I'm not doubting you might be having hardware problems, but several of your complaints are not actually problems.
Move windows between Spaces: Hit your spaces key, and drag the windows between spaces. Easy peasy.
Automatically change desktop wallpaper: right-click (or control-click) on desktop, select "Change Desktop Background". I have a folder of Digital Blasphemy pics, so I hit the + button at the bottom of the left hand side, and navigate to that folder. Then I check "Change Picture", select "Every Hour", and check Random Order.
I have a feeling that Spaces is "supposed to" separate things by application, not necessarily by window. Linux and Windows throw all windows into one huge Alt-Tab clusterfsck, where Apple says: Command-Tab is for switching applications, and Command-` is for switching windows within an application.
Menubar at the top of the screen? Ever hear of Fitt's Law? Rather than the fiddly wasted screen space of dozens of menu bars repeated in every window, I've just got one.
Uninstalling Garage Band? Just delete the folder. No uninstaller application needed.
Just because something is different doesn't mean it's broken
The problem with lowering the cost of RPG books is the quantities and profit margins involved. If you compare RPG books with, say, coffee-table books or academic works like textbooks ($100+ for 2-400 pages!), you'll find a similar price to pagecount ratio. The reason for this is low-number print runs. Unless you're D&D, the 800-pound gorilla of RPGs, a large print run for RPG publishers is 1000-5000 copies. Once you consider paying the artists, writers, license holders (if any), shippers, distributors, and retailers, it's not really all that unreasonable to pay $40 for a glossy full color 3-400 page hardcover book.
Now, it's an entirely different argument whether full color artwork, hardcovers, and glossy paper are really necessary for enjoyment of RPGs. Some people have come to expect them, but some see them as unecessary window dressing. I think the relative success of the RPG PDF industry (http://www.rpgnow.com/http://www.drivethrurpg.com/http://e23.sjgames.com/ etc.) is an indicator of that. By cutting out the cost of printing and distributing hard copy, you can get a searchable, cut and pasteable copy for usually half the cost of a hardcopy (even from Amazon). This isn't a perfect model--there's a lot of complaints about piracy, and most people don't game with a computer at the table. And some of the larger publishers are intentionally sandbagging PDF sales by pricing them at nearly the same cost as the hard copy (Fantasy Flight Games, I'm looking at you).
But as far as the small-press hobby publishers are concerned, I think PDFs are going to be the wave of the future (Add in the rise of very low print run Print on Demand services, and you can get a decent hard copy (softcover, black and white, perfect bound) for much less than you used to).
Much like my friends in electronic music production, technology is seriously lowering the bar for entry into RPG production. There's no equivalent of GarageBand (I guess you could call MS Word an entry-level RPG production toolkit, but it's certainly not RPG-specific), but there's a lot of innovation out there.
That's the top 100 retailers in the US. Wal-Mart has 2002 revenues of $246,525,000,000. The total US Retail sales is $1,236,236,120,000. That's almost 20% of the US retail market (good guess, if you were guessing!)
http://www.chainstoreage.com/industry_data/pdfs/ to p100retailers/2003_top100_rank.pdf
That's the top 100 retailers in the US. Wal-Mart has 2002 revenues of $246,525,000,000. The total US Retail sales is $1,236,236,120,000. That's almost 20% of the US retail market (good guess, if you were guessing!)
Actually, Hasbro/WoTC has been *very* hesitant to allow D20/OGL software. PCGen is just about the only D&D/D20 package that's been allowed to exist without special licensing from them. Basically, you need the OGL information (the D&D game rules) to be end-user readable--most games won't allow that.
I'm a pen & paper RPG developer, but I've seen enough debate about D20/OGL computer games on the respective mailing lists to know that it's a pain in the ass to do D&D computer games/utilities.
You are right, the original (OS 1.x) recognition software was horrible. I had a OS 2.0 MessagePad 120 that I loved. I used it to take notes for college, and it worked great. I don't have any direct experience with the 2.0 cursive recognition--I haven't written cursive since elementary school, but that also was great (my ex-girlfriend had a MessagePad 2000, used for pretty much the same purpose, and she used cursive all the time).
