The essence of the complaint is that once you have bought music from iTMS, you can't play it back on normal MP3 players, only on an iPod.
This is, of course, stupid, as you already know this when you buy music from iTMS in the first place. Just as you would know that software you buy for a Mac won't run on a PC.
If you think of iTunes' m4p files as software, I think this is pretty clear. If you think of them as "music", then it's hard to see how Apple has a monopoly, as they don't have exclusive rights to the majority of what they sell.
If "music" is the product, you can buy it elsewhere (and elsewhere online), but if "music for iTunes & iPods" is what they're selling, and I think it's always been pretty clear that this is the case, then it isn't an open market, and they have no reason to make it into one.
LaunchBar at least offers a list of alternate suggestions beneath the first one
Yeah, that does sound useful. Which is why QuickSilver does that, too.
It was at that point that I realized I didn't have the iTunes Control Module Package Module Plugin Extension Snap-In
Yes, QS doesn't include many plugins by default, but then, LaunchBar doesn't support any kind of plugins. Also, it does point this out after the first launch, complete with a link to the plugin page, from which the plugins can be installed directly. The way you tell it makes it sound like a ten step process.
...I still can't access any of my music without going to iTunes > Browse Artists > Beastie Boys >...
Wrong. You can get at your playlists as you would anything else. If you really want to get to every song, you could just tell Quicksilver to index your iTunes music folder. I for one don't need to have all 3000 individually indexed. This was one of the first things I turned off in LaunchBar. It's just a different approach. I don't think this makes Quicksilver worse or better in any way, even if that's the way I prefer it.
There are valid criticisms of QuickSilver, but "I prefer LaunchBar" isn't one of them.
'cuz I like to evaluate GUIs by closing my eyes and trying to use them.
That might be funny, if the visual were the only part of the interface. QuickSilver, Launchbar, etc, work a lot like finely detailed keyboard shortcuts, but with a different kind of visual feedback.
If you know the name of a program or file or action, you can easily launch it without even considering the interface. I know that Cmd+Space, and then SA will open/switch to Safari, and can easily do that without a second thought. That's where the real interface is.
Quicksilver also has the worst interface of any Mac app, ever.
You're an idiot. There, I said it, and will probably get modded down just for that. But, honestly, QuickSilver having a bad interface? Bullshit. Your description sounds like you just looked at a screenshot and guessed at how it works. It's functionally no different than LaunchBar, Cmd+Space and start typing in the box cleverly marked "Type to search".
Yes, it's a *slightly* different approach than LaunchBar, but if you closed your yes, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between the two.
I'm a huge fan of QuickSilver, and of Spotlight, but they are very different critters. They complement each other, but to say that QuickSilver is somehow a replacement or placeholder for Spotlight is quite mistaken.
Actually, it CAN search inside of files, contrary to your post. The results can then be arranged by size, type, folder, date, etc. Isn't that enough?
It can do this, but it's ungodly slow, cannot be extended to use new file types, the UI sucks hell of ass, indexing is slow and monolithic, etc, etc. There's a lot of room for improvement.
I don't know. Where is it? Is GIMP innovative because it doesn't behave like Photoshop? I'm sure there are arguments for GIMP's interface, but I promise you, "we do it this way because Photoshop doesn't" is not one of them.
So the GIMP should just become an open source Photoshop clone?
It already is, basically. I'm merely suggesting that it act more like it, and that doing so would be a good thing for GIMP.
Because everyone can use whatever categories they find useful for themselves this means that I can tag my Mac stuff "mac", you can use "Macintosh" and someone else can use "Apple", leading to miscommunication.
I still don't understand why this is a bad thing. If you're interested in communication, use the most common tags. If you're not, use what's useful for you. On the other side, when browsing, a list of related tags should be fine. There's no need to, as some have proposed, enforce synonyms.
I have a friend named Mac, and I have pictures of him on Flickr. Is it a miscommunication that he shows up alongside pictures of iPod socks and people unpacking G5s? If so, what in the hell was I trying to communicate?
I think what people are concerned about isn't miscommunication, but lack of communication, which is seen by blogsnobs as a crisis in need of repair, by enabling more communication, "...as if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly.", as Thoreau said.
