MS makes their money by doing what's best for the company. Apple makes their money by doing what's best for the users. What MS doesn't realize is that in the short term, being a jerk is great, but in the long term, Apple's the one who's going to come out on top.
Bwahaha. I think you need a history lesson. Microsoft IS on top because Apple WERE jerks. Hell, when Jobs asked Gates what he should do to increase the Mac marketshare, Gates told him "license clones". Gates realised that the fact the hardware came from only one company was holding them back. They tried it, and when they realised the clones were seriously cutting into their own marketshare, they killed them rather than actually become competitive. Oops.
I dunno what kind of short term you're thinking about either, Microsoft has been on top for a long time. Apple by the way don't stand a chance - they have exactly the same business models as Microsoft except with proprietary hardware, and history showed that this doesn't work.
Finally, the idea that Apple is a cuddly fluffy bunny that has a giant great big heart and loves its customers to bits is simply laughable. The number of cases where Apple has made seriously unpopular decisions that pissed off ALL their customers at once is so long I won't write it all down here, I'm sure you can think of some. Apple are sometimes just as much a nasty piece of work as Microsoft are, so to pretend that if they had absolute power they wouldn't abuse it like Gates did is ridiculous.
Apple, on the other hand, opened the source, but still keeps a leash on it, in a small sense, and they control the hardware as well, plus the overlying APIs, but Apple's control is quality control, and no one's going to take their quality away from them just by having the source.
Repeat after me. MacOS is NOT open source. I don't understand why people repeat this myth. The small percentage that is open sourced is based on BSD which was already available. Most importantly, the API implementations are not open sourced, and they are the things that give an OS its lockin value. Linux has a fine kernel, but we can't run Windows apps well yet because the implementations of the Windows APIs aren't complete.
Heck, MS could even use Darwin - wouldn't that be an interesting turn of events!
Considering that NT was once in fact also based on a microkernel architecture, which was later dropped due to serious performance issues, yeah, it'd be fascinating.
Actually it implements most of the spec, there are still bits missing like declarative animation, but so far I'm finding it OK.
libart is incompatable because it needs to be availabe under the Mozilla tri-license, but on Windows it uses GDI+ now anyway so that's only a concern for Linux.
Re:For idiots like me -
on
SVG On the Rise
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· Score: 2, Informative
We use it a lot at work for visualising maps. It's really catching on for cartography, and we're currently experimenting with what it can do. I had quite a bit of success using SVG for a query interface to a geographic database (a bond style zoomable map no less:).
One issue is the only viewer that actually implements all the spec is the Adobe one, which revs infrequently and doesn't work in Mozilla. For development I ended up needing to run IE with the plugin under Wine so I could work on Linux. Performance is also a concern.
So - this time around I'm using the Moz native support, which is pretty good. SVG may never replace Flash (and so what if it doesn't) but there are a whole host of uses for vector graphics outside animations on the web.
For those who are wondering why this is +5 Funny, it's a reference to a brit TV show from the late eighties and early nineties called Red Dwarf. In this scene, Holly, the ultra-powerful computer than runs the Red Dwarf (it's a spaceship) goes computer senile after being on its own for 3 million years
Eventually, Holly gets so lonely that it plugs in a novelty toaster that Lister (the last human in the universe) once bought, because he's so senile the toaster is actually as intelligent as Holly now. Unfortunately the toasters mission in life is to make toast, so cue many hilarious scenes where Holly and the kitchen appliance argue about whether a muffin is in fact part of the toast family, whether computers need toast anyway and so on.
If you're in the states it's the kind of show that's repeated about once every 5 minutes on BBC America, so try and catch it some time. The early series are better than the later ones though.
I've always preferred Gnome. Well, until a couple of weeks ago when I became uncertain. I had resigned to the fact that kde was more popular and almost certain to dominate the desktop despite my preferring gnome.
I dunno. I've not seen any compelling stats for which is more popular. Anyway, it's odd but when I uesd KDE I used mainly KDE apps, and now I use gnome I mainly use gnome apps. Except I did use some GTK/GNOME apps in KDE, and now I don't use and KDE/Qt apps at all, most of the time when I find an app I want it uses GTK. Dunno why.
On another thought, perhaps we need to change the attitude we have towards making applications. Many have considered it, and some do it - separating the program from the interface, Qt or GTK.
A lot of apps do this, there are lots of front ends to LAME, or cdrecord etc. But yeah, it's something to look in to.
Partly this is architectural - there's FAR more code sharing and reuse in KOffice/KDE/Qt than in AbiWord/GTK, partly because the balance of talking about it/doing it is further towards the doing it end with KWord than with AbiWord. I guess this also explains why Slashdot appears to have a tendency towards GNOME whilst the Linux community as a whole seems to prefer KDE.
Nope, can't agree with that. Firstly, I don't think Slashdot has a tendancy either way, I see just as many stupid trolls for and against both.
Secondly, for quite some time (dunno if this is still the case) KOffice had David Faure being paid to work on it. AbiWord hasn't had paid employees on it for a loooong time, so they're doing pretty well. Whenever I hear about people word processing on Linux, they're using OpenOffice or AbiWord. For spreadsheets, it's OpenOffice or Gnumeric. Maybe there is an utterly silent majority which actually uses KOffice, but I'd be pretty surprised. Mindshare does in fact matter, and I've found gnome/gtk based projects tend to have much better communication with the outside world than KDE based ones. AbiWord stable is getting pretty old now, but it's the one I'm interested in because I can see it developing and it's getting very cool very fast. KOffice on the other hand.... what is it doing? I do read dot.kde.org sometimes, but haven't seen a KOffice story for ages. The koffice development mailing list has about 200-300 emails so far this year, the same number as abiword development, which focuses only on a word processor, not a whole office suite.
