I'm not even sure how it's possible for the team to bring so many new features in such a short time. Is it a side effect from being open source with browser enthusiasts working on it day and night? Is it "just" because a very flexible and well written code base? An efficient organization of the mozilla developers? A combination?
All of those things. I think type ahead find was written by an open source contributor (of course the module owners helped out, as with most Moz features). Mozilla is very very easy to hack on, as it's very componentized and large parts of it are just text files (xml/js/css). And finally they've been doing stuff like code review, super review, commit for a while so they are pretty slick about it.
Provide your high-level GUI stuff through an IPC channel and get out of the way. Let me have my own main loop back. Thank you.
Right on. I'm waiting for somebody (it won't be me) to create an SVG based gui_server that accepts binary serialized XML on a socket, transforms it, renders it and synchs events back to the app. That would then in turn render either using X (with spiffy vector extensions) or OpenGL. Evas can do this. That would rock absolutely, and if you wanted to mix and match, you can use XEmbed as well. You could have XUL transformed to SVG:) Why not? Kinda like Quartz and Display PDF except better.
That picture is going:) Sorry, that's why I said not to bother looking at the site, it's going to completely switch in a couple of days.
Yes, we are very far along architecture wise, it's basically just building it now (the hard bit, in other words:)
Hopefully I'll be able to get a slashdot story on it sometime, otherwise watch my sig for a link to it. If you want to ask any questions, you can email me on mike theoretic com. There will be a technical summary of the various pieces on the site by next week, promise.
Yes, how dare they try and make profit to support the further development of their OS and fund researches and UI analysts. Until you show your business model of 'give things away for free' to be successful, don't knock everyone elses.
You still don't understand the word "free" do you. I paid for Linux, as have many, many other people. What is so hard to understand about this. You can get Linux for free yes, but when it comes from a company you pay for it. Easy, no?
How dare they protect the name and look-and-feel that they invented? They actually named the linux theme "Aqua", not very subtle for a rip-off. They ARE allowed to protect the name, aren't they??
Speaking of look-and-feel, remember how well the OSS community showed off their maturity when RedHat took the OPEN SOURCE KDE and Gnome look-and-feels and unified them.
Missed the point again. The point is that you cannot defend a look and feel in court. If Aqua is a trademark you can stop people using that name, but they didn't do that did they? They sent him a very threatening letter, which had no legal grounding at all. RedHat also now have their own look and feel, good for them. I have no issues with companies creating their own look and feels, I have issues with them abusing the legal system to try and protect it. You can make any derivative of BlueCurve you like, as long as it's not called BlueCurve.
This is funny cause apple has had a LONG time anti-DRM stance. DRM on the iPod is OPTIONAL. I've never had problems putting MP3's on it. Have you?
Define optional. If you mean, you can hack it and switch it off then yes, but in that case Windows Media DRM is also "optional". I know of no other MP3 player that forces you to use various hacks and 3rd party tools like the iPod does.
Yeah, they give nothing back. Except for that free unix distro, Darwin, and that whole Rendevouz thing. Also, GNU != Linux. Even assuming apple uses LOTS of GNU code in it's quicktime player, they are under no obligation to give back to the community. That's part of the GPL and LGPL. Plus, why linux? Why should apple devote resources to porting a Quicktime player to an OS with almost no share of the desktop market.
Darwin is not anything special OK? Large parts of which, it should be noted, were already written. It's also a distro with no graphics capabilties and virtually no desktop apps. What use is that? Linux/FreeBSD already do nicely on the server thanks.
If Apple did use lots of GNU code in QuickTime then they would be legally obliged to give the whole thing back to the community, that's what the GPL forces you to do.
Finally, "no desktop market share" is FUD, pure and simple. If we take Apples own (optimistic) estimates of MacOS X market share, and an independant third parties (IDC) estimate of Linux desktop market share, you still arrive at Linux have at minimum double, and at best 4 times the desktop market share of MacOS. No, really. Check for yourself. MacOS X 0.4%, Linux 2%. Anyway, as to why Apple should devote resources to it, how about because they insist on buying up various bits of content to try and prop up QuickTime as a media platform. Real can manage to produce a player for Linux, so why can't Apple, who arguably owe a whole lot more?
