Yeah, I go through clothing pretty fast. Repairing equipment, crawling around under desks, moving stuff around, etc. all results in me going home with torn pants and stained shirts. Hooray for free t-shirts from vendors which help defray the cost of replacing clothing.
one of the reasons I work at a school: no matter how I dress, the students will always find a way to look worse than me. (whether it's by showing up to class in a bathrobe, or worse)
It also, sadly, a much older procedural API, so it doesn't mesh well with Cocoa development and can feel backwords when trying to use QuickTime within a modern OOP development environment.
Have you looked at the new QTKit framework in QuickTime 7? It's a set of Cocoa classes for using QuickTime. It's nowhere near complete yet, but it handles a large enough portion of QuickTime that Apple now uses it for QuickTime Player. (Although a few features of QT Player are clearly still handled through that awful procedural API, as some features are not yet available through QTKit.)
most of the time the reboot really isn't necessary. just quit and restart Safari, and anything else using webkit. and just force quit software update. (control-click it in the dock, then hold down option and hit "force quit")
The reboot is usually there just to make absolutely sure that you've quit and restarted all apps that link against the library.. important if the update included any security updates! It's easier to get people to click the "restart" button than to get them to actually quit and relaunch any apps linked against WebKit, especially since the average user wouldn't know which apps those are.
updates to Mac OS X itself really do require a reboot to take effect (as the window server or important daemons may have changed, or even the kernel could have been updated)
hmm. the Mac version of iTunes has pretty good performance (some annoying UI choices, but no performance issues). I guess they need to put more effort into the Windows port.
Quality problems with episodes of Lost could be either ABC's fault or Apple's.. w/o knowing who does the encoding and what format is used when it's being delivered to Apple, it's impossible to know.
I'm guessing that we'll eventually see higher resolution (or at least higher bitrate) videos from the iTunes store at some point. There are a lot of factors to consider here:
the very poor bandwidth most American households have
the cost of Apple's bandwidth
the capabilities of the iPod (which is clearly their main focus at this point)
what the content owners will allow them to sell (quite likely the most limiting constraint)
Apple has worked on improving boot times in Mac OS X 10.4 by redesigning the boot sequence so things can load in parallel instead of one after the other. Perhaps some Linux distro will do the same, hopefully by using Apple's code.
umm.. actually, that's what they did in 10.2 (or was it in 10.3?) to improve boot time. And lots of Linux distributions have since copied that idea.
The new thing in 10.4 is to avoid starting stuff at boot time unless it's really necessary to boot.. now a lot of daemons are loaded on demand rather than starting at boot time and waiting around until they're needed. It's a little bit like inetd in concept, but a lot more flexible (can do things other than watch for network traffic.. it can wait for a file to be dropped in a spool directory to start a print daemon, for example)
the eMac is still available for schools to buy, via the Apple Store for Education. (note that it's not available to students or teachers.. only to institutions.)
Of course, the eMac started out as an education-only product, and it was only after several months of consumer demand that Apple made it available to individuals. I imagine it will stay around for a few more months for schools, and then quietly disappear for good this spring, with Apple telling schools to buy the mini and buy a CRT somewhere else.
At any rate, Apple pushed FireWire in direct competition with USB
hmm. Why did the original iMac have USB ports but no Firewire ports? Firewire didn't appear on those machines for a full year after USB. Has Apple ever sold a machine with Firewire but no USB? (No.) Has Apple ever made Firewire mice or keyboards? (No.)
As far as I can tell, Firewire was never intended for low-speed devices such as mice and keyboards. Apple used to use ADB for that, and later they switched to USB. They developed Firewire as a replacement for SCSI. It was intended to be used for disk drives, scanners, and other things which need to operate at higher speeds. Apple switched from a combination of ADB and SCSI ports on the back of Macs to a combination of USB and Firewire. (Note that older Macs also had serial ports.. USB replaced both ADB and serial ports. I think this may have been one of the big reasons ADB was replaced by USB.)
I think that without USB Apple may have kept ADB for keyboards/mice when they switched from SCSI to Firewire for external drives and such. (They continued to use ADB for laptop keyboards and trackpads until very recently.)
Clearly Apple didn't like the fact that USB 2.0 allowed for fast devices similar in speed to 1394a. (1394b is faster, but even Apple has put it only on a few high end machines.) This led Apple to avoid putting high speed USB ports on most of their models until pretty recently. (very annoying) Another sign that Apple didn't want people using USB for disk drives is that Macs won't boot off of USB devices, even though they can boot from Firewire devices. (Annoying, as it means we have to buy more expensive Firewire disk enclosures to boot from external disks rather than using cheap USB disk enclosures.) Hopefully that will change with the Intel-based Macs.
