Secondly, doesn't your gut tell you there's way too much open space in that place? If having so much unused space on the most expensive land in the entire world seems a bit inefficient, imagine how inefficient their other practices are.
"Open" doesn't necessarily mean "unused.":)
The fact that it's not a tightly-packed cube farm is the whole point.
10.0.0 was an unexpectedly major change from 9.x. for many users.
For what it's worth, I have some packing list somewhere that lists the contents as "Mac OS X 1.0," as opposed to "Mac OS X 10.0."
With Jaguar (10.2.x) and Panther (10.3.x) Apple has been using the second number as "major release" number where they'll change backward compatibility
Not sure I follow here. 10.2 and 10.3 are entirely backwards-compatible with 10.0 and 10.1. There is new API in each 10.x release, however.
So what happened to that third number as a marker of the bugs and stability?
This is very much still the case. I'm surprised you even bring it up. 10.3.8 is a bug fix release. 10.4 (Tiger) will be a feature release.
This is now pushed down into the Build number. Do 9 out of 10 Mac users know what the build number is or how to find it?
I'm not sure what you mean by this, unless you're referring to the occassional security fixes?
Apple hasn't had great use of version numbers in the past, but I do hope that if they do ever take the opportunity to revise the major version number that they will also take the opportunity to remove the marketing influence on the Minor and Patch numbers in the version numbering scheme.
It doesn't seem like that big of a problem to me. Take 10.3.8.
10 = signifies difference from Mac OS 9 branch. This could probably be 1 instead. Marketing had a hand here, as you say.
3 = the major feature release number, Panther
8 = the minor version number, or "patch level" if you want to think of it that way. There are rarely features introduced at this level. Any that are introduced tend to address a usability bug.
When two products have equal capabilities in relation to your tasks, but one is $650 and one is free, the choice becomes really simple.
I think you're misjudging the marketing. It's not a technology problem.
$650 is only when you buy for the first time. It tends to be about $150 thereafter. Not only is this pocket change, but designers tend to care more about user experience than anything else. They don't care about politics, licenses or even price because none of these things affect the creative process.
Nothing ends up costing the designer more than something which impedes the creative process, and Adobe knows this. This is why bullet list feature comparisons are essentially irrelevant. Free (either kind) products with similar major features is not nearly a good enough reason to switch. What GIMP is more likely to do is to take out the low end market.
For what it's worth, I'd personally like an alternative to Photoshop on Mac OS X, but GIMP is not it as of now.
Here's a link to an article at Forbes that questions the wisdowm of suing your own fan
This is a fairly different issue. The Fobes article is about a web site that publishes private information and sells ads. I'm not sure if they make much of a profit, but not exactly "fans" in the sense of random Mac users walking down the street.
"Microsoft said Friday that it is halting development of future Macintosh versions of its Internet Explorer browser, citing competition from Apple Computer's Safari browser."
That's the company line. In other news, Clippy is helpful.
If Apple puts Microsoft in a position where they are competing, Microsoft may well do what they did in the Safari situation and stop developing the product
Not sure why everyone assumes IE's dropped development was a effect of Safari.
Jobs said Tiger will continue Apple's drive for improved Windows compatibility. New features aimed at interoperability will include better support for SMB home directories and the ability to display Word tables within TextEdit.
1. Apple makes everything. Talk about having all your eggs in one basket! What happens if they go under
Four billion or something in cash. I think they're good.
I don't think so. Owning the hardware, the OS, the apps, AND the Office suite, geez, what a nightmare!
I think you're reading way too much into it. Think of it this way: you are free to not buy a Mac. Unless that changes, there is no monopoly. Nobody calls Sony a monopoly because they make both the Playstation hardware and software. You can buy a GameCube.
How much incentive is there for 3rd party dev folks when Apple is doing it all?
Apple's hardly "doing it all." What they've been doing for some time is addressing the weaknesses in the platform. MS Office is "okay," but far from the best representation of what the Mac OS X frameworks have to offer.