Interesting you should mention that. Apparently Passport does indeed now have a Kerberos stack (I had previously thought that would be too hard to do), and the XBox service uses it. They are cross tying their products already.
At the PingID project we're dropping support for Liberty for now. At the DIDW conference I had good long chat with John Beatty, the guy who wrote the Liberty specs. He was an extremely cool guy, but unfortunately Liberty the organization is pretty pathetic when it comes to openness.
For instance: they charge $120,000 for one level of membership (i forget which). We were told in no uncertain terms that there was no reason for this other than to keep the little guys out, and that virtually all the money would be returned. He joked they'd have to live in Hawaii or something to spend that much.
Even more worrying was that quite a few of our questions were met with "Sorry, we can't tell you that". A lot of stuff they're doing is "commercially sensitive" apparently. For instance, they demoed a true single sign in/federation demo at the conf, the open sourced reference server doesn't have any web front ends or demos like that. I asked whether I could have copy at the end - no can do, it's based on Novells own authentication engine. Maybe if we can convince the management they said. That's just great.
Finally it's worth remembering that Liberty is a group of companies each with lots of accounts. They want to "federate" those accounts to streamline their websites and business processes, to make it easier for the customer to have "relationships" with them (a common term at this conference). Hence the fact that they now refer to "Simplified Sign On", not Single Sign on. Only time will tell, but I think our ideas are better.
I believe we in the Linux community should return the favor, and port Wine to Windows.
[grin] I know it was joke, but just for future reference quite a few parts of Wine are now being developed on Windows, at it makes it easier to locate bugs. In theory, as they are recreating the DLLs, you can in fact drop in parts of the Wine project DLLs into Windows and have a semi-MS free Windows installation. Scary huh?:)
Old news guys. There has been an Apache/Linux module for Passport for years. At Digital ID World 2002 I chatted with some of the Passport guys, and pretty cool they are too. They told me that they were going to rewrite it, as they didn't have many (read, any) skilled Linux coders, and their present Apache implementation sucked dogs balls.
Second point, so what? Passport has practically zero penetration, even less since the screwed over doristheflorist.com and removed the Wallet functionality (for being unnecessary bloat). Now don't me wrong, I'm sure MS will push Passport until it gets bigger and better, but at the moment that isn't an issue.
Final point, digital identity is a good idea, and the world will be an easier and more secure place for those who want it to be when we can have digital identities. So, what are we doing about it?
The PingID project is developing an open royalty free set of protocols, with an open source (though unfortunately non-free) reference implementation of the server. This will be something you can download and install onto your server for free, that will then let you sign in to various accounts that support the protocols, manage your personal document store and any authorizations you have given out (at least, in the beginning). The url is pingid.org but I'm not linking to it, because we're going to be putting up a new site that more accurately reflects the new open source nature of the project in like 3 or 4 days, so I don't want people to go look and go "huh, he was talking out of his ass". Code for v0.1 will be coming in a few weeks hopefully, I get paid to hack on it part time. Join the mailing lists to help out and track its progress. So far, this is really the only open answer to digital identity we've found, so I'm pretty glad I'm a part of it:)
Hmm, interesting. I hadn't realised that was the connection.
Still, it seems rather arbitrary. What does this distinction gain the user, when nobody other than those who know their HIG inside out can figure out the connection? Also, some of those app connections are somewhat dubious. What does QuickTime replace? A VCR perhaps? What about iChat. The closest analogy in the real world is a phone, but that's very rough indeed. If the Address Book is a replacement for a real world item, why is the text editor not (replacement for notepad)? I dunno, and don't really care to be honest. I was just pointing out that Apple are not the gui design gods people often assume they are.