I would be a lot more intrested in paying $150 for something like this if not for the hokey New Age garbage surrounding it. If it were open enough that anyone could write apps for it, I'd snatch it up right away.
Because that would mean admitting responsibility. At present, Microsoft can still rely on the myth that Windows' continual security problems are do to monoculture and basically being a big target.
It would also piss off developers of spyware and anti-spyware, and if there is anything that Microsoft is reluctant to do, it's scare of developers, even if it's at the expense of the user's experience. Remember Ballmer's "Developers! Developers! Developers!"? That's where the focus is.
Time and time again, I run into this wrong headed notion of the "expert". When I was a kid, I bought into it. I believed there were people who knew just about everything there is to know about a particular subject.
Well, there's the problem right there. You believed that the word "expert" implied infalibility. It didn't, it doesn't, and your argument seems a well-intentioned straw man.
My point is that there can be no experts because information is not immutable....Homosexuality used to be considered a psychological disorder that could be "cured"....These views are quite obviously wrong. But if you would have checked with an expert of the past, those are the answers you would have gotten.
I think you're overlooking something very important: If you had consulted a resource such as Wikipedia in the past, you would have gotten most of the same answers. With the exception of totalitarian states, it's unlikely that you would a place and time where the 'expert' opinion significantly differs from the 'popular' opinion, or at least, does so for a long time. Each feeds off of the other. You may say that the belief that homosexuality is a disease is "obviously wrong", but your saying that is undobutedly influenced by your living in a time and place where that belief is unpopular.
Better technology does not equal market success, fanboy.
You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that in any given market, there can only be one success. If Apple were to sell half as many copies of iWork as Microsoft sold copies of Office, that does not mean that Apple is half as successful. Apple is a much smaller company, and presumably spent much less on developing the product.
For $399.95, it had damned well better be. I think Apple's is intending to go for the lower end of the spectrum -- people that need something more than TextEdit (which I've found to be surprisingly effective), but less than Word.
Also, the rumors seem to indicate that this suite will be pre-installed on new Macs, which is definitely aimed at competing with cheap Windows machines with Office pre-installed.
I know you're not cloning the OS as a whole, but you are quite clearly taking from the GUI, and that of Mac OS X. Copying is not bad in and of itself, but you're copying the least important parts. Window tabs, for instance -- yes, they look kind of cool, but they don't make a better interface. What other reason is there for them than to look like BeOS?
I'm not trying to trash your project -- please work on whatever you want to work on -- but I really think your efforts would be better spent involved in an existing project than branching off into a new, incompatable, project.
Just exactly what makes it a bad clone of the BeOS UI?
I guess what I meant to say was that of the far-too-many BeOS clones I've seen, this one looks the least interesting, because it's only a clone of the look and feel. That said, most others do the opposite -- trying to reimplement BeOS from the ground up, or build new AppKit on top of Linux, with no UI yet.
I don't know about anyone else, but the things I remember fondly from BeOS were not the icons and widgets, or the pervasive multithreading -- they were the things I could do with it, that I couldn't elsewhere.
The ability to do extremely fast metadata searches, and save queries as folders that update in realtime is the only thing that kept me on BeOS for more than a month, and was definitely the hardest thing to leave behind. (There were other nice things, like the 10-second boot times, but the above is what stuck out after three months of full-time use.)
Most open source hackers would tell you that this was possible thanks to the 64-bit journaled database-like filesystem, but I think you'd get that response because most open source hackers know more about coding concrete things like filesystems with easily quantifiable goals (bigger, better, faster) than more mysterious things like interfaces, where the goal of "more useful" is often fairly subjective. Consequently, more time is spent concerned with implementation than capability. (Witness many of the comments on this article, trouncing the Elecktra configuration system because of it's resemblance to the Windows registry, with little regard to whether or not it might be more useful.)
Enter Apple's (I know this is getting a little OT, but bear with me) Spotlight, which lets you do extremely fast metadata (and content) searches, and save them as folders that update in realtime, without a specialized filesystem. So, yes, it is possible. Be's implementation wasn't perfect, nor is Apple's, but the idea is sound, it works, and it's incredibly useful.