It got a bad rep right off the bat with the 1.x machines, and no one noticed when the really nice 2.x machines came out.
For example, my friend Stephan is totally red-green color blind. The OS X "traffic light" metaphor for window controls will be a massive problem for him. He'd be much Much MUCH happier with the UI he uses in LinuxPPC.
I haven't actually looked at the widgets used in window controls for a long time. I remember the position. Short of having text labels that say "close", it's all just metaphor anyway. Who decided that "X" meant close window anyway?
I would suppose that people with severe color blindness would do the same thing for real traffic lights, too. (if the top light is lit, that means stop). I don't think it will be that much of a problem.
This relates to an idea I had a while ago to facilitate companies distributing software for linux. For most software, it doesn't matter if you're running on PPC, x86, sparc, or what-have-you--you can just recompile. So...what I had envisioned is a package distribution kind of like RPM, where you can rebuild it when you install the software, but the source would be encrypted. You could cache it in RAM, and not write it to disk for security purposes. That way when companies (or people, too) want to distribute software for Linux without giving out the source for whatever reason, people can install it on any reasonably compliant Linux system.
Of course, a dedicated hacker could cause a core dump and grab it from memory, but then again, he could decomple the binaries, too.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine put this together as a "essential guide" to the classic Doctor Who:
http://woodelf.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/essential-doctor-who/
I highly recommend it.
There's always the Wuthering Heights RPG:
http://www.unseelie.org/rpg/wh/index.html
I'm sure there's some difference between the source books, but frankly I couldn't be bothered to finish either of them.
Does OS X have a way to actually run a program or open a document from Finder using only one keystroke (or even a chord)?
Command-O
I'm not doubting you might be having hardware problems, but several of your complaints are not actually problems.
Move windows between Spaces: Hit your spaces key, and drag the windows between spaces. Easy peasy.
Automatically change desktop wallpaper: right-click (or control-click) on desktop, select "Change Desktop Background". I have a folder of Digital Blasphemy pics, so I hit the + button at the bottom of the left hand side, and navigate to that folder. Then I check "Change Picture", select "Every Hour", and check Random Order.
I have a feeling that Spaces is "supposed to" separate things by application, not necessarily by window. Linux and Windows throw all windows into one huge Alt-Tab clusterfsck, where Apple says: Command-Tab is for switching applications, and Command-` is for switching windows within an application.
Menubar at the top of the screen? Ever hear of Fitt's Law? Rather than the fiddly wasted screen space of dozens of menu bars repeated in every window, I've just got one.
Uninstalling Garage Band? Just delete the folder. No uninstaller application needed.
Just because something is different doesn't mean it's broken
The problem with lowering the cost of RPG books is the quantities and profit margins involved. If you compare RPG books with, say, coffee-table books or academic works like textbooks ($100+ for 2-400 pages!), you'll find a similar price to pagecount ratio. The reason for this is low-number print runs. Unless you're D&D, the 800-pound gorilla of RPGs, a large print run for RPG publishers is 1000-5000 copies. Once you consider paying the artists, writers, license holders (if any), shippers, distributors, and retailers, it's not really all that unreasonable to pay $40 for a glossy full color 3-400 page hardcover book.
Now, it's an entirely different argument whether full color artwork, hardcovers, and glossy paper are really necessary for enjoyment of RPGs. Some people have come to expect them, but some see them as unecessary window dressing. I think the relative success of the RPG PDF industry (http://www.rpgnow.com/ http://www.drivethrurpg.com/ http://e23.sjgames.com/ etc.) is an indicator of that. By cutting out the cost of printing and distributing hard copy, you can get a searchable, cut and pasteable copy for usually half the cost of a hardcopy (even from Amazon). This isn't a perfect model--there's a lot of complaints about piracy, and most people don't game with a computer at the table. And some of the larger publishers are intentionally sandbagging PDF sales by pricing them at nearly the same cost as the hard copy (Fantasy Flight Games, I'm looking at you).