Actually MacOS itself gets it wrong in quite a few places, for instance the muscle memory destroying zoomable Dock and the visually noisey stripes everywhere. They also vary the theme between aqua and brushed metal seemingly at random in their apps collection. This goes flat against their own HIG.
Also, iirc Interface Builder is based on absolute positioning mostly, with guidelines to let you line things up. The technique used by Glade/GTK/XUL, box packing, has several advantages like being able to scale the GUI up to any size you like (good for resolution independance) in any aspect ratio and still have it look right.
Anyway, I digress. I don't think this guy is talking about desktop design. He's talking about fantastically complex pieces of software, probably specialist stuff.
I'd suggest he exames emacs and vi. Given that they have practically no GUI elements, they nonetheless expose a lot of functionality via the keyboard (and mouse too). It may be worth considering having a "lite" graphical UI and a heavy duty keyboard based UI for this question.
Are Microsoft complacent, or is IE 7 going to incorporate some of these useful new features and maybe even innovate a little?
The point of IE was not to build a better browser, it was to destroy Netscape. After that had been (apparently) achieved, I think most of the team were pulled in order to work on stuff like.NET
Don't expect IE to move forwards now - why should they? Opera is not competition to IE, neither is Mozilla. Although they are both better, IE is there on the desktop, and Moz/Opera are not.
I've given up hope of Mozilla beating IE on Windows. It will take over the world, but it'll be on the back of Linux, there just isn't enough incentive to switch browsers.
No no no. You completely misunderstood my post. Let me make it clear for you.
I never said, Apple doesn't use any standardised technology. Everybody does to some extent, yes, even Microsoft. Most of what you spouted is old news, pretty much everybody uses them (usb?), and Apple only use stuff like CUPS because it makes no sense for them to reinvent stuff that already exists. They did not invent ZeroConf, they merely made an implementation of it. The POSIX compatability it should be noted is not exactly complete - despite being based on the efforts of the free unix people, it's still not compatible.
How about this:
Damn them with their proprietary hardware that cannot be built by anybody but them (under threat of lawsuits).
Damn them with their entirely closed source OS above the kernel level, and what kind of madness is an "open source" kernel where they can change the conditions under which it is licensed at any time they like?
How dare they threaten lawsuits against the creator of an Aqua mozilla skin, despite everybody knowing that they themselves proved in court you can't protect a look and feel.
May they roast in hell for their DRM enabled (yes, it is) mp3 media player that had to be reverse engineered for the people that wrote much of their OS.
And why is there STILL no QuickTime player for Linux, despite the fact that they use large amounts of GNU code. A lot of open source software has been ported to MacOS, but do they port anything back in return? No.
They are in fact practically the devil.
And I love how on every point OS X wins. You agreed that it was easier to use, had better hardware integration, and better software. Plus, I think most of us agree that it's really cool tech and is prettier.
What bollocks. My points were deliberately neutral, they could be read both ways. I personally find OS X hard to use, and Linux very easy. I understand that statistically I am currently unusual.
You conveniently skip the multi vendor point, despite it being the most important. Apple can screw you anyday, so can RedHat but with Linux you can simply install a new distro and get on with things.
The minimal amount of hardware OS X will run on is a weakness, not a strength. Once more, you are locked to single vendor solutions.
OS X is far, far more expensive than Linux, despite the fact that you get far more with Linux than OS X in terms of capabilities. Show me where I can find a copy of OS X, with (native) image editing software, word processors, games, music composition software, chat programs etc all for £30. There isn't anywhere. It's cheap - that is good.
Finally, note that I did not say that Linux software was low quality. I'm using GNOME 2, with Gabber, the Gimp 1.3 and Evolution, and this is high quality stuff. It's all free as in speech too.
And then you say "Linux is free. Nuff said." as if this clinches it and Linux has won despite losing in every category other than price.
You must be new here. I paid for my copy of Linux. Free refers to not being forced to kowtow to Steves ego, free refers to freedom. If you had any clue at all you would have realised that, and would understand why it's so important.