So, what I'm saying is that Mockup is a bad clone (and most clones are bad) because it overlooks the truly useful and innovative aspects of the UI in favor of the ever-mutable visual and behavioral aspects. Furthermore, I suspect this is due to a naive understanding of interface design that's pervasive in the OSS community.
It looks like they're basically building a better GUI engine for Mac OS X.
This has absolutely nothing to do with Mac OS X. Nor is there any new GUI engine here. It's just yet another clone of the BeOS UI, and a bad one at that.
The GUI in OS X is currently a mess. Ask any Mac themer. I hope Apple buys this from these guys and fixes Aqua.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Mac themers? Do those even exist? If so, what do they do, sit around and talk about how they wish Mac OS X supported theming? As if that would make a better UI?
Why would Apple sell a $500 machine with no monitor, when their cheapest monitor is $1300? If they were trying to undercut Dell, etc., they'd have to try harder, as a $500 Dell typically includes a 17" CRT.
I would expect a new 17" LCD to pair with this, in double-shot plastic, priced low enough to keep the total cost under $1000. I seriously doubt they'd go back to CRTs, or expect users to provde their own monitor.
Oh and I noticed they have a "most active" list of links, but no porn section???
I can't vouch for it's quality, but there does exist porn.a.licious. I'm not so sure I want to see how random people on the web categorize porn, but it's there if you do.
If it wasn't for the idiot tree huggers who put a stop to nuclear power in the US, our air would be a lot cleaner right now.
It would help, though, if the energy industry wasn't composed mostly of stubborn fossil fuel conglomerates that own the wells, the pipelines, the refineries, the plants, and everything, all supported by heavy government subsidies and a finger in every bureaucratic pie. Oh, and if it didn't cost so much to build and maintain a nuclear plant.
Environmentalists (not all of whom can be described as "idiot tree huggers") may make a lot of noise, but the biggest reason nuclear power isn't huge here is the money. It just doesn't make financial sense to fossil fuel-based energy companies to spend tons of money on a plant that makes their existing plants and infrastructure obsolete and has the effect of making their product, energy, cheaper.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program doesn't tell you exactly what the program is for?
I didn't say that. I said that "GIMP" tells me nothing about the program, except perhaps that it's creators decided to burden it with an acronym for a name, which itself contains a meaningless recursive acronym.
Now, acronyms aren't strictly bad. It's much easier to say NASA than National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But one reason why that works is that "nasa" is not, by itself a word (in English anyway). GIMP wouldn't be quite so bad if not for the fact that "gimp" is a word, and a moderately offensive slang one at that.
PSP has nothing to do with painting
So should we stop calling the "brush" tool a brush because you can't actually hold it? It's a metaphor, a useful one that's been around for a very long time.
You should also see my second point above, that it doesn't matter what Photoshop is called, because "everybody" knows what it is. GIMP has not reached that level outside of the geek world, and will undoubtedly have a harder time doing so with it's current name.
Photoshop is a really broad name (especially for a program that can't make animated.gifs on its own)
You're firstly ignoring the hojillions of things that Photoshop can do that GIMP cannot, and secondly, why on earth would you want to? I'm just taking it on faith that Photoshop can't do animated GIFs, as I've never even tried.
More importantly, you're ignoring the fact that GIMP can't open or save GIF at all on its own.
Well, for one, Photoshop actually gives some indication as to what kind of program it is. GIMP does not. Secondly, at this point, it doesn't matter much what Photoshop is called because everyone to whom it really matters already knows what it is. Photoshop is Photoshop and has been Photoshop since it was released in 1990.
It could also be stated with much fairness that PhotoShop users form a disproportionate population of those complaining about same.
Could it be that Photoshop users (current, potential, or former) are probably the biggest single group that might be drawn to GIMP? I think that if you're building a tool with an implicit goal of having all of the same capabilities of Photoshop, it might be nice if said tool would act something like it.
Slashdot Mirror
The essence of the complaint is that once you have bought music from iTMS, you can't play it back on normal MP3 players, only on an iPod.
This is, of course, stupid, as you already know this when you buy music from iTMS in the first place. Just as you would know that software you buy for a Mac won't run on a PC.