My eighth grade algebra teacher taught us to calculate square roots with pencil and paper. It's like long division, but not as intuitive and it takes more steps, making it take longer and also making it more difficult to remember how to do it. (I can't remember off the top of my head how it works anymore.. I haven't ever needed to do it.)
That only works for people who attended WWDC. No one else can view WWDC session stuff.
I have an ADC Select membership and there is no WWDC option on the ADC site for me. (It only lists ADC Store, Downloads, and My Account)
In past years there was a way to buy access to the WWDC session videos and stuff after WWDC was over. This year there doesn't appear to be an way to do so.
Now creating one type per extension on windows isn't as easy as the old Mac OS way, admittedly, but personally I think the Resource Fork (where the meta data was stored) created more problems than it solved - at least as far as interacting with other OS and Java is concerned. (OK It's been a while but this is what I remember).
<pedant>Well, actually the HFS Type and Creator weren't stored in the resource fork, but with the other metadata (modification date, etc.) </pedant> but yes, it caused some problems when exchanging files over protocols (ftp) or in archive formats (zip) which didn't have support for the extra metadata. That's why Apple no longer recommends the use of type/creator as the main way to specify the type of a file.
Mac OS X still supports the use of the HFS metadata, but applications are supposed to use extensions in addition to (or instead of) the HFS metadata. (Most Carbon ports of old software still use the HFS metadata, although they generally set an extension too. Most Cocoa programs and a growing number of new Carbon programs just use an extension.) There's now a new "Universal Type Identifier" (UTI) which can be associated with one or more extensions and/or HFS filetypes. Most things on Tiger are built around the UTI.. they're used to choose which application will open a file or which spotlight plugin will index the file, for example. Some part of the OS is responsible for deciding what UTI a file has, depending on either its filetype or extension. I'm not sure whether it gives precedence to the HFS filetype or the extension. Oh, and UTI has a mapping to/from MIME types as well, but there's no way to directly specify a MIME type for a file in the HFS filesystem, so this isn't used much at this point.
Once you start dragging it's not always clear how to cancel; I generally move the mouse around randomly until I see the "no" cursor, but it's not always easy to find and sometimes I drop things unexpected places because I thought they wouldn't be "droppable"
on the Mac you can always safely drop stuff on the menubar, which will ignore all drops. (unless you've installed some dumb hack which uses drops on the menubar to do something, of course) In the classic Mac OS you could "drop" windows there and they'd snap back to their original position, too, but in Mac OS X it doesn't work for windows.
Dropping stuff on the titlebars of windows should also be ignored.
The ESC key (which should be easy to hit if you're right-handed) also cancels drags on Mac OS X, although the Finder seems a bit buggy. The Finder will cancel the drag, animating the movement of the icon back to its starting point, but if you continue dragging the mouse after hitting escape you'll see the ghost icon snap back to the cursor again. Wacky. (I've filed a bug report. Bug ID# 4187405)
The Java version of Cocoa was never very well supported (lots of features not available) and the documentation always sucked. Plus, it was hard to use, as Java and ObjC have a lot of big differences which made using Cocoa APIs from Java very awkward. You pretty much had to learn the Objective C version of Cocoa first anyway, before trying to use the Java version, in order to really get it. And at that point you might as well just write your program in Objective C. (Unless you were just trying to put a native interface on top of existing Java code.)
Also, Cocoa and Carbon have yet to reach feature parity... when you complain, Apple will just tell you to call the Carbon API, which of course you can't do from Java. So in addition to Cocoa features which weren't available in Java, there were plenty of things which aren't in Cocoa yet and were thus not available to Java.
The Java version of Cocoa was never terribly popular, because it was weird, hard-to-use, lacking features, and most Java programmers want to write platform-agnostic code anyway. (Although for any real application you have to, as Mac users tend to expect a GUI which matches the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines.)
Apple would be better off promoting the Python-ObjC bridge, PyObjC. (Or Camelbones for Perl). Python and Perl fit into the Cocoa model much better than java.
Of course, Apple needs to continue to improve their Java environment, with improved Swing support, and perhaps some new com.apple.swing.* classes to add some of the additional Cocoa widgets to Swing.
I'm guessing Apple dropped it because too few people were using it, and it was just too hard to support. (The big differences between ObjC and Java [such as memory management, and the whole late binding thing which makes ObjC so fun] made it a lot of work to expose Cocoa APIs in Java, and in some cases were really ugly and difficult to use as a result.) Also, future integration between Cocoa and Carbon (I want to see HIView and NSView cooperate in a single window, damnit!) may have further complicated things.
I was on it once when it stopped.. I think it was right after the cannonball bit, right at the bottom of the final ramp back up to the loading dock. It was only three or four minutes, so it didn't bother me too much.
More interesting was when the mine train ride at Knott's Berry Farm broke down. They led us out through the maintenance tunnels underneath, past the basketball court, and emptying out on the back side of the "mountain". (I can't remember whether it was a full court, or just a half court like the one in the Matterhorn at Disneyland).. it was amusing to see all the motors and pistons and stuff driving the animatronics from underneath.