I understand Apple has a sliver of the marketplace but I'm not sure making everything for your computer platform helps you in the long run.
I don't really feel like I have the time or patience to muck about with stuff that doesn't work so well, so I choose to buy a Mac.
No, what was promised was that NextStep as it was would be a suitable desktop OS.
Now we're getting into a somewhat grey area that's hard to prove or disprove. I'm not disputing that there was work to do to make Nextstep appropriate for a Mac consumer, but that doesn't really directly address the issue of what the best long-term OS strategy was for apple.
And what does Apache and MySQL bring to a desktop OS
A desktop OS for people who make web sites.
Multi-user is not a core feature in a desktop OS
I disagree.
Unfortunately the Mac needs cross platform apps in order to survive.
I misspoke. I didn't mean cross-platform apps in general, I meant those that rely on a third party cross-platform toolkit to do the port. I don't know of any apps that are popular on the Mac that use this approach.
The Mac market is too small to be hugely successful in. Go to a VC with a business plan that shows you running only on Mac and you'll get laughed out of the room
So you wouldn't be interested in the revenue from something like Final Cut Pro?:)
But in any case, the most interesting software I see on any platform nowadays tends to be apps written by independent developers. Cocoa is a major factor in this on the Mac.
I wonder sometimes what would have happened if the Next management had truly done an objective analysis of the merits of Copland and NextStep's kernel.
Would we ever have seen anything like Darwin? More a philosophical question I guess.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that Copland and the culture that surrounded it would have resulted in a different type of audience than Apple has today. Not making a statement about whether this is good or bad, just interesting.
iTunes, incidentally, was developed outside of Apple by two of the key Copland developers who got disgusted and left after Next took over. So, perhaps the demise of Copland did save Apple.
SoundJam was the one Apple went with, but it wasn't the only MP3 player around.
- Scott
Left out some parts to the story
on
NeXTSTEP To Mac OS X
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The end result was that Mac OS X was not shipped until 2001, nearly 3 years behind what was promised.
You're leaving out some rather crucial parts of the story, here. In Spring of 1999, Apple shipped Mac OS X Server 1.0. In many respects, this is what was promised: Nextstep/Rhapsody on PowerPC hardware. It's a far cry from what we have in Mac OS X today, but that's because the requirements changed.
First, the original Next acquisition strategy was to require everyone to rewrite their apps in NextStep APIs (predecessor to Cocoa). Companies like Adobe didn't like this prospect, so Apple went back and started working on Carbon, which was a significant undertaking. In addition, Quartz was created to replace Display PostScript. And that's really just scratching the surface.
Nonetheless, Apple went from having about 10% of the desktop market when I started in 1995 to less than 4% today
Windows 95 combined with Apple management issues certainly had a significant impact. But to be fair, not all of this is due to Apple losing customers. Today, market share includes $168 PCs from Walmart, but this is a much different type of experience offered to a much different type of customer than what we typically think of as computer users.
So, if Copland had succeeded would Apple have been sunk? I don't think so. The fact that OS X has a Unix underpinning has had very little effect on the number of applications available for it. OS X's windowing system is most emphatically NOT X Windows so a port of any interesting application from Unix or Windows is major work.
This is misleading in several senses. Not only does come with a X11 server but a lot of significant Unix software (Apache, MySQL, etc) is faceless. In terms of consumer desktop application, what the Unix side brings is basic infrastructure for a multi-user system.
But one of the most significant advantages that Next brought to the table was the development environment. Not only for third party developers but Apple itself. The speed at which one can write high quality applications is a huge asset.
Objective-C has become the language of choice for Mac applications which again makes your applications totally non-portable.
The language is essentially irrelevant. The difference is in the frameworks. Unless you're using cross-platform toolkits, the language issue is a moot point. And cross-platform apps generally don't serve the platform or users as much as the developer.