If you think of iTunes' m4p files as software, I think this is pretty clear. If you think of them as "music", then it's hard to see how Apple has a monopoly, as they don't have exclusive rights to the majority of what they sell.
If "music" is the product, you can buy it elsewhere (and elsewhere online), but if "music for iTunes & iPods" is what they're selling, and I think it's always been pretty clear that this is the case, then it isn't an open market, and they have no reason to make it into one.
LaunchBar at least offers a list of alternate suggestions beneath the first one
...I still can't access any of my music without going to iTunes > Browse Artists > Beastie Boys > ...
Yeah, that does sound useful. Which is why QuickSilver does that, too.
It was at that point that I realized I didn't have the iTunes Control Module Package Module Plugin Extension Snap-In
Yes, QS doesn't include many plugins by default, but then, LaunchBar doesn't support any kind of plugins. Also, it does point this out after the first launch, complete with a link to the plugin page, from which the plugins can be installed directly. The way you tell it makes it sound like a ten step process.
Wrong. You can get at your playlists as you would anything else. If you really want to get to every song, you could just tell Quicksilver to index your iTunes music folder. I for one don't need to have all 3000 individually indexed. This was one of the first things I turned off in LaunchBar. It's just a different approach. I don't think this makes Quicksilver worse or better in any way, even if that's the way I prefer it.
There are valid criticisms of QuickSilver, but "I prefer LaunchBar" isn't one of them.
'cuz I like to evaluate GUIs by closing my eyes and trying to use them.
That might be funny, if the visual were the only part of the interface. QuickSilver, Launchbar, etc, work a lot like finely detailed keyboard shortcuts, but with a different kind of visual feedback.
If you know the name of a program or file or action, you can easily launch it without even considering the interface. I know that Cmd+Space, and then SA will open/switch to Safari, and can easily do that without a second thought. That's where the real interface is.
Quicksilver also has the worst interface of any Mac app, ever.
You're an idiot. There, I said it, and will probably get modded down just for that. But, honestly, QuickSilver having a bad interface? Bullshit. Your description sounds like you just looked at a screenshot and guessed at how it works. It's functionally no different than LaunchBar, Cmd+Space and start typing in the box cleverly marked "Type to search".
Yes, it's a *slightly* different approach than LaunchBar, but if you closed your yes, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between the two.
I'm a huge fan of QuickSilver, and of Spotlight, but they are very different critters. They complement each other, but to say that QuickSilver is somehow a replacement or placeholder for Spotlight is quite mistaken.
Actually, it CAN search inside of files, contrary to your post. The results can then be arranged by size, type, folder, date, etc. Isn't that enough?
It can do this, but it's ungodly slow, cannot be extended to use new file types, the UI sucks hell of ass, indexing is slow and monolithic, etc, etc. There's a lot of room for improvement.
Indeed, quite like that, thanks.
Now to port it to Mono...
Where is the innovation?
I don't know. Where is it? Is GIMP innovative because it doesn't behave like Photoshop? I'm sure there are arguments for GIMP's interface, but I promise you, "we do it this way because Photoshop doesn't" is not one of them.
So the GIMP should just become an open source Photoshop clone?
It already is, basically. I'm merely suggesting that it act more like it, and that doing so would be a good thing for GIMP.
Because everyone can use whatever categories they find useful for themselves this means that I can tag my Mac stuff "mac", you can use "Macintosh" and someone else can use "Apple", leading to miscommunication.
I still don't understand why this is a bad thing. If you're interested in communication, use the most common tags. If you're not, use what's useful for you. On the other side, when browsing, a list of related tags should be fine. There's no need to, as some have proposed, enforce synonyms.
I have a friend named Mac, and I have pictures of him on Flickr. Is it a miscommunication that he shows up alongside pictures of iPod socks and people unpacking G5s? If so, what in the hell was I trying to communicate?
I think what people are concerned about isn't miscommunication, but lack of communication, which is seen by blogsnobs as a crisis in need of repair, by enabling more communication, "...as if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly.", as Thoreau said.
I would be a lot more intrested in paying $150 for something like this if not for the hokey New Age garbage surrounding it. If it were open enough that anyone could write apps for it, I'd snatch it up right away.