Oh, and Space Mountain at Disneyland is interesting when it breaks down. When they turn on the lights it looks a lot different. And you can really see why it's a Bad Idea to put your hands up in the air on that ride.. at least as of 10 years ago there were some places where it looked like your hands could smack some hard (possibly sharp) metal bits. Although I understand that they've messed around with it again (replacing the old "launch tunnel" bit, among other things) so some of this may not apply anymore.
I used to write software for the old RIM 950, back before they introduced Blackberry. It was very nice hardware.. a 286 (or 386, I can't remember) with a few megs of RAM, all running on a few AA (or AAA, again it's been a while) batteries. Oh, and their software was all written in C/C++. And trust me, that was important..
Their competition at the time was the Motorola Pagewriter, which was crappy hardware with even worse software. It was dog slow, and you had to use their weird programming language which took the worst aspects of Pascal and Java and merged them together into something hideous. Oh, and the compiler was extremely buggy. In one version the compiler would crash if you put a comment on the line after an IF statement or something screwy like that.
The RIM was fun to program, though, and if they would give out the SDK for free I'm sure you'd see a ton of software for it.
No, the final shipping Intel-based Macs will not be running Open Firmware for some other reason. I don't know the reason, I just know, because that's what Apple has said, they'll not have it.
Just because a preliminary document with "subject to change" stamped all over it says that Open Firmware isn't available doesn't mean that Apple can't or won't put it in the final machines. Same with the Apple partition scheme vs the common x86 partitioning scheme.
The point they were making is that developers shouldn't make any assumptions about those features. Because
The developer preview machines are stock PCs, and thus don't have OpenFirmware or Mac-standard hard disk partitions. The final hardware will almost certainly be different in some way, but developers need to test their software on something now, even if it's different from what consumers eventually buy.
Apple may not have decided what to do on their final hardware.
Even if Apple were to use Open Firmware and/or the Mac hard disk partitioning scheme, they might want to keep their options open in case they ever do want to make a version of Mac OS X for non-Apple hardware.
Anyway, it's not as if Apple hasn't made last-minute changes before. And nothing in the transition guidelines is set in stone.. that's why it says "preliminary" and "subject to change":-)
Important: This is a preliminary document for an application binary interface (ABI) in development. Although this document has been reviewed for technical accuracy, it is not final. Apple Computer is supplying this information to help developers plan for the adoption of the technologies and programming interfaces described herein. This information is subject to change, and software implemented according to this document should be tested with final operating system software and final documentation. Newer versions of this document may be provided with future seeds of the ABI. For information about updates to this and other developer documentation, view the New & Updated sidebars in subsequent seeds of the ADC Reference Library.
I'm not sure why you're hypothesising about a motherboard with Open Firmware. Leaving that aside, what's to stop Microsoft from getting Windows to run on a PowerPC Mac? They used to ship Windows NT 4.0 for Mac, but XP, for some reason, isn't available.
Well, I don't believe Microsoft ever shipped NT for PowerMacs. They did have a version in development for PREP (or CHRP, or whatever the PPC reference platform was at the time) but Apple never really did make their machines compliant with the hardware reference platform, and Microsoft decided not to release it anyway. Probably because it was too much work and marketing research probably showed that most Mac users wanted to stick with Mac OS.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft make a version of Windows for the Mac (and Apple has said they won't do anything to stop them from doing so) but I think it's more likely that Microsoft will push a version of Virtual PC. Why? Because it will be easier, probably, and more convenient for the consumer (who wants to have to reboot? Better to run it in a virtual machine!) plus they get to sell two pieces of software (VPC and Windows) instead of just one (Windows).
FFX-2 may not have been what people would have expected from a Final Fantasy game, but it's a fun game. It has a good battle system, a pretty cool job system, and a lot of variety in gameplay.
It addresses a few shortcomings in FFX.. it uses the traditional Active Time Battle system, as opposed to FFX's turn-based system, and it's extremely non-linear.. about as far from FFX's linear progression as you can get. (I think they went too far here... I like my games to be at least somewhat linear. Actually, I think most people prefer games with a fairly high degree of linearity, even if they think otherwise. Perhaps FFX vs. FFX-2 will help people realize this.)
The minigames are pretty fun, and for the most part you don't have to complete them. (Unless you want that perfect ending, but I'm content to just read the dialog from the extra scenes on gamefaqs)
The story in FFX-2 isn't a big epic story (at least not yet.. I'm only halfway through) but I don't think it's supposed to be.. that's what FFX was after all. FFX-2 is just supposed to be fun. And trust me.. if you start playing the game right after you finish FFX (as I did.. I just finished FFX earlier this month, and then went out and bought FFX-2 right away) it's a nice break from the big story of FFX and it's non-"happy ever after" ending. Yuna was my favorite character in FFX (Tidus can get to be a bit annoying, actually) and it's nice to see how her character develops after she saves Spira.