Your best bet is to write the core engine in something like C, and write the higher level UI stuff in whatever the platform prefers.
Had Apple had strong enough managemnt to rein in engineering and force the product to ship it would have been successful and a strong contender to Windows NT on the desktop.
We clearly have different opinions on this, but I have a rather hard time seeing your parallel universe comparing favorably to one with Jobs, Cocoa, iMac, iPod/iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, Final Cut Pro, etc. That's just my gut feeling.
Not sure this really helps. All it means is people using MSN won't find your site. Unless it's done on a massive (and I mean massive) scale, it's pointless.
Imagine if Slashdot did this. It would be a minor irritation for MSN, but a lot of lost hits for Slashdot.
How about a cat that doesn't shed, a cat that sleeps AT NIGHT instead of during the day, a cat that doesn't s**t behind the couch when you piss it off, a cat that is hairball resistant [...] a cat that will actually kill said "gifts" that get into your house by other means, a cat that'll bring home USEFUL things instead of the typical birds, rabbits, mice, frogs... a new lawnmower would be nice once in awhile, or maybe some PC hardware - but no, it's always half-dead stuff.
Mac OS X **IS NOT** the "Classic" Mac OS by any stretch of the imgination, the GUI and system design are 90% NeXT. Even most of the codebase is derrived from OpenStep 4.x. (And updated, obviously, also borrowing from newer versions of Mach and BSD).
While the general principle applies, I think you're somewhat underestimating the role classic Mac OS concepts play in Mac OS X (90%). At the highest levels, you have things like the menu bar at the top of the screen, Mac keyboard shortcuts, aliases, QuickTime, AppleScript, ColorSync, and such. You can't tear off menus and there's no shelf.
At the API level, you have Carbon which is responsible for quite a lot of stuff. For that matter, SearchKit (which is used in a number of places) is based on AIAT/VTwin (?).
And then are plenty of things that are brand new to Mac OS X that were not in OpenStep, such as CoreFoundation and CoreGraphics/Quartz. But I do agree that Mac OS X is worlds away from the design of classic Mac OS.
- Scott
Re:Quartz Extreme, Core Data, Spotlight, Automator
on
Tiger Early Start Kit
·
· Score: 1
Well, one might argue that bindings is something that was in NeXTStep
Bindings is certainly inspired by EOF, but it's designed for desktop apps.
- Scott
Quartz Extreme, Core Data, Spotlight, Automator
on
Tiger Early Start Kit
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Call it whatever you want, patches are still patches. The list of new features is not revolutionnary, by far (http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/)And it's not like they did it only once. Jaguar, Panther, and now Tiger...
I think the problem is that you're reading the watered-down description of the OS intended for casual consumers.
Quartz Extreme, Bindings (both Jaguar), Core Data, Spotlight and Automator (all Tiger) are certainly not "patches".
A 10th anniversary of something that barely anyone has ever used (in the big scheme of things) is really not any great thing to celebrate
Aside from the fact that it's the predecessor to Cocoa, OpenStep is what Sun based Java on. And since Java birthed.Net, and.Net birthed Mono, figure many modern OO platforms owe their existence to OpenStep.
Slashdot Mirror
whenever someone states the obvious about the media--that it is mostly PR
I don't think it's obvious to most people.
- Scott
Secondly, doesn't your gut tell you there's way too much open space in that place? If having so much unused space on the most expensive land in the entire world seems a bit inefficient, imagine how inefficient their other practices are.
:)
"Open" doesn't necessarily mean "unused."
The fact that it's not a tightly-packed cube farm is the whole point.
- Scott
It works for Mac OS X. Drivers compiled for 10.1 work fine with 10.3, don't they?
I'm pretty sure this wasn't the case for 10.1, but they did abstract those kernel interfaces sometime after.
- Scott
10.0.0 was an unexpectedly major change from 9.x. for many users.
For what it's worth, I have some packing list somewhere that lists the contents as "Mac OS X 1.0," as opposed to "Mac OS X 10.0."