FWIW I am European, and I think the characterisation by Gordon of the KDE developers as "get on and do it" and of others as "make lots of noise" is stupid - which desktop project was it that threw a hissy fit when Redhat altered some themes and changed some branding (something gnome also went through)? I know Europeans and Americans, and haven't noticed a great deal of difference between them in the way described.
I take it you've not used KDE 3.1 yet then? There's some good improvements in there. And let's face it, GNOME usability still has a long long way to go *cough*GTK+ file dialog*cough*
I take it you've not used GNOME2.1? I monitor what KDE and GNOME do, and so far GNOME has KDE beat by miles in the usability stakes. The GNOME/GTK world has a strong set of UI guidelines in the form of the HIG that even non-gnome apps are complying with (like xchat, gaim etc) because despite its lack of perfection, it gives a clear direction and it makes sense to follow it.
Last time I checked, I couldn't even find the KDE equivalents on usability.kde.org (though I have seen at least one before) and I've been told there are two such guides, both unfinished. The kde usability list seems to flap around without clear direction whereas you can visibly see and feel GTK apps get more usable.
And don't diss Noatun: you might not like it but from my point of view it's far nicer than anything else available.
You're certainly entitled to your view, but you're the first I've met who actually prefers it to XMMS. To be fair, the version in KDE3 is much improved over the one in 2.2 but it's still a hellhole usability wise. What made me laugh was the default plugin was called "Excellent" with the tagline, "A very simple, and therefore usable interface". First mistake, simple != usable. In fact, Excellent tripped me up several times, for instance it took me quite a while to figure out how to click on a part of the time slider to make it jump to a part of the song. Left clicking moves it in increments. Right clicking? No. Double clicking? No. Ohhh, that's right, middling clicking lets you move the slider to the part under the mouse. Obvious. Three types of playlist, none of which are compatible with each other and the only halfway decent one does NOT read.m3u files????!?
The only interface I found I could actually stand was the WinAmp one. Noatun does have some saving graces like the keygrabber plugin, and the notification tray icon is nice (though it doesn't actually notify you of anything). Nonetheless, I feel I'm justified in slamming it.
And let's face it, GNOME usability still has a long long way to go *cough*GTK+ file dialog*cough*
The file dialog is the exception that proves the rule, and a new one is definately going in for GTK2.4, that's guaranteed. It's harder for GTK because unlike KDE/Qt GTK is actually widely used outside of the desktop project. You can't just introduce random dependancies on Nautilus for instance. I'd also like to point out that the KDE file picker is simply a direct lift of the Windows one with all the UI faults it comes with, I won't write an UI review of it here because they exist elsewhere.
Really, GNOME has had to make some tough choices, ones that a small but vocal minority was opposed to every step of the way. Simplifying the UI was needed, GNOME 1.4 had an even more bloated UI than KDE in this respect, but KDE hasn't yet picked up the gauntlet. I don't think it is, but if Shawns theory holds true then it's simply because the KDE team don't like making controversial decisions, which is maybe why it looks and works so much like Windows.
The Gecko vs KHTML debate has already been thrashed to death here, but remember this:
Very, very few people on Linux use KHTML (according to my website stats at any rate). Gecko rules them all, with IE coming in at second place, probably due to people visiting at work, or curious Windows users.
Apple seem to have chosen KHTML purely on the basis that when they made the decision it was faster than Gecko (actually since then Gecko has been speeded up by something like 20% and is closing to catching KHTML while keeping its featureset).
I don't buy the idea that they chose it because it was easier to screw around in the internals - Gecko is such a strong engine already that they wouldn't have needed to do the kind of deep surgery they had to do with KHTML. I think basically they knew when they started that by the time it came out Macs would be being kicked for being slow, so they optimized for speed from the get go.
So the decision by Redhat to use Mozilla instead of Konqueror makes perfect sense, considering that most end users won't care how "integrated" Konq might be, Mozilla renders the most pages and has tabs. And these days it's pretty fast too, so really I think the Apple/Safari thing is a bad example to choose.
1) It means you can only write GPLd software with it. Apple were pretty keen not to let Safari be open sourced, though god knows why, it's hardly a cutting edge browser so they actually had to produce Qt wrappers and de-Qt parts to prevent it becoming GPL software.
2) It's only free software when using X11. That means KDE software can't be ported to Windows or MacOS and use the native graphics layer on each, they have to use an X server. Also, if one day (unlikely but possible) we all decide to move away from X, unless Trolltech update the license KDE is kind of shafted. Obviously that's the least likely of all scenarios, and anyway I expect Trolltech would just update the license, but you get the idea.
Of course you can write commercial or portable software with Qt, but have you seen the prices? It's $1500 per developer for the professional edition, meaning unless you are a rich company you have to make your software GPLd and X specific (which is what they intended, but hey).
In contrast, GTK can be used for commercial and portable apps, and really it's quite a good toolkit these days. Hence the flamewars.