The people who hate FFX-2 mostly fall into three groups: those who can't stand playing any game with female protagonists, those who don't want a "lighthearted" FF game, and those who don't like Yuna.
We can ignore the sexually-insecure teenagers who can't handle playing a game with female characters. They'll hopefully grow up someday.
The second group needs to realize that a) they don't have to play the game if they don't want to play it and b) this wasn't intended to be a standard FF game (which is why it has that funky X-2 name instead of being XII or whatever).
The third group.. well, if you don't like Yuna, then that's too bad. She was my favorite character (by far) in FFX, but not everyone will agree. But it's pretty clear that she and Tidus were both considered by Square to be the main characters in FFX (all of the early promotional material made it clear that Tidus and Yuna were both considered to be the main characters) but FFX was Tidus's story (although obviously Yuna played a large part) so now Square is telling Yuna's story.
In FFX we were able to watch Tidus grow and develop emotionally, coming to understand his father and himself, as he made the hard choices which were necessary to save Spira. Yuna was mostly just doing what she had been trained to do, and didn't really start to consider other options for her life until pretty far into the story.. at which point she mostly just let Tidus decide what to do. In FFX-2 she is forced to decide for herself what to do (as her previous training is rather pointless now) and we really get to see her character grow in this story. I really like the way Square has handled this, giving Yuna a chance to have her own story. I think the lack of male player-controlled characters is important in allowing Yuna to do her own thing. If a dominant male character were around, she might be tempted to just let him control things as a Tidus substitute.
Now I must admit, I would have liked to see something a bit more similar to FFX in terms of the basic game structure (because I am not a big fan of minigames, and I prefer a more linear story) but I really enjoy FFX-2. I like the whole girl power thing, and Square's decision to have a cheesy Charlie's Angles type of attitude. The only thing I'd change would be to make it more linear and with fewer minigames. I find the cheesy humor to be a wonderful break fro
I find it interesting that totally generic french words can be held as being relatively strong trademarks in the US.
It's not just French words. Totally generic English words can have strong trademark protection in the US as well.
Windows, Outlook, Links, Halo, Entourage.. it looks like Word, Office, and Project aren't on the list.. I don't think they're any more generic, most likely they just didn't get them registered in time.
the biggest things that have changed in the OS are really below the surface.
for the developer, I think CoreData, CoreImage, CoreVideo...
the thing there is that when developers take advantage of this, you will need to upgrade to use the neat new features in those new applications that take advantage of them.
Yes, I think we're going to see a lot of shareware and freeware apps using these new APIs. Commercial software will take a bit longer, depending on the rate of Tiger adoption (companies don't want to lose out on sales due to users still using old versions of the OS) but it looks to me like the Tiger adoption rate will be pretty good.
CoreAudio, from panther, made creating audio plug-ins (for logic, live, etc.) relatively easy to build functions that work in a variety of applications as they are based on the architecture of the OS rather than the plug-in architecture of a particular application. (apologies for the sentence structure...)
CoreAudio has been around since before Panther, but Panther is when it really became polished. (And received a lot of attention thanks to the high-profile applications such as GarageBand which started using it after Panther's release.)
I would love to see the ability to create image filters that could be used in a variety of manipulation programs, ( btw, is the CoreSet available to darwin?) and have it then be possible to generate a simple image manipulation framework that relied entirely on CoreImage/Video units.
Image Units are just so cool that I'm sure we're going to see a ton of them. Someone needs to write a Photoshop plugin which allows one to use IUs in apps which use the Photoshop API. (I don't think the reverse is possible, as IUs have to be implemented in a fragment language so they can be executed on the GPU.)
Prepare yourself for the flood of shareware image editing apps using Core Image. Core Image is one of those things which is going to help drive the users to upgrade. (Even if they don't know it yet.)
I really like the way Apple is building these generic frameworks with good plugin support. It makes developing cool and useful applications much easier, and perhaps more importantly avoids the problem of application-specific plugin formats.. It also helps Apple, as it means more plugins which work in their software (such as Audio Units for GarageBand).
I hope someone will take iTunes to the next level and truly offer a global service. I realize this isn't Apples fault, but it still sucks.
I'm sure that as soon as the music industry can work out all the rights issues and agree on terms, Apple will jump on the opportunity to increase the selection of music in iTunes.
Currently the US iTunes music store has "French Pop" and "German Pop" sections.. I imagine that they'll expand their selection whenever possible. I heard something about them adding a large Chinese music section at some point a few months ago, but I don't think it's happened yet. (Or at least I don't see it.).. Aha, here is a news story about it.