With Jaguar (10.2.x) and Panther (10.3.x) Apple has been using the second number as "major release" number where they'll change backward compatibility
Not sure I follow here. 10.2 and 10.3 are entirely backwards-compatible with 10.0 and 10.1. There is new API in each 10.x release, however.
So what happened to that third number as a marker of the bugs and stability?
This is very much still the case. I'm surprised you even bring it up. 10.3.8 is a bug fix release. 10.4 (Tiger) will be a feature release.
This is now pushed down into the Build number. Do 9 out of 10 Mac users know what the build number is or how to find it?
I'm not sure what you mean by this, unless you're referring to the occassional security fixes?
Apple hasn't had great use of version numbers in the past, but I do hope that if they do ever take the opportunity to revise the major version number that they will also take the opportunity to remove the marketing influence on the Minor and Patch numbers in the version numbering scheme.
It doesn't seem like that big of a problem to me. Take 10.3.8.
10 = signifies difference from Mac OS 9 branch. This could probably be 1 instead. Marketing had a hand here, as you say.
3 = the major feature release number, Panther
8 = the minor version number, or "patch level" if you want to think of it that way. There are rarely features introduced at this level. Any that are introduced tend to address a usability bug.
- Scott
When two products have equal capabilities in relation to your tasks, but one is $650 and one is free, the choice becomes really simple.
I think you're misjudging the marketing. It's not a technology problem.
$650 is only when you buy for the first time. It tends to be about $150 thereafter. Not only is this pocket change, but designers tend to care more about user experience than anything else. They don't care about politics, licenses or even price because none of these things affect the creative process.
Nothing ends up costing the designer more than something which impedes the creative process, and Adobe knows this. This is why bullet list feature comparisons are essentially irrelevant. Free (either kind) products with similar major features is not nearly a good enough reason to switch. What GIMP is more likely to do is to take out the low end market.
For what it's worth, I'd personally like an alternative to Photoshop on Mac OS X, but GIMP is not it as of now.
- Scott
Here's a link to an article at Forbes that questions the wisdowm of suing your own fan
This is a fairly different issue. The Fobes article is about a web site that publishes private information and sells ads. I'm not sure if they make much of a profit, but not exactly "fans" in the sense of random Mac users walking down the street.
- Scott
Desktop search has already been done, and well
h t. html
Spotlight is quite a lot more than "desktop search." Here's a an article that describes it:
http://developer.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlig
While there are bits and pieces out there, I don't believe anyone has implemented a system as comprehensive as this on the deesktop yet.
- Scott
"Microsoft said Friday that it is halting development of future Macintosh versions of its Internet Explorer browser, citing competition from Apple Computer's Safari browser."
That's the company line. In other news, Clippy is helpful.
- Scott
There are also rumors that Apple will drop their computer unit and focus on the music side of things.
Uh, no. That would be corporate suicide.
- Scott
If Apple puts Microsoft in a position where they are competing, Microsoft may well do what they did in the Safari situation and stop developing the product
Not sure why everyone assumes IE's dropped development was a effect of Safari.
- Scott
Except for tables
A relevant story:
Jobs said Tiger will continue Apple's drive for improved Windows compatibility. New features aimed at interoperability will include better support for SMB home directories and the ability to display Word tables within TextEdit.
- Scott
A few things to keep in mind:
1. Mac OS X has had some level of built-in Word compatibility since Panther shipped
2. Apple and Microsoft have a broad cross-licensing agreement.
Also, it's not like the only reason to write an office suite is to overthrow Microsoft. Apple didn't write Safari to conquer IE.
- Scott
1. Apple makes everything. Talk about having all your eggs in one basket! What happens if they go under
Four billion or something in cash. I think they're good.
I don't think so. Owning the hardware, the OS, the apps, AND the Office suite, geez, what a nightmare!