Lets face it, C is not well suited for window environments.
This FUD should have been dispelled a long time ago. The C++ bindings for GTK/GNOME are excellent, in fact they are mor C++ish than Qt, as they make proper use of the standard library, as opposed to Qt that reinvents a lot of it (QString et al) for portability to ancient platforms and needs stuff like a preprocessor for its object model. Check it out before you bash gnome again.
If you like C++, use it! Nobody is forcing you to use C. The fact that a lot of Gnome software is written in C is because the coders prefer C, that's it. No, really. They do. C++ is a hard, amazingly complex language that isn't to everybodies taste.
Look at Windows. MFC is just C++ classes aound C stuff.
The MFC is a good example of how NOT to make bindings, don't write off all language bindings because you had a bad experience with one.
What that the License gets you though, is the ability to ship the same high-grade apps on Windows as on Linux, Mac OS X, and whatever other platform you want.
Only if you stick to Qt of course, and pay up (a LOT of money) for each developer. If you want to use the KDE classes, not all of them are available on Windows or MacOS, so....
This could singlehandedly be the missing element to bring Linux to the masses.
Actually GTK apps are ported to Windows far more often, because you don't have to pay to do so. Try again.
BRING BACK HARMONY.
Oh yeah, that's nice. Why not, and destroy TrollTech at the same time. Do you have any idea how much effort would be required to recreate Qt? A widget toolkit is often many millions of lines of code, and Qt doesn't just do widgets, it does strings, threads and lots more.
The solution is to make GTK and Qt interoperate better, share theming engines and so on, then you can choose which toolkit you prefer. GTKmm and Qt are basically very similar anyway.
Sun, from their evaluation report, seemed to have chosen GNOME as their future desktop mainly because of the licensing issues, but not of technical merits
It was probably also because they could easily hire a repository of experienced hackers in the form of Ximian, for which there is no such equivalent with KDE (theKompany simply writes some apps that work on KDE, they don't actually contribute much to the project itself iirc).
KDE people also have the weird habit of producing their own versions of various pieces of software.
I agree with the basic thrust of the post, but in fairness this occurs with Gnome as well. Gnome seems less centralised to me, for instance they don't produce their own media player as such but RhythmBox is a Gnome app, they don't produce their own email app but there is Balsa and Evolution, etc.
There is way too much duplication, I agree. The projects are starting to work together a lot more now though, largely thanks to the work at freedesktop.org. Not just there though, for instance KDE was considering using GStreamer for its multimedia architecture at one point (I think they decided to wait for it to mature, which is fair enough).
Some KDE projects seem rather dead though, I think the more decentralised approach gnome takes (or rather, doesn't take) is a bit better. AbiWord isn't a Gnome app but you'd never know, it integrates nicely etc and is a good deal more active than KWord seems to be. Ditto for Gnumeric and KSpread. Noatun is just a joke, really, but it's kind of the "official" KDE media player.
Note that I have been KDE user in the past (alternating with less popular lightweight wm's), but Gnome seems to finally have gotten their stuff together with gnome2.
Agreed, at least in terms of desktop experience. It's not all there yet, but it shows great potential. KDE still leads in terms of developer platform though imho, their documentation is much better (though to be fair to gnome, they don't have a company like trolltech maintaining it for them). Also some Gnome technologies like Bonobo tend to be a bit confusing, especially in the more advanced usage. On the other hand, the KDE usability effort seems to be going nowhere quickly:(
So, my question is, why is KDE considered second best? Are there technical reasons, or political, or what?
[sigh] It's not. Look, I'll try and tell it like it is, but nobody is entirely neutral in this debate OK?
Basically, with Mandrake looking like it's going down the tubes, there are 2 major commercial Linux desktop distros left, Redhat and SuSE. There are others like Xandros of course, but they are more focussed on providing an "appliance" style OS, rather than staying level with the current cutting edge in Linux development.
RedHat are popular in the states, and are "biased" towards Gnome, that is they have more Gnome hackers with experience than KDE hackers. As such, their distro focusses on Gnome more than KDE. SuSE is similar but opposite, they focus more on KDE than Gnome and afaik don't have any Gnome hackers on the team.
When Redhat 8 came out, as I'm sure you noticed, they attempted to equalize the desktops somewhat. BlueCurve was an attempt to give Redhat a distinctive brand on the desktop and it worked tremendously well. Nonetheless, some people involved with KDE got a bit upset, because KDE has its own brand (as does gnome) and Bluecurve changed that.
Today the desktops are basically equal, although they are stronger in different areas. So, GNOME has better usability IMHO, but KDE has more features. I should think theKompany likes KDE/Qt as a developer platform more because Qt is commercially supported, has professional docs and is more cross platform, so (if they pay) they can sell their apps on Windows and MacOS as well. Of course he has hackers with KDE/Qt experience which also tips him. On the other hand, GTK is more Linux specific, but has some cooler features. Some people will tell you that GTK is harder to program for, but in reality that's not the case, if C++ is your thing then both Qt and GTKmm are excellent.
I think you're exaggurating when you say KDE is slower and uglier on redhat. I think the BlueCurve artwork is great, but you can always retheme it easily, and it should be no slower.
If anything, Windows is even more scriptable than linux because of COM and it's progeny, ActiveX.
Well - yes and no. Yes, in that COM has "proper" scripting support, but no, in that most apps don't expose services in such a way.