My quibble is that TE doesn't respond to the home and end keys. Minor issue though, as my old Mac (keyboard) didn't even have those keys, but I am getting accustomed to their presence.
It does use them, it just doesn't do what you expect. The Human Interface Guidelines say that home should scroll to the top left corner of the document (w/o moving the insertion point) and end should scroll to the bottom of the document (again, w/o moving the insertion point).
To move the insertion point to the beginning/end of the line, you are supposed to hit command-left or command-right arrow. Or in Cocoa applications such as TextEdit, emacs fans can use Control-A and Control-E. (Cocoa's text systems supports a large subset of the common emacs editing commands by default.)
Luckily the Cocoa text system can have its keyboard commands changed. Apple's documentation is here. (Note: Apple renames documents and changes their URL structure occasionally, so if you're looking at this in two years and the link is broken, well, it ain't my fault.)
See also this page which includes some information about changing key bindings.
Specifically, you want to bind key \UF729 (home) to "moveToBeginningOfLine:" and key \UF72B (end) to "moveToEndOfLine:". By default, they're bound to "scrollToBeginningOfDocument:" and "scrollToEndOfDocument: ".
See the list of "Action methods" on this page for a list of methods which you can bind to keys.
Note that Carbon programs won't be affected.. they will continue to use the Classic Mac OS text editing keys. But TextEdit is a Cocoa application, so it will honor your preferences.
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Yeah, I go through clothing pretty fast. Repairing equipment, crawling around under desks, moving stuff around, etc. all results in me going home with torn pants and stained shirts. Hooray for free t-shirts from vendors which help defray the cost of replacing clothing.
one of the reasons I work at a school: no matter how I dress, the students will always find a way to look worse than me. (whether it's by showing up to class in a bathrobe, or worse)
Instead of "open -a TextEdit" you can "open -e" :-)
Have you looked at the new QTKit framework in QuickTime 7? It's a set of Cocoa classes for using QuickTime. It's nowhere near complete yet, but it handles a large enough portion of QuickTime that Apple now uses it for QuickTime Player. (Although a few features of QT Player are clearly still handled through that awful procedural API, as some features are not yet available through QTKit.)
most of the time the reboot really isn't necessary. just quit and restart Safari, and anything else using webkit. and just force quit software update. (control-click it in the dock, then hold down option and hit "force quit")
The reboot is usually there just to make absolutely sure that you've quit and restarted all apps that link against the library.. important if the update included any security updates! It's easier to get people to click the "restart" button than to get them to actually quit and relaunch any apps linked against WebKit, especially since the average user wouldn't know which apps those are.
updates to Mac OS X itself really do require a reboot to take effect (as the window server or important daemons may have changed, or even the kernel could have been updated)
hmm. the Mac version of iTunes has pretty good performance (some annoying UI choices, but no performance issues). I guess they need to put more effort into the Windows port.
Quality problems with episodes of Lost could be either ABC's fault or Apple's.. w/o knowing who does the encoding and what format is used when it's being delivered to Apple, it's impossible to know.
I'm guessing that we'll eventually see higher resolution (or at least higher bitrate) videos from the iTunes store at some point. There are a lot of factors to consider here:
umm.. actually, that's what they did in 10.2 (or was it in 10.3?) to improve boot time. And lots of Linux distributions have since copied that idea.
The new thing in 10.4 is to avoid starting stuff at boot time unless it's really necessary to boot.. now a lot of daemons are loaded on demand rather than starting at boot time and waiting around until they're needed. It's a little bit like inetd in concept, but a lot more flexible (can do things other than watch for network traffic .. it can wait for a file to be dropped in a spool directory to start a print daemon, for example)
the eMac is still available for schools to buy, via the Apple Store for Education. (note that it's not available to students or teachers .. only to institutions.)
Of course, the eMac started out as an education-only product, and it was only after several months of consumer demand that Apple made it available to individuals. I imagine it will stay around for a few more months for schools, and then quietly disappear for good this spring, with Apple telling schools to buy the mini and buy a CRT somewhere else.
the Apple II only had 80x24, not 80x25. (well, the early Apple II models only had 40x24 .. 80x24 was added later)
hmm. Why did the original iMac have USB ports but no Firewire ports? Firewire didn't appear on those machines for a full year after USB. Has Apple ever sold a machine with Firewire but no USB? (No.) Has Apple ever made Firewire mice or keyboards? (No.)
As far as I can tell, Firewire was never intended for low-speed devices such as mice and keyboards. Apple used to use ADB for that, and later they switched to USB. They developed Firewire as a replacement for SCSI. It was intended to be used for disk drives, scanners, and other things which need to operate at higher speeds. Apple switched from a combination of ADB and SCSI ports on the back of Macs to a combination of USB and Firewire. (Note that older Macs also had serial ports .. USB replaced both ADB and serial ports. I think this may have been one of the big reasons ADB was replaced by USB.)