I think you're reading way too much into it. Think of it this way: you are free to not buy a Mac. Unless that changes, there is no monopoly. Nobody calls Sony a monopoly because they make both the Playstation hardware and software. You can buy a GameCube.
How much incentive is there for 3rd party dev folks when Apple is doing it all?
Apple's hardly "doing it all." What they've been doing for some time is addressing the weaknesses in the platform. MS Office is "okay," but far from the best representation of what the Mac OS X frameworks have to offer.
I understand Apple has a sliver of the marketplace but I'm not sure making everything for your computer platform helps you in the long run.
I don't really feel like I have the time or patience to muck about with stuff that doesn't work so well, so I choose to buy a Mac.
- Scott
What was Apple's arrogance based on? Useless toy 3D web-browsers?
Don't laugh, I recently found out that thing was the predecessor to RSS.
- Scott
No, what was promised was that NextStep as it was would be a suitable desktop OS.
:)
Now we're getting into a somewhat grey area that's hard to prove or disprove. I'm not disputing that there was work to do to make Nextstep appropriate for a Mac consumer, but that doesn't really directly address the issue of what the best long-term OS strategy was for apple.
And what does Apache and MySQL bring to a desktop OS
A desktop OS for people who make web sites.
Multi-user is not a core feature in a desktop OS
I disagree.
Unfortunately the Mac needs cross platform apps in order to survive.
I misspoke. I didn't mean cross-platform apps in general, I meant those that rely on a third party cross-platform toolkit to do the port. I don't know of any apps that are popular on the Mac that use this approach.
The Mac market is too small to be hugely successful in. Go to a VC with a business plan that shows you running only on Mac and you'll get laughed out of the room
So you wouldn't be interested in the revenue from something like Final Cut Pro?
But in any case, the most interesting software I see on any platform nowadays tends to be apps written by independent developers. Cocoa is a major factor in this on the Mac.
I wonder sometimes what would have happened if the Next management had truly done an objective analysis of the merits of Copland and NextStep's kernel.
Would we ever have seen anything like Darwin? More a philosophical question I guess.
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that Copland and the culture that surrounded it would have resulted in a different type of audience than Apple has today. Not making a statement about whether this is good or bad, just interesting.
iTunes, incidentally, was developed outside of Apple by two of the key Copland developers who got disgusted and left after Next took over. So, perhaps the demise of Copland did save Apple.
SoundJam was the one Apple went with, but it wasn't the only MP3 player around.
- Scott
The end result was that Mac OS X was not shipped until 2001, nearly 3 years behind what was promised.
You're leaving out some rather crucial parts of the story, here. In Spring of 1999, Apple shipped Mac OS X Server 1.0. In many respects, this is what was promised: Nextstep/Rhapsody on PowerPC hardware. It's a far cry from what we have in Mac OS X today, but that's because the requirements changed.
First, the original Next acquisition strategy was to require everyone to rewrite their apps in NextStep APIs (predecessor to Cocoa). Companies like Adobe didn't like this prospect, so Apple went back and started working on Carbon, which was a significant undertaking. In addition, Quartz was created to replace Display PostScript. And that's really just scratching the surface.
Nonetheless, Apple went from having about 10% of the desktop market when I started in 1995 to less than 4% today
Windows 95 combined with Apple management issues certainly had a significant impact. But to be fair, not all of this is due to Apple losing customers. Today, market share includes $168 PCs from Walmart, but this is a much different type of experience offered to a much different type of customer than what we typically think of as computer users.
So, if Copland had succeeded would Apple have been sunk? I don't think so. The fact that OS X has a Unix underpinning has had very little effect on the number of applications available for it. OS X's windowing system is most emphatically NOT X Windows so a port of any interesting application from Unix or Windows is major work.
This is misleading in several senses. Not only does come with a X11 server but a lot of significant Unix software (Apache, MySQL, etc) is faceless. In terms of consumer desktop application, what the Unix side brings is basic infrastructure for a multi-user system.