Why not deal with existing issues first?
Because that would mean admitting responsibility. At present, Microsoft can still rely on the myth that Windows' continual security problems are do to monoculture and basically being a big target.
It would also piss off developers of spyware and anti-spyware, and if there is anything that Microsoft is reluctant to do, it's scare of developers, even if it's at the expense of the user's experience. Remember Ballmer's "Developers! Developers! Developers!"? That's where the focus is.
Time and time again, I run into this wrong headed notion of the "expert". When I was a kid, I bought into it. I believed there were people who knew just about everything there is to know about a particular subject.
Well, there's the problem right there. You believed that the word "expert" implied infalibility. It didn't, it doesn't, and your argument seems a well-intentioned straw man.
My point is that there can be no experts because information is not immutable....Homosexuality used to be considered a psychological disorder that could be "cured"....These views are quite obviously wrong. But if you would have checked with an expert of the past, those are the answers you would have gotten.
I think you're overlooking something very important:
If you had consulted a resource such as Wikipedia in the past, you would have gotten most of the same answers. With the exception of totalitarian states, it's unlikely that you would a place and time where the 'expert' opinion significantly differs from the 'popular' opinion, or at least, does so for a long time. Each feeds off of the other. You may say that the belief that homosexuality is a disease is "obviously wrong", but your saying that is undobutedly influenced by your living in a time and place where that belief is unpopular.
Better technology does not equal market success, fanboy.
You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that in any given market, there can only be one success. If Apple were to sell half as many copies of iWork as Microsoft sold copies of Office, that does not mean that Apple is half as successful. Apple is a much smaller company, and presumably spent much less on developing the product.
Office v.X for the Mac is actually quite nice
For $399.95, it had damned well better be. I think Apple's is intending to go for the lower end of the spectrum -- people that need something more than TextEdit (which I've found to be surprisingly effective), but less than Word.
Also, the rumors seem to indicate that this suite will be pre-installed on new Macs, which is definitely aimed at competing with cheap Windows machines with Office pre-installed.
...that's what you get for tossing the tea.
That is the coolest expression I have heard all year.
Mockup is not a BeOS clone, what are you saying?
I know you're not cloning the OS as a whole, but you are quite clearly taking from the GUI, and that of Mac OS X. Copying is not bad in and of itself, but you're copying the least important parts. Window tabs, for instance -- yes, they look kind of cool, but they don't make a better interface. What other reason is there for them than to look like BeOS?
I'm not trying to trash your project -- please work on whatever you want to work on -- but I really think your efforts would be better spent involved in an existing project than branching off into a new, incompatable, project.
Just exactly what makes it a bad clone of the BeOS UI?
I guess what I meant to say was that of the far-too-many BeOS clones I've seen, this one looks the least interesting, because it's only a clone of the look and feel. That said, most others do the opposite -- trying to reimplement BeOS from the ground up, or build new AppKit on top of Linux, with no UI yet.
I don't know about anyone else, but the things I remember fondly from BeOS were not the icons and widgets, or the pervasive multithreading -- they were the things I could do with it, that I couldn't elsewhere.
The ability to do extremely fast metadata searches, and save queries as folders that update in realtime is the only thing that kept me on BeOS for more than a month, and was definitely the hardest thing to leave behind. (There were other nice things, like the 10-second boot times, but the above is what stuck out after three months of full-time use.)
Most open source hackers would tell you that this was possible thanks to the 64-bit journaled database-like filesystem, but I think you'd get that response because most open source hackers know more about coding concrete things like filesystems with easily quantifiable goals (bigger, better, faster) than more mysterious things like interfaces, where the goal of "more useful" is often fairly subjective. Consequently, more time is spent concerned with implementation than capability. (Witness many of the comments on this article, trouncing the Elecktra configuration system because of it's resemblance to the Windows registry, with little regard to whether or not it might be more useful.)
Enter Apple's (I know this is getting a little OT, but bear with me) Spotlight, which lets you do extremely fast metadata (and content) searches, and save them as folders that update in realtime, without a specialized filesystem. So, yes, it is possible. Be's implementation wasn't perfect, nor is Apple's, but the idea is sound, it works, and it's incredibly useful.