I think that without USB Apple may have kept ADB for keyboards/mice when they switched from SCSI to Firewire for external drives and such. (They continued to use ADB for laptop keyboards and trackpads until very recently.)
Clearly Apple didn't like the fact that USB 2.0 allowed for fast devices similar in speed to 1394a. (1394b is faster, but even Apple has put it only on a few high end machines.) This led Apple to avoid putting high speed USB ports on most of their models until pretty recently. (very annoying) Another sign that Apple didn't want people using USB for disk drives is that Macs won't boot off of USB devices, even though they can boot from Firewire devices. (Annoying, as it means we have to buy more expensive Firewire disk enclosures to boot from external disks rather than using cheap USB disk enclosures.) Hopefully that will change with the Intel-based Macs.
My eighth grade algebra teacher taught us to calculate square roots with pencil and paper. It's like long division, but not as intuitive and it takes more steps, making it take longer and also making it more difficult to remember how to do it. (I can't remember off the top of my head how it works anymore.. I haven't ever needed to do it.)
That only works for people who attended WWDC. No one else can view WWDC session stuff.
I have an ADC Select membership and there is no WWDC option on the ADC site for me. (It only lists ADC Store, Downloads, and My Account)
In past years there was a way to buy access to the WWDC session videos and stuff after WWDC was over. This year there doesn't appear to be an way to do so.
<pedant>Well, actually the HFS Type and Creator weren't stored in the resource fork, but with the other metadata (modification date, etc.) </pedant> but yes, it caused some problems when exchanging files over protocols (ftp) or in archive formats (zip) which didn't have support for the extra metadata. That's why Apple no longer recommends the use of type/creator as the main way to specify the type of a file.
Mac OS X still supports the use of the HFS metadata, but applications are supposed to use extensions in addition to (or instead of) the HFS metadata. (Most Carbon ports of old software still use the HFS metadata, although they generally set an extension too. Most Cocoa programs and a growing number of new Carbon programs just use an extension.) There's now a new "Universal Type Identifier" (UTI) which can be associated with one or more extensions and/or HFS filetypes. Most things on Tiger are built around the UTI .. they're used to choose which application will open a file or which spotlight plugin will index the file, for example. Some part of the OS is responsible for deciding what UTI a file has, depending on either its filetype or extension. I'm not sure whether it gives precedence to the HFS filetype or the extension. Oh, and UTI has a mapping to/from MIME types as well, but there's no way to directly specify a MIME type for a file in the HFS filesystem, so this isn't used much at this point.
I never said Windows had decent drag and drop. :-)
on the Mac you can always safely drop stuff on the menubar, which will ignore all drops. (unless you've installed some dumb hack which uses drops on the menubar to do something, of course) In the classic Mac OS you could "drop" windows there and they'd snap back to their original position, too, but in Mac OS X it doesn't work for windows.
Dropping stuff on the titlebars of windows should also be ignored.
The ESC key (which should be easy to hit if you're right-handed) also cancels drags on Mac OS X, although the Finder seems a bit buggy. The Finder will cancel the drag, animating the movement of the icon back to its starting point, but if you continue dragging the mouse after hitting escape you'll see the ghost icon snap back to the cursor again. Wacky. (I've filed a bug report. Bug ID# 4187405)
The Java version of Cocoa was never very well supported (lots of features not available) and the documentation always sucked. Plus, it was hard to use, as Java and ObjC have a lot of big differences which made using Cocoa APIs from Java very awkward. You pretty much had to learn the Objective C version of Cocoa first anyway, before trying to use the Java version, in order to really get it. And at that point you might as well just write your program in Objective C. (Unless you were just trying to put a native interface on top of existing Java code.)
Also, Cocoa and Carbon have yet to reach feature parity ... when you complain, Apple will just tell you to call the Carbon API, which of course you can't do from Java. So in addition to Cocoa features which weren't available in Java, there were plenty of things which aren't in Cocoa yet and were thus not available to Java.
The Java version of Cocoa was never terribly popular, because it was weird, hard-to-use, lacking features, and most Java programmers want to write platform-agnostic code anyway. (Although for any real application you have to, as Mac users tend to expect a GUI which matches the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines.)
Apple would be better off promoting the Python-ObjC bridge, PyObjC. (Or Camelbones for Perl). Python and Perl fit into the Cocoa model much better than java.
Of course, Apple needs to continue to improve their Java environment, with improved Swing support, and perhaps some new com.apple.swing.* classes to add some of the additional Cocoa widgets to Swing.
I'm guessing Apple dropped it because too few people were using it, and it was just too hard to support. (The big differences between ObjC and Java [such as memory management, and the whole late binding thing which makes ObjC so fun] made it a lot of work to expose Cocoa APIs in Java, and in some cases were really ugly and difficult to use as a result.) Also, future integration between Cocoa and Carbon (I want to see HIView and NSView cooperate in a single window, damnit!) may have further complicated things.