Believe me, OLE Automation as it was known when I learnt about it is a total pain in the ass for developers, the only reason it's possible AT ALL is that Windows IDEs have lots of wizards to do it all for you. It's not just a case of building a COM object, you've got to provide the IDispatch interface (to allow for method invocation), you've got to register it, give it a ProgID, set up the server when the app is running, deal with cases when then server isn't running so the app has to be specially started etc....
Don't get me wrong, OLE Automation is cool, but it's HARD and therefore rare outside of Microsofts own products. Also, it's harder to program. Because it's available via actual programming languages, to do something like access a file via WSH you create an object, call it's methods etc.
Scripting on Linux (with the command line) is totally, totally different. bash started out as a command line, and mutated into a programming language as well. All command line apps support scriptability to some extent because they take input, parameters and output. It's crude, but it works surprisingly well.
Oh, and for those who are wondering about GUI apps - the boys over at freedesktop.org are working on a new message bus architecture, similar to DCOP, called DBUS, which looks like amongst many other cool things will allow for simple object scriptability in a desktop-neutral fashion, from the command line or other languages. It's not as powerful as ActiveX, but then again most of the power of COM/OLE/ActiveX was never used anyway, so that's not too bad, and because it should be simple and easy to add support hopefully we'll see lots of apps adopting it.
Disclaimer: nothing about DBUS is actually official, it's a bunch of KDE and GNOME hackers working on something that may or may not be adopted by either project. You know how it goes - it'll be adopted when it's shown to be mature and better than the current solutions.
So, Apple decided not to take on the considerable risk of being seen to sponsor music piracy.
Providing a plugin API to extend a product shouldn't be seen by any sane court of law to be "sponsoring" it in any way, shape or form.
If that were the case, Microsoft could be sued by the RIAA for providing "plugin interfaces" to Windows that let it install and use the user/commctrl DLLs to provide its user interface. An API is an API, things build upon it.
Considering that pretty much any media player could be added to in this way, if that's Apples attitude they are on pretty shaky ground, as they've basically told people what they can and cannot build upon their platforms. As there's no reason to restrict such things legally, I can't see them doing such a thing.
For the record, I dislike piracy intensely. The system is broken, but that's not an excuse to exploit it, you've got to reward artists for their work and until a more efficient system comes in that strips the middleman and makes use of these wonderful technologies, we should live with the current system. Sure, we can bitch all we like but if anybody should be sued for this, it's the people who made iCommune, it's just another P2P network like any other.
But that also doesn't excuse Apple this time - they are using get-out clauses in their license agreements to quash a product, and so far the only reasonable explanation I've seen is that it's because they have a similar product coming up.
Just because iTunes is a proprietary MP3 player doesn't mean that it's the only possible one that'll work on the MacOSX platform.
No, but it comes bundled for 'free' with every Mac. I think most of us would agree that Mozilla is a better browser than IE, it has tabs, popup blocking, it's more secure, it's more standards compliant, it can look boring if you want but it can also look cool and so on. The latest builds are even comparable to IE6 in speed. Internet Explorer itself has hardly moved on in the last few years, Gates has his eye on other balls.
Nonetheless, it's practically impossible to convince a lot of people to use it. Mozillas market share remains at rock bottom. I've tried to convince friends to try it and they point blank refuse, "IE is fine for me, why would I need Mozilla?".
And you know what? I think they might be onto something. Trying to convince somebody to change their web browser, or media player, or zip extractor is like trying to convince people to buy a different brand of oil for their car.
I mean, to most people, things like that are part of the furniture, it works, they don't think about it. The effort required to try something else, when what you have works, is simply too great. We can't be discerning buyers in everything we do (part of the reason classical economics fails) and so the idea that somehow a company could displace iTunes by making a better media player is probably wrong.
The only way that'd be possible is if it was SO much better than iTunes, and iTunes was SO bad that people were willing to find out about the competition and download them and try them out etc, ie not going to happen anytime soon.
So really this company is sort of screwed. I don't agree with the "well it was in the plugin license agreement so they are the criminals here" line either - arbitrary restrictions on plugin APIs that serve seemingly no purpose just reeks of control freakery and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if that was a planned feature for iTunes.
Using license agreements to arbitrarily restrict competition like this is a classic Microsoft tactic, it's sad to see Apple do the same, but not entirely surprising.
As much as I hate to see projects killed, in this case, its not necessarily a Bad Thing(tm). In windows-land, I've got a plethora of networks to hound for one file, depending on who has it. With my mac, I'll only have one, and if the file is out there, it's on that network.
By that logic we should kill off Mozilla and hell, why not, the Mac as a platform anyway. They're both inconvenient to quite a few people, I mean some software companies have these Mac ports that are horribly expensive to keep around, and of course Mozilla is kind of a thorn in the side of Internet Explorer, if it weren't for them and their damn standards we could have all kinds of cool technology on the web by now.
Sure. It'd be a one product web, but hey. Maybe it's worth it, convenience and all.
They follow the same rules everyone else does. Thats why I think people will still try to defend Apple.
Yeah, that's true, but I remain to be convinced that if it were Apple with 95% market share they'd be any less evil than Microsoft is. If anything, they'd probably be more evil - MS pulls more than its fair share of dirty tricks but they rarely resort to using the law as their weapon as Apple do all too frequently.