So, what I'm saying is that Mockup is a bad clone (and most clones are bad) because it overlooks the truly useful and innovative aspects of the UI in favor of the ever-mutable visual and behavioral aspects. Furthermore, I suspect this is due to a naive understanding of interface design that's pervasive in the OSS community.
It looks like they're basically building a better GUI engine for Mac OS X.
This has absolutely nothing to do with Mac OS X. Nor is there any new GUI engine here. It's just yet another clone of the BeOS UI, and a bad one at that.
The GUI in OS X is currently a mess. Ask any Mac themer. I hope Apple buys this from these guys and fixes Aqua.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Mac themers? Do those even exist? If so, what do they do, sit around and talk about how they wish Mac OS X supported theming? As if that would make a better UI?
Why would Apple sell a $500 machine with no monitor, when their cheapest monitor is $1300? If they were trying to undercut Dell, etc., they'd have to try harder, as a $500 Dell typically includes a 17" CRT.
I would expect a new 17" LCD to pair with this, in double-shot plastic, priced low enough to keep the total cost under $1000. I seriously doubt they'd go back to CRTs, or expect users to provde their own monitor.
Creative Commons licensing and public domain are two completely different things. They're mutually exclusive.
Creative Commons doesn't seem to think so.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/
Oh and I noticed they have a "most active" list of links, but no porn section???
I can't vouch for it's quality, but there does exist porn.a.licious. I'm not so sure I want to see how random people on the web categorize porn, but it's there if you do.
If it wasn't for the idiot tree huggers who put a stop to nuclear power in the US, our air would be a lot cleaner right now.
It would help, though, if the energy industry wasn't composed mostly of stubborn fossil fuel conglomerates that own the wells, the pipelines, the refineries, the plants, and everything, all supported by heavy government subsidies and a finger in every bureaucratic pie. Oh, and if it didn't cost so much to build and maintain a nuclear plant.
Environmentalists (not all of whom can be described as "idiot tree huggers") may make a lot of noise, but the biggest reason nuclear power isn't huge here is the money. It just doesn't make financial sense to fossil fuel-based energy companies to spend tons of money on a plant that makes their existing plants and infrastructure obsolete and has the effect of making their product, energy, cheaper.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program doesn't tell you exactly what the program is for?
.gifs on its own)
I didn't say that. I said that "GIMP" tells me nothing about the program, except perhaps that it's creators decided to burden it with an acronym for a name, which itself contains a meaningless recursive acronym.
Now, acronyms aren't strictly bad. It's much easier to say NASA than National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But one reason why that works is that "nasa" is not, by itself a word (in English anyway). GIMP wouldn't be quite so bad if not for the fact that "gimp" is a word, and a moderately offensive slang one at that.
PSP has nothing to do with painting
So should we stop calling the "brush" tool a brush because you can't actually hold it? It's a metaphor, a useful one that's been around for a very long time.
You should also see my second point above, that it doesn't matter what Photoshop is called, because "everybody" knows what it is. GIMP has not reached that level outside of the geek world, and will undoubtedly have a harder time doing so with it's current name.
Photoshop is a really broad name (especially for a program that can't make animated
You're firstly ignoring the hojillions of things that Photoshop can do that GIMP cannot, and secondly, why on earth would you want to? I'm just taking it on faith that Photoshop can't do animated GIFs, as I've never even tried.
More importantly, you're ignoring the fact that GIMP can't open or save GIF at all on its own.
Huh?And why PhotoShop does? What do you mean?
Well, for one, Photoshop actually gives some indication as to what kind of program it is. GIMP does not. Secondly, at this point, it doesn't matter much what Photoshop is called because everyone to whom it really matters already knows what it is. Photoshop is Photoshop and has been Photoshop since it was released in 1990.
It could also be stated with much fairness that PhotoShop users form a disproportionate population of those complaining about same.
Could it be that Photoshop users (current, potential, or former) are probably the biggest single group that might be drawn to GIMP? I think that if you're building a tool with an implicit goal of having all of the same capabilities of Photoshop, it might be nice if said tool would act something like it.