I was on it once when it stopped .. I think it was right after the cannonball bit, right at the bottom of the final ramp back up to the loading dock. It was only three or four minutes, so it didn't bother me too much.
.. it was amusing to see all the motors and pistons and stuff driving the animatronics from underneath.
.. at least as of 10 years ago there were some places where it looked like your hands could smack some hard (possibly sharp) metal bits. Although I understand that they've messed around with it again (replacing the old "launch tunnel" bit, among other things) so some of this may not apply anymore.
More interesting was when the mine train ride at Knott's Berry Farm broke down. They led us out through the maintenance tunnels underneath, past the basketball court, and emptying out on the back side of the "mountain". (I can't remember whether it was a full court, or just a half court like the one in the Matterhorn at Disneyland)
Oh, and Space Mountain at Disneyland is interesting when it breaks down. When they turn on the lights it looks a lot different. And you can really see why it's a Bad Idea to put your hands up in the air on that ride
Dungeon Master was great. I had it on my Apple IIgs.
Much, much later I had Dungeon Master II on Mac OS, but for some reason I never liked it quite as much as the original.
I used to write software for the old RIM 950, back before they introduced Blackberry. It was very nice hardware .. a 286 (or 386, I can't remember) with a few megs of RAM, all running on a few AA (or AAA, again it's been a while) batteries. Oh, and their software was all written in C/C++. And trust me, that was important..
Their competition at the time was the Motorola Pagewriter, which was crappy hardware with even worse software. It was dog slow, and you had to use their weird programming language which took the worst aspects of Pascal and Java and merged them together into something hideous. Oh, and the compiler was extremely buggy. In one version the compiler would crash if you put a comment on the line after an IF statement or something screwy like that.
The RIM was fun to program, though, and if they would give out the SDK for free I'm sure you'd see a ton of software for it.
Just because a preliminary document with "subject to change" stamped all over it says that Open Firmware isn't available doesn't mean that Apple can't or won't put it in the final machines. Same with the Apple partition scheme vs the common x86 partitioning scheme.
The point they were making is that developers shouldn't make any assumptions about those features. Because
Anyway, it's not as if Apple hasn't made last-minute changes before. And nothing in the transition guidelines is set in stone .. that's why it says "preliminary" and "subject to change" :-)
From Universal Binary Programming Guidelines:
Well, I don't believe Microsoft ever shipped NT for PowerMacs. They did have a version in development for PREP (or CHRP, or whatever the PPC reference platform was at the time) but Apple never really did make their machines compliant with the hardware reference platform, and Microsoft decided not to release it anyway. Probably because it was too much work and marketing research probably showed that most Mac users wanted to stick with Mac OS.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft make a version of Windows for the Mac (and Apple has said they won't do anything to stop them from doing so) but I think it's more likely that Microsoft will push a version of Virtual PC. Why? Because it will be easier, probably, and more convenient for the consumer (who wants to have to reboot? Better to run it in a virtual machine!) plus they get to sell two pieces of software (VPC and Windows) instead of just one (Windows).
FFX-2 may not have been what people would have expected from a Final Fantasy game, but it's a fun game. It has a good battle system, a pretty cool job system, and a lot of variety in gameplay.
.. it uses the traditional Active Time Battle system, as opposed to FFX's turn-based system, and it's extremely non-linear .. about as far from FFX's linear progression as you can get. (I think they went too far here ... I like my games to be at least somewhat linear. Actually, I think most people prefer games with a fairly high degree of linearity, even if they think otherwise. Perhaps FFX vs. FFX-2 will help people realize this.)
.. I'm only halfway through) but I don't think it's supposed to be .. that's what FFX was after all. FFX-2 is just supposed to be fun. And trust me.. if you start playing the game right after you finish FFX (as I did .. I just finished FFX earlier this month, and then went out and bought FFX-2 right away) it's a nice break from the big story of FFX and it's non-"happy ever after" ending. Yuna was my favorite character in FFX (Tidus can get to be a bit annoying, actually) and it's nice to see how her character develops after she saves Spira.
.. well, if you don't like Yuna, then that's too bad. She was my favorite character (by far) in FFX, but not everyone will agree. But it's pretty clear that she and Tidus were both considered by Square to be the main characters in FFX (all of the early promotional material made it clear that Tidus and Yuna were both considered to be the main characters) but FFX was Tidus's story (although obviously Yuna played a large part) so now Square is telling Yuna's story.
.. at which point she mostly just let Tidus decide what to do. In FFX-2 she is forced to decide for herself what to do (as her previous training is rather pointless now) and we really get to see her character grow in this story. I really like the way Square has handled this, giving Yuna a chance to have her own story. I think the lack of male player-controlled characters is important in allowing Yuna to do her own thing. If a dominant male character were around, she might be tempted to just let him control things as a Tidus substitute.