At the end of the day, Apple have the same business models and methods that Microsoft do. Look at MacOS and Windows and tell me what's really different underneath. I'm not talking about technical details or "experience", I'm talking about business models. They both charge money for the OS and give away some free stuff with it. They both use it to try and reinforce their other products.
So sure, in the real world it wasn't Apple, but it could have been if Jobs had actually followed the advice Gates gave him when he asked for it and licensed clones. Whether Apple would have tried to destroy Netscape is debatable, but they seem happy to clamp down on people when they make competing products to themselves, or even products that alter their own in some trivial way. It's a moot point, but interesting speculation.
If Sun were really smart, that is exactly what they do: impliment a free software/open source reference of the protocol.
Then they must be really, smart because that's exactly what the IPL implementation is - except under an Apache style license. At least, I think it's called the IPL.
Don't expect to just download it and get single sign on though. Liberty doesn't work like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Bwahaha. I think you need a history lesson. Microsoft IS on top because Apple WERE jerks. Hell, when Jobs asked Gates what he should do to increase the Mac marketshare, Gates told him "license clones". Gates realised that the fact the hardware came from only one company was holding them back. They tried it, and when they realised the clones were seriously cutting into their own marketshare, they killed them rather than actually become competitive. Oops.
I dunno what kind of short term you're thinking about either, Microsoft has been on top for a long time. Apple by the way don't stand a chance - they have exactly the same business models as Microsoft except with proprietary hardware, and history showed that this doesn't work.
Finally, the idea that Apple is a cuddly fluffy bunny that has a giant great big heart and loves its customers to bits is simply laughable. The number of cases where Apple has made seriously unpopular decisions that pissed off ALL their customers at once is so long I won't write it all down here, I'm sure you can think of some. Apple are sometimes just as much a nasty piece of work as Microsoft are, so to pretend that if they had absolute power they wouldn't abuse it like Gates did is ridiculous.
Apple, on the other hand, opened the source, but still keeps a leash on it, in a small sense, and they control the hardware as well, plus the overlying APIs, but Apple's control is quality control, and no one's going to take their quality away from them just by having the source.
Repeat after me. MacOS is NOT open source. I don't understand why people repeat this myth. The small percentage that is open sourced is based on BSD which was already available. Most importantly, the API implementations are not open sourced, and they are the things that give an OS its lockin value. Linux has a fine kernel, but we can't run Windows apps well yet because the implementations of the Windows APIs aren't complete.
Considering that NT was once in fact also based on a microkernel architecture, which was later dropped due to serious performance issues, yeah, it'd be fascinating.
libart is incompatable because it needs to be availabe under the Mozilla tri-license, but on Windows it uses GDI+ now anyway so that's only a concern for Linux.
One issue is the only viewer that actually implements all the spec is the Adobe one, which revs infrequently and doesn't work in Mozilla. For development I ended up needing to run IE with the plugin under Wine so I could work on Linux. Performance is also a concern.
So - this time around I'm using the Moz native support, which is pretty good. SVG may never replace Flash (and so what if it doesn't) but there are a whole host of uses for vector graphics outside animations on the web.
For those who are wondering why this is +5 Funny, it's a reference to a brit TV show from the late eighties and early nineties called Red Dwarf. In this scene, Holly, the ultra-powerful computer than runs the Red Dwarf (it's a spaceship) goes computer senile after being on its own for 3 million years
Eventually, Holly gets so lonely that it plugs in a novelty toaster that Lister (the last human in the universe) once bought, because he's so senile the toaster is actually as intelligent as Holly now. Unfortunately the toasters mission in life is to make toast, so cue many hilarious scenes where Holly and the kitchen appliance argue about whether a muffin is in fact part of the toast family, whether computers need toast anyway and so on.
If you're in the states it's the kind of show that's repeated about once every 5 minutes on BBC America, so try and catch it some time. The early series are better than the later ones though.
I dunno. I've not seen any compelling stats for which is more popular. Anyway, it's odd but when I uesd KDE I used mainly KDE apps, and now I use gnome I mainly use gnome apps. Except I did use some GTK/GNOME apps in KDE, and now I don't use and KDE/Qt apps at all, most of the time when I find an app I want it uses GTK. Dunno why.
On another thought, perhaps we need to change the attitude we have towards making applications. Many have considered it, and some do it - separating the program from the interface, Qt or GTK.
A lot of apps do this, there are lots of front ends to LAME, or cdrecord etc. But yeah, it's something to look in to.
So.... what is your point again? If you prefer a KDE centric distro, use SuSE or Mandrake.
Nope, can't agree with that. Firstly, I don't think Slashdot has a tendancy either way, I see just as many stupid trolls for and against both.
Secondly, for quite some time (dunno if this is still the case) KOffice had David Faure being paid to work on it. AbiWord hasn't had paid employees on it for a loooong time, so they're doing pretty well. Whenever I hear about people word processing on Linux, they're using OpenOffice or AbiWord. For spreadsheets, it's OpenOffice or Gnumeric. Maybe there is an utterly silent majority which actually uses KOffice, but I'd be pretty surprised. Mindshare does in fact matter, and I've found gnome/gtk based projects tend to have much better communication with the outside world than KDE based ones. AbiWord stable is getting pretty old now, but it's the one I'm interested in because I can see it developing and it's getting very cool very fast. KOffice on the other hand.... what is it doing? I do read dot.kde.org sometimes, but haven't seen a KOffice story for ages. The koffice development mailing list has about 200-300 emails so far this year, the same number as abiword development, which focuses only on a word processor, not a whole office suite.
