argument that other companies do this, well other companies have less to lose. Apple aren't doing this to spite developers, or because they haven't considered the downsides. They've looked at it, decided that what they have to lose outweighs what they have to gain, and chosen their course of action - just like *every* company does. A few billion in sales and PR is a hard benefit to overlook, and IMHO a fair chunk of that comes from the very clever and precise manipulation of the media. Apple wouldn't be the Apple of today, if they were just another no-surprises, we-all-know-what's-coming tech company. Design is important in Apple's markets, but it doesn't translate directly to sales, and Apple are doing very well in making that translation at the moment.
Besides, it seems to me that Apple at least *try* to release-it-right rather than release-it-now. I'd like to keep a company with that attitude around a while longer, I don't think it's very common any more.
Simon
Right, because the iPhone has suffered terribly from the lack of 3rd-party applications. Sales are in single digits, and frankly owning one is an embarrassment. Not.
I'm an iPhone app developer. The API is actually pretty nice "under the surface". UIKit is a lean-and-mean version of Cocoa, and behaves just like it in most respects. Being able to write Leopard-style ObjC on a device that goes in your pocket is frankly awesome. Unless you have *specific* examples of this "ragged" nature, I'm just gonna call bullshit on your entire comment, and leave it at that.
Now a proper SDK will be a step forward, no doubt, but that's because we'll get things like named-constants rather than use 0x02 to specify values. Classdump, which is how the API was recovered, can only give you the method signatures and names. We'll also get the official C compiler, not one that works 98% of the time, real debugging, and perhaps even a simulator built into XCode, so you don't have to deploy to a target device in order to test the code. Oh yeah, and I'd expect to see some documentation too...
Lacking any of these things doesn't point to it being "ragged" architecturally, every single point is a consequence of the hacks that were required to get *any* development going on the iPhone. Apple don't have that problem...
Simon.
... and it's a pretty amazing place if you're at all geeky. They don't let people into all of it these days, but I went down before it was fully operational, a few years ago.
The blast doors are a sight to be seen - they're about 4 feet thick of solid steel. There's blast doors on every entrance and at locations inside. Even the taxman would have a hard time getting through that [grin]. Then there's the air purifiers, which can filter out all known airborn toxins for the entire complex, and several diesel generators for backup power. The diesel tanks are large enough to keep the whole place running for weeks.
There's the room that was always guarded when the place was operational, and didn't appear on the blueprints... There's the fact that everything everywehere is tempest shielded, and there's the fact that it has sufficient fibre coming into it to carry most of the internet traffic worldwide - literally metre-thick bundles of the stuff. Oh, and it's H U G E inside; they'll not be running out of space any time soon...
Quite an amazing place.
Simon.
Even *if* you had been correct, and (s)he was hiding behind it, the problem is still in the domain of the listener. There's nothing wrong with using "niggardly", and if someone gets all hot and bothered about it, and is then made to look like an ignorant ass just because (s)he jumped to an unwarranted conclusion, that's the listener's problem; it's a problem that probably won't happen again once discussed, which means the listener learnt something. It's never too late to learn...
It's not my desire to countenance ignorance, and I don't support the idea of restrictions being placed on the innocent, just to placate the ignorant; that way lies mediocrity in all things.
Simon.
No. If you mandate long passwords on the server, there are no short passwords. That's sort of the point.
But then, I read on in the article (yeah, I know, it's
Now, don't get me wrong, *any* protection is obviously better than none, but this is basically a surrender - instead of selling the common (wrong, but common) "I have an up-to-date anti-virus package, I am protected" perception, they're now moving towards "Hey, we did the best we could; all those *old* virus's/virii(+) are *definitely not getting through". Woo Hoo.
So perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but it seems to me like a corporate piece with quotable sound-bites (so it gets wide distribution) that tries to deliver the message "hey, we suck, but keep on buying our software", in a more acceptable-to-the-people manner...
Simon
(+) And with this, I hope to equally annoy the grammar and spelling nazis out there. [insert random deity] those people piss me off.
I was recently paying $240/mo for a dedicated 10M/7U at a datacenter in Fremont. When you buy larger chunks you usually get a better deal, so I reckon you could get 100 Mbit for ~2k/mo, worst case.
Simon
For this "options window", I guess I'm still not understanding how you can't move/resize the window. Perhaps at this point, if you could put an image up on a webserver somewhere... You're not describing it well enough for me to grasp the problem. Some points
I'm ignorant of why they decided to make the help option tell you the HARDER way to do stuff
It's common knowledge that on the Mac, a right-click is the exact equivalent of a ctrl-click. It's almost certainly documented in your manual, though I don't have one on-hand to check. I suspect the reason they document the ctrl-click is because it is *always* possible to do it that way. Would you prefer documentation that instructed you to 'right click to get a menu' ? If you were unaware of the ctrl-click == right-click, you would wonder how it was possible to right-click a single-button mouse!!
The rest of your post seems to be dedicated to saying "it doesn't do that for me". Well, it *does* do that for me. I tried the drag-and-drop operation before I wrote about it, both from iPhoto and from photo-booth.
Reading this thread again, and given your ranting and general attitude, I think I've had enough - find your own damn ways to do things, and enjoy ranting about how bad they are from now on...
Simon.
I still have no idea what you mean by this. There is an option in preferences->Viewing "Display unread messages in bold". Is that it ? There is also a menu item 'View -> Organize by thread', which changes the view, but not to what you're describing...
Did you consider moving/resizing the Mail window, if it's obscuring the dock ? And I'm not sure what this "options window" is either - you are sure you're using Mail.app that comes with OSX, aren't you ?
Why is Apple going out of its way to hide the existence of options for unwanted one-handed people? Why do they think ctrl-click is easier for two-handed people, than right-clicking?
Those questions are nonsense. If Apple didn't want to provide right-clicking, they simply wouldn't. They do provide it, so they obviously do want people to use it. Which is why every desktop and laptop can do right-clicks, despite *apparently* having a single-button mouse/trackpad. You keep on flogging this dead horse, and it's still not going anywhere. Your own ignorance of the extensive use of right-clicking within Apple's OS and apps is not a good argument.
iMovie
I've never used iMovie, but the response from someone above seems reasonable "save frame as" would imply you can both save a given frame, and name it what you want...
iPhoto
The desktop is an example. You can put the files wherever you want. I'm definitely getting a "waah, waah, waah" vibe from you now.
As for the menu item, it does exist. I've just used it. Just in case you're being incredibly dense, the option is "Show File", not "Show in Finder".
iChat
[sigh] No, you don't have to store anything anywhere. Again, it was an example. I'd expected you to delete the file from the desktop immediately afterwards. Since you apparently require deliberate instructions, here you go:
Seems pretty straightforward to me. The same drag/drop works from photo-booth by the way...
Simon.
But I thought the whole point of the Mac interface was that you never had to read a manual
Then you were wrong.
Macs *are* generally easy to use - my mother has less problems than the gp, and she can't program the DVR.... However, if there was no need for any documentation, however, I seriously doubt Apple would spend the time and money on all this documentation. Note that this isn't just developer documentation, it's everything from games through bundled apps, through code-generation, through hardware references.
Simon