It addresses a few shortcomings in FFX
The minigames are pretty fun, and for the most part you don't have to complete them. (Unless you want that perfect ending, but I'm content to just read the dialog from the extra scenes on gamefaqs)
The story in FFX-2 isn't a big epic story (at least not yet
The people who hate FFX-2 mostly fall into three groups: those who can't stand playing any game with female protagonists, those who don't want a "lighthearted" FF game, and those who don't like Yuna.
We can ignore the sexually-insecure teenagers who can't handle playing a game with female characters. They'll hopefully grow up someday.
The second group needs to realize that a) they don't have to play the game if they don't want to play it and b) this wasn't intended to be a standard FF game (which is why it has that funky X-2 name instead of being XII or whatever).
The third group
In FFX we were able to watch Tidus grow and develop emotionally, coming to understand his father and himself, as he made the hard choices which were necessary to save Spira. Yuna was mostly just doing what she had been trained to do, and didn't really start to consider other options for her life until pretty far into the story
Now I must admit, I would have liked to see something a bit more similar to FFX in terms of the basic game structure (because I am not a big fan of minigames, and I prefer a more linear story) but I really enjoy FFX-2. I like the whole girl power thing, and Square's decision to have a cheesy Charlie's Angles type of attitude. The only thing I'd change would be to make it more linear and with fewer minigames. I find the cheesy humor to be a wonderful break fro
It's not just French words. Totally generic English words can have strong trademark protection in the US as well.
Windows, Outlook, Links, Halo, Entourage.. it looks like Word, Office, and Project aren't on the list .. I don't think they're any more generic, most likely they just didn't get them registered in time.
Yes, I think we're going to see a lot of shareware and freeware apps using these new APIs. Commercial software will take a bit longer, depending on the rate of Tiger adoption (companies don't want to lose out on sales due to users still using old versions of the OS) but it looks to me like the Tiger adoption rate will be pretty good.
CoreAudio has been around since before Panther, but Panther is when it really became polished. (And received a lot of attention thanks to the high-profile applications such as GarageBand which started using it after Panther's release.)
Image Units are just so cool that I'm sure we're going to see a ton of them. Someone needs to write a Photoshop plugin which allows one to use IUs in apps which use the Photoshop API. (I don't think the reverse is possible, as IUs have to be implemented in a fragment language so they can be executed on the GPU.)
Prepare yourself for the flood of shareware image editing apps using Core Image. Core Image is one of those things which is going to help drive the users to upgrade. (Even if they don't know it yet.)
I really like the way Apple is building these generic frameworks with good plugin support. It makes developing cool and useful applications much easier, and perhaps more importantly avoids the problem of application-specific plugin formats.. It also helps Apple, as it means more plugins which work in their software (such as Audio Units for GarageBand).
I'm sure that as soon as the music industry can work out all the rights issues and agree on terms, Apple will jump on the opportunity to increase the selection of music in iTunes.
Currently the US iTunes music store has "French Pop" and "German Pop" sections .. I imagine that they'll expand their selection whenever possible. I heard something about them adding a large Chinese music section at some point a few months ago, but I don't think it's happened yet. (Or at least I don't see it.) .. Aha, here is a news story about it.
The version of iChat in Tiger supports Jabber servers. (They're bundling a Jabber server in Tiger Server, in fact.)
You only have to use AOL or .Mac screennames if you want to talk to the AIM server.
On your local subnet you don't need any central server .. iChat can use Bonjour (formerly known as Rendezvous) to do peer discovery.
It does use them, it just doesn't do what you expect. The Human Interface Guidelines say that home should scroll to the top left corner of the document (w/o moving the insertion point) and end should scroll to the bottom of the document (again, w/o moving the insertion point).
To move the insertion point to the beginning/end of the line, you are supposed to hit command-left or command-right arrow. Or in Cocoa applications such as TextEdit, emacs fans can use Control-A and Control-E. (Cocoa's text systems supports a large subset of the common emacs editing commands by default.)
Luckily the Cocoa text system can have its keyboard commands changed. Apple's documentation is here. (Note: Apple renames documents and changes their URL structure occasionally, so if you're looking at this in two years and the link is broken, well, it ain't my fault.)
See also this page which includes some information about changing key bindings.
Specifically, you want to bind key \UF729 (home) to "moveToBeginningOfLine:" and key \UF72B (end) to "moveToEndOfLine:". By default, they're bound to "scrollToBeginningOfDocument:" and "scrollToEndOfDocument: ".
See the list of "Action methods" on this page for a list of methods which you can bind to keys.
Note that Carbon programs won't be affected .. they will continue to use the Classic Mac OS text editing keys. But TextEdit is a Cocoa application, so it will honor your preferences.