FWIW I am European, and I think the characterisation by Gordon of the KDE developers as "get on and do it" and of others as "make lots of noise" is stupid - which desktop project was it that threw a hissy fit when Redhat altered some themes and changed some branding (something gnome also went through)? I know Europeans and Americans, and haven't noticed a great deal of difference between them in the way described.
I take it you've not used KDE 3.1 yet then? There's some good improvements in there. And let's face it, GNOME usability still has a long long way to go *cough*GTK+ file dialog*cough*
I take it you've not used GNOME2.1? I monitor what KDE and GNOME do, and so far GNOME has KDE beat by miles in the usability stakes. The GNOME/GTK world has a strong set of UI guidelines in the form of the HIG that even non-gnome apps are complying with (like xchat, gaim etc) because despite its lack of perfection, it gives a clear direction and it makes sense to follow it.
Last time I checked, I couldn't even find the KDE equivalents on usability.kde.org (though I have seen at least one before) and I've been told there are two such guides, both unfinished. The kde usability list seems to flap around without clear direction whereas you can visibly see and feel GTK apps get more usable.
And don't diss Noatun: you might not like it but from my point of view it's far nicer than anything else available.
You're certainly entitled to your view, but you're the first I've met who actually prefers it to XMMS. To be fair, the version in KDE3 is much improved over the one in 2.2 but it's still a hellhole usability wise. What made me laugh was the default plugin was called "Excellent" with the tagline, "A very simple, and therefore usable interface". First mistake, simple != usable. In fact, Excellent tripped me up several times, for instance it took me quite a while to figure out how to click on a part of the time slider to make it jump to a part of the song. Left clicking moves it in increments. Right clicking? No. Double clicking? No. Ohhh, that's right, middling clicking lets you move the slider to the part under the mouse. Obvious. Three types of playlist, none of which are compatible with each other and the only halfway decent one does NOT read .m3u files????!?
The only interface I found I could actually stand was the WinAmp one. Noatun does have some saving graces like the keygrabber plugin, and the notification tray icon is nice (though it doesn't actually notify you of anything). Nonetheless, I feel I'm justified in slamming it.
And let's face it, GNOME usability still has a long long way to go *cough*GTK+ file dialog*cough*
The file dialog is the exception that proves the rule, and a new one is definately going in for GTK2.4, that's guaranteed. It's harder for GTK because unlike KDE/Qt GTK is actually widely used outside of the desktop project. You can't just introduce random dependancies on Nautilus for instance. I'd also like to point out that the KDE file picker is simply a direct lift of the Windows one with all the UI faults it comes with, I won't write an UI review of it here because they exist elsewhere.
Really, GNOME has had to make some tough choices, ones that a small but vocal minority was opposed to every step of the way. Simplifying the UI was needed, GNOME 1.4 had an even more bloated UI than KDE in this respect, but KDE hasn't yet picked up the gauntlet. I don't think it is, but if Shawns theory holds true then it's simply because the KDE team don't like making controversial decisions, which is maybe why it looks and works so much like Windows.
Very, very few people on Linux use KHTML (according to my website stats at any rate). Gecko rules them all, with IE coming in at second place, probably due to people visiting at work, or curious Windows users.
Apple seem to have chosen KHTML purely on the basis that when they made the decision it was faster than Gecko (actually since then Gecko has been speeded up by something like 20% and is closing to catching KHTML while keeping its featureset).
I don't buy the idea that they chose it because it was easier to screw around in the internals - Gecko is such a strong engine already that they wouldn't have needed to do the kind of deep surgery they had to do with KHTML. I think basically they knew when they started that by the time it came out Macs would be being kicked for being slow, so they optimized for speed from the get go.
So the decision by Redhat to use Mozilla instead of Konqueror makes perfect sense, considering that most end users won't care how "integrated" Konq might be, Mozilla renders the most pages and has tabs. And these days it's pretty fast too, so really I think the Apple/Safari thing is a bad example to choose.
Two major problems:
1) It means you can only write GPLd software with it. Apple were pretty keen not to let Safari be open sourced, though god knows why, it's hardly a cutting edge browser so they actually had to produce Qt wrappers and de-Qt parts to prevent it becoming GPL software.
2) It's only free software when using X11. That means KDE software can't be ported to Windows or MacOS and use the native graphics layer on each, they have to use an X server. Also, if one day (unlikely but possible) we all decide to move away from X, unless Trolltech update the license KDE is kind of shafted. Obviously that's the least likely of all scenarios, and anyway I expect Trolltech would just update the license, but you get the idea.
Of course you can write commercial or portable software with Qt, but have you seen the prices? It's $1500 per developer for the professional edition, meaning unless you are a rich company you have to make your software GPLd and X specific (which is what they intended, but hey).
In contrast, GTK can be used for commercial and portable apps, and really it's quite a good toolkit these days. Hence the flamewars.
That's what they're doing. They're sponsoring a lot of the desktop standards effort that's busy rejoining kde and gnome.