But as far as the small-press hobby publishers are concerned, I think PDFs are going to be the wave of the future (Add in the rise of very low print run Print on Demand services, and you can get a decent hard copy (softcover, black and white, perfect bound) for much less than you used to).
Much like my friends in electronic music production, technology is seriously lowering the bar for entry into RPG production. There's no equivalent of GarageBand (I guess you could call MS Word an entry-level RPG production toolkit, but it's certainly not RPG-specific), but there's a lot of innovation out there.
Check out this PDF:
Top 100 Chain Store Retailers Ranking (complete List of the Giants of Retailing)
That's the top 100 retailers in the US. Wal-Mart has 2002 revenues of $246,525,000,000. The total US Retail sales is $1,236,236,120,000. That's almost 20% of the US retail market (good guess, if you were guessing!)
They're also the biggest world retailer:
Global 100: The World's Top Retailers
Even if they're not at 50% of the market, they're still the 800 lb gorilla that everone has to listen to. What Wal-Mart wants, Wal-Mart gets.
Check out this PDF:
/ to p100retailers/2003_top100_rank.pdf
/ gl obal100/2002_globaltop100.pdf
http://www.chainstoreage.com/industry_data/pdfs
That's the top 100 retailers in the US. Wal-Mart has 2002 revenues of $246,525,000,000. The total US Retail sales is $1,236,236,120,000. That's almost 20% of the US retail market (good guess, if you were guessing!)
They're also the biggest world retailer:
http://www.chainstoreage.com/industry_data/pdfs
Even if they're not at 50% of the market, they're still the 800 lb gorilla that everone has to listen to. What Wal-Mart wants, Wal-Mart gets.
Actually, Hasbro/WoTC has been *very* hesitant to allow D20/OGL software. PCGen is just about the only D&D/D20 package that's been allowed to exist without special licensing from them. Basically, you need the OGL information (the D&D game rules) to be end-user readable--most games won't allow that.
I'm a pen & paper RPG developer, but I've seen enough debate about D20/OGL computer games on the respective mailing lists to know that it's a pain in the ass to do D&D computer games/utilities.
It's about time Forum 2000 started doing movie reviews again. They're just about the best part (other than the Ayn Rand/Anti-Ayn dynamic).
Does anyone know which came first, the ID cheat code, or the game Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles Of Putrid Decay"?
If the code came first, where did it come from? There's obviously a causal relationship between the two.
You are right, the original (OS 1.x) recognition software was horrible. I had a OS 2.0 MessagePad 120 that I loved. I used it to take notes for college, and it worked great. I don't have any direct experience with the 2.0 cursive recognition--I haven't written cursive since elementary school, but that also was great (my ex-girlfriend had a MessagePad 2000, used for pretty much the same purpose, and she used cursive all the time).
It got a bad rep right off the bat with the 1.x machines, and no one noticed when the really nice 2.x machines came out.
For example, my friend Stephan is totally red-green color blind. The OS X "traffic light" metaphor for window controls will be a
massive problem for him. He'd be much Much MUCH happier with the UI he uses in LinuxPPC.
I haven't actually looked at the widgets used in window controls for a long time. I remember the position. Short of having text labels that say "close", it's all just metaphor anyway. Who decided that "X" meant close window anyway?
I would suppose that people with severe color blindness would do the same thing for real traffic lights, too. (if the top light is lit, that means stop). I don't think it will be that much of a problem.
This relates to an idea I had a while ago to facilitate companies distributing software for linux. For most software, it doesn't matter if you're running on PPC, x86, sparc, or what-have-you--you can just recompile. So...what I had envisioned is a package distribution kind of like RPM, where you can rebuild it when you install the software, but the source would be encrypted. You could cache it in RAM, and not write it to disk for security purposes. That way when companies (or people, too) want to distribute software for Linux without giving out the source for whatever reason, people can install it on any reasonably compliant Linux system.
Of course, a dedicated hacker could cause a core dump and grab it from memory, but then again, he could decomple the binaries, too.