But one of the most significant advantages that Next brought to the table was the development environment. Not only for third party developers but Apple itself. The speed at which one can write high quality applications is a huge asset.
Objective-C has become the language of choice for Mac applications which again makes your applications totally non-portable.
The language is essentially irrelevant. The difference is in the frameworks. Unless you're using cross-platform toolkits, the language issue is a moot point. And cross-platform apps generally don't serve the platform or users as much as the developer.
Your best bet is to write the core engine in something like C, and write the higher level UI stuff in whatever the platform prefers.
Had Apple had strong enough managemnt to rein in engineering and force the product to ship it would have been successful and a strong contender to Windows NT on the desktop.
We clearly have different opinions on this, but I have a rather hard time seeing your parallel universe comparing favorably to one with Jobs, Cocoa, iMac, iPod/iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, Final Cut Pro, etc. That's just my gut feeling.
- Scott
Add this to robots.txt
Not sure this really helps. All it means is people using MSN won't find your site. Unless it's done on a massive (and I mean massive) scale, it's pointless.
Imagine if Slashdot did this. It would be a minor irritation for MSN, but a lot of lost hits for Slashdot.
- Scott
The competition is going to be tough on the Mac platform with launchbar, quicksilver allready there and do not forget apple's upcomming spotlight.
Launchbar, QuickSilver and Spotlight overlap some, but Spotlight is a much more general API than the others.
FWIW
- Scott
How about a cat that doesn't shed, a cat that sleeps AT NIGHT instead of during the day, a cat that doesn't s**t behind the couch when you piss it off, a cat that is hairball resistant [...] a cat that will actually kill said "gifts" that get into your house by other means, a cat that'll bring home USEFUL things instead of the typical birds, rabbits, mice, frogs... a new lawnmower would be nice once in awhile, or maybe some PC hardware - but no, it's always half-dead stuff.
Around here we call those humans.
- Scott
Mac OS X **IS NOT** the "Classic" Mac OS by any stretch of the imgination, the GUI and system design are 90% NeXT. Even most of the codebase is derrived from OpenStep 4.x. (And updated, obviously, also borrowing from newer versions of Mach and BSD).
While the general principle applies, I think you're somewhat underestimating the role classic Mac OS concepts play in Mac OS X (90%). At the highest levels, you have things like the menu bar at the top of the screen, Mac keyboard shortcuts, aliases, QuickTime, AppleScript, ColorSync, and such. You can't tear off menus and there's no shelf.
At the API level, you have Carbon which is responsible for quite a lot of stuff. For that matter, SearchKit (which is used in a number of places) is based on AIAT/VTwin (?).
And then are plenty of things that are brand new to Mac OS X that were not in OpenStep, such as CoreFoundation and CoreGraphics/Quartz. But I do agree that Mac OS X is worlds away from the design of classic Mac OS.
- Scott
Well, one might argue that bindings is something that was in NeXTStep
Bindings is certainly inspired by EOF, but it's designed for desktop apps.
- Scott
Call it whatever you want, patches are still patches. The list of new features is not revolutionnary, by far (http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/)And it's not like they did it only once. Jaguar, Panther, and now Tiger...
I think the problem is that you're reading the watered-down description of the OS intended for casual consumers.
Quartz Extreme, Bindings (both Jaguar), Core Data, Spotlight and Automator (all Tiger) are certainly not "patches".
- Scott
You must purchase a PowerMac G5 and a Cinema Display to get the discount
I think it simply means that you get the discount for both if you choose.
- Scott
When WebObjects transitioned to Java, EOF was killed in favor of EJB
Uhh... EOF is very much available, alongside EJB.
- Scott
A 10th anniversary of something that barely anyone has ever used (in the big scheme of things) is really not any great thing to celebrate
.Net, and .Net birthed Mono, figure many modern OO platforms owe their existence to OpenStep.
Aside from the fact that it's the predecessor to Cocoa, OpenStep is what Sun based Java on. And since Java birthed
- Scott