This FUD should have been dispelled a long time ago. The C++ bindings for GTK/GNOME are excellent, in fact they are mor C++ish than Qt, as they make proper use of the standard library, as opposed to Qt that reinvents a lot of it (QString et al) for portability to ancient platforms and needs stuff like a preprocessor for its object model. Check it out before you bash gnome again.
If you like C++, use it! Nobody is forcing you to use C. The fact that a lot of Gnome software is written in C is because the coders prefer C, that's it. No, really. They do. C++ is a hard, amazingly complex language that isn't to everybodies taste.
Look at Windows. MFC is just C++ classes aound C stuff.
The MFC is a good example of how NOT to make bindings, don't write off all language bindings because you had a bad experience with one.
What that the License gets you though, is the ability to ship the same high-grade apps on Windows as on Linux, Mac OS X, and whatever other platform you want.
Only if you stick to Qt of course, and pay up (a LOT of money) for each developer. If you want to use the KDE classes, not all of them are available on Windows or MacOS, so....
This could singlehandedly be the missing element to bring Linux to the masses.
Actually GTK apps are ported to Windows far more often, because you don't have to pay to do so. Try again.
BRING BACK HARMONY.
Oh yeah, that's nice. Why not, and destroy TrollTech at the same time. Do you have any idea how much effort would be required to recreate Qt? A widget toolkit is often many millions of lines of code, and Qt doesn't just do widgets, it does strings, threads and lots more.
The solution is to make GTK and Qt interoperate better, share theming engines and so on, then you can choose which toolkit you prefer. GTKmm and Qt are basically very similar anyway.
It was probably also because they could easily hire a repository of experienced hackers in the form of Ximian, for which there is no such equivalent with KDE (theKompany simply writes some apps that work on KDE, they don't actually contribute much to the project itself iirc).
I guess that's why he uses personal recommendation only.
CodeWeavers and Ximian do something similar, though not quite to the same extent.
I agree with the basic thrust of the post, but in fairness this occurs with Gnome as well. Gnome seems less centralised to me, for instance they don't produce their own media player as such but RhythmBox is a Gnome app, they don't produce their own email app but there is Balsa and Evolution, etc.
There is way too much duplication, I agree. The projects are starting to work together a lot more now though, largely thanks to the work at freedesktop.org. Not just there though, for instance KDE was considering using GStreamer for its multimedia architecture at one point (I think they decided to wait for it to mature, which is fair enough).
Some KDE projects seem rather dead though, I think the more decentralised approach gnome takes (or rather, doesn't take) is a bit better. AbiWord isn't a Gnome app but you'd never know, it integrates nicely etc and is a good deal more active than KWord seems to be. Ditto for Gnumeric and KSpread. Noatun is just a joke, really, but it's kind of the "official" KDE media player.
Note that I have been KDE user in the past (alternating with less popular lightweight wm's), but Gnome seems to finally have gotten their stuff together with gnome2.
Agreed, at least in terms of desktop experience. It's not all there yet, but it shows great potential. KDE still leads in terms of developer platform though imho, their documentation is much better (though to be fair to gnome, they don't have a company like trolltech maintaining it for them). Also some Gnome technologies like Bonobo tend to be a bit confusing, especially in the more advanced usage. On the other hand, the KDE usability effort seems to be going nowhere quickly :(
[sigh] It's not. Look, I'll try and tell it like it is, but nobody is entirely neutral in this debate OK?
Basically, with Mandrake looking like it's going down the tubes, there are 2 major commercial Linux desktop distros left, Redhat and SuSE. There are others like Xandros of course, but they are more focussed on providing an "appliance" style OS, rather than staying level with the current cutting edge in Linux development.
RedHat are popular in the states, and are "biased" towards Gnome, that is they have more Gnome hackers with experience than KDE hackers. As such, their distro focusses on Gnome more than KDE. SuSE is similar but opposite, they focus more on KDE than Gnome and afaik don't have any Gnome hackers on the team.
When Redhat 8 came out, as I'm sure you noticed, they attempted to equalize the desktops somewhat. BlueCurve was an attempt to give Redhat a distinctive brand on the desktop and it worked tremendously well. Nonetheless, some people involved with KDE got a bit upset, because KDE has its own brand (as does gnome) and Bluecurve changed that.
Today the desktops are basically equal, although they are stronger in different areas. So, GNOME has better usability IMHO, but KDE has more features. I should think theKompany likes KDE/Qt as a developer platform more because Qt is commercially supported, has professional docs and is more cross platform, so (if they pay) they can sell their apps on Windows and MacOS as well. Of course he has hackers with KDE/Qt experience which also tips him. On the other hand, GTK is more Linux specific, but has some cooler features. Some people will tell you that GTK is harder to program for, but in reality that's not the case, if C++ is your thing then both Qt and GTKmm are excellent.
I think you're exaggurating when you say KDE is slower and uglier on redhat. I think the BlueCurve artwork is great, but you can always retheme it easily, and it should be no slower.
Well - yes and no. Yes, in that COM has "proper" scripting support, but no, in that most apps don't expose services in such a way. Believe me, OLE Automation as it was known when I learnt about it is a total pain in the ass for developers, the only reason it's possible AT ALL is that Windows IDEs have lots of wizards to do it all for you. It's not just a case of building a COM object, you've got to provide the IDispatch interface (to allow for method invocation), you've got to register it, give it a ProgID, set up the server when the app is running, deal with cases when then server isn't running so the app has to be specially started etc....
Don't get me wrong, OLE Automation is cool, but it's HARD and therefore rare outside of Microsofts own products. Also, it's harder to program. Because it's available via actual programming languages, to do something like access a file via WSH you create an object, call it's methods etc.
Scripting on Linux (with the command line) is totally, totally different. bash started out as a command line, and mutated into a programming language as well. All command line apps support scriptability to some extent because they take input, parameters and output. It's crude, but it works surprisingly well.
Oh, and for those who are wondering about GUI apps - the boys over at freedesktop.org are working on a new message bus architecture, similar to DCOP, called DBUS, which looks like amongst many other cool things will allow for simple object scriptability in a desktop-neutral fashion, from the command line or other languages. It's not as powerful as ActiveX, but then again most of the power of COM/OLE/ActiveX was never used anyway, so that's not too bad, and because it should be simple and easy to add support hopefully we'll see lots of apps adopting it.
Disclaimer: nothing about DBUS is actually official, it's a bunch of KDE and GNOME hackers working on something that may or may not be adopted by either project. You know how it goes - it'll be adopted when it's shown to be mature and better than the current solutions.
And why do my posts start at 1 all of a sudden. The worlds gone mad, and I never noticed.....
why no +1?
afgaasdfa test test test
Providing a plugin API to extend a product shouldn't be seen by any sane court of law to be "sponsoring" it in any way, shape or form.
If that were the case, Microsoft could be sued by the RIAA for providing "plugin interfaces" to Windows that let it install and use the user/commctrl DLLs to provide its user interface. An API is an API, things build upon it.
Considering that pretty much any media player could be added to in this way, if that's Apples attitude they are on pretty shaky ground, as they've basically told people what they can and cannot build upon their platforms. As there's no reason to restrict such things legally, I can't see them doing such a thing.
For the record, I dislike piracy intensely. The system is broken, but that's not an excuse to exploit it, you've got to reward artists for their work and until a more efficient system comes in that strips the middleman and makes use of these wonderful technologies, we should live with the current system. Sure, we can bitch all we like but if anybody should be sued for this, it's the people who made iCommune, it's just another P2P network like any other.
But that also doesn't excuse Apple this time - they are using get-out clauses in their license agreements to quash a product, and so far the only reasonable explanation I've seen is that it's because they have a similar product coming up.
No, but it comes bundled for 'free' with every Mac. I think most of us would agree that Mozilla is a better browser than IE, it has tabs, popup blocking, it's more secure, it's more standards compliant, it can look boring if you want but it can also look cool and so on. The latest builds are even comparable to IE6 in speed. Internet Explorer itself has hardly moved on in the last few years, Gates has his eye on other balls.
Nonetheless, it's practically impossible to convince a lot of people to use it. Mozillas market share remains at rock bottom. I've tried to convince friends to try it and they point blank refuse, "IE is fine for me, why would I need Mozilla?".
And you know what? I think they might be onto something. Trying to convince somebody to change their web browser, or media player, or zip extractor is like trying to convince people to buy a different brand of oil for their car.
I mean, to most people, things like that are part of the furniture, it works, they don't think about it. The effort required to try something else, when what you have works, is simply too great. We can't be discerning buyers in everything we do (part of the reason classical economics fails) and so the idea that somehow a company could displace iTunes by making a better media player is probably wrong.
The only way that'd be possible is if it was SO much better than iTunes, and iTunes was SO bad that people were willing to find out about the competition and download them and try them out etc, ie not going to happen anytime soon.
So really this company is sort of screwed. I don't agree with the "well it was in the plugin license agreement so they are the criminals here" line either - arbitrary restrictions on plugin APIs that serve seemingly no purpose just reeks of control freakery and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if that was a planned feature for iTunes.
Using license agreements to arbitrarily restrict competition like this is a classic Microsoft tactic, it's sad to see Apple do the same, but not entirely surprising.
By that logic we should kill off Mozilla and hell, why not, the Mac as a platform anyway. They're both inconvenient to quite a few people, I mean some software companies have these Mac ports that are horribly expensive to keep around, and of course Mozilla is kind of a thorn in the side of Internet Explorer, if it weren't for them and their damn standards we could have all kinds of cool technology on the web by now.
Sure. It'd be a one product web, but hey. Maybe it's worth it, convenience and all.
Yeah, that's true, but I remain to be convinced that if it were Apple with 95% market share they'd be any less evil than Microsoft is. If anything, they'd probably be more evil - MS pulls more than its fair share of dirty tricks but they rarely resort to using the law as their weapon as Apple do all too frequently.
At the end of the day, Apple have the same business models and methods that Microsoft do. Look at MacOS and Windows and tell me what's really different underneath. I'm not talking about technical details or "experience", I'm talking about business models. They both charge money for the OS and give away some free stuff with it. They both use it to try and reinforce their other products.
So sure, in the real world it wasn't Apple, but it could have been if Jobs had actually followed the advice Gates gave him when he asked for it and licensed clones. Whether Apple would have tried to destroy Netscape is debatable, but they seem happy to clamp down on people when they make competing products to themselves, or even products that alter their own in some trivial way. It's a moot point, but interesting speculation.
Then they must be really, smart because that's exactly what the IPL implementation is - except under an Apache style license. At least, I think it's called the IPL.
Don't expect to just download it and get single sign on though. Liberty doesn't work like that.