But no. I gave a fairly neutral summing up of the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms, yet you decided to engage in senseless flamebait zealotry, as I knew somebody would. There is always somebody who can't see the bigger picture, is only interested in promoting whatever they've decided is cool today.
Understand this: Apple is only for your rights when they think it will make them money. Apple only use open standards when they could not force their own on the market. Apple have shown time and time again in their long history that when push comes to shove, they will happily screw their own customers in the name of profit.. Never, ever forget that.
i love it... i hope an activex control for IE is around that will allow IE to use XUL
There is an ActiveX control that emulates the IE APIs allowing a drop in replacement of Trident (the ie rendering engine) with Gecko. In theory I guess some registry hacks could make IE itself use Mozilla, in much the same way that Konqueror can be flipped between KHTML and Gecko. Dunno if anybody has done that yet, but for embedding apps there is already a solution.
It seems Mozilla is working closer and closer to being an OS than just a browser. Kinda funny if you think about it, where MS has windows which was supposed to be an OS and is now including a browser.
What is doubly amusing is that when Microsoft attempted to kill (perhaps did kill) Netscape, they did so because they were scared the browser would turn into a platform that would let you write kickass apps making Windows irrelevant. In a way, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as if Netscape hadn't been taken over by AOL and left to do its own thing, would Mozilla (a platform as well as a browser) exist today?
I doubt that one day all desktop apps will be written using Mozilla. But it's an intriguing possibility, I look forward to the GRE with much interest.
For those who like the "lite" approach, but don't want to go quite this extreme, try FluxBox.
It can do tabbed windows, task switching, virtual desktops, keygrabbing (emacs style keybindings from all over your desktop) and so on. If you run it without a desktop, and if you have the Xscreensaver collection then you can run:
and get a beautiful animated dolphin as your "wallpaper". I think that's the command anyway, i'm at work so please correct me if wrong. If you're going to save CPU cycles in one way, you might as well spend them in another:)
It's a good idea (disclaimer, I read the article a few hours ago). When I first started using vim (emacs now) my friends saw me use it for a few moments when looking over my shoulder. I did a key sequence, I don't recall what it was, and they actually said "whoa" and took a step back:) Advanced emacs usage has the same effect. If you're fast with the keyboard, this kind of thing can push efficiency through the roof.
XUL is largely frozen, and if you only use the 1.0.x branch, it's guaranteed to only get perf improvements and bug fixes.
Having said that, 99% of XUL is now solid anyway. If you develop apps, the syntax may change or more likely you'll get new features, but if you then want to upgrade to that version of Mozilla, you can simply run the old XUL through some XSL transforms. It's the same as with any API really, except it's easier to upgrade/alter XUL.
To me this is the one of the most important parts. I'm not a programmer, nor will I ever be I think.
But have you dabbled with web design? If the answer is yes, then you can write Mozilla apps. It's due to this fact that it's so easy to write patches for Mozilla. XUL (which if you know html is easy), CSS and JavaScript are all you need to know.
You could well be a programmer with Mozilla, and never know what a pointer is.
I seem to recall that some use MSIE as a component architecture to develop generalized applications in much the same way, but I can't think of any examples of this right now.
Good examples would be Oddpost, an email app that launches from the web, and RhymBox, a Jabber client.
Note that I've spoken to the froods who did both of these projects, and they've been constantly hitting the wall in terms of what IE can do. RhymBox now uses quite a lot of ActiveX code in order to work around the general lameness of using DHTML.hta files for the ui.
I'm on Windows XP on a fairly modern machine (1.5ghz Athlon, 512mb of RAM). After the machine has booted for the first time, it takes about 2-3 seconds to start. If I quit it again, and restart it, it takes about 0.5 secs as the files are all cached in memory. That's as fast as with QuickLaunch really, so I don't bother enabling it.
I'm using the Classic theme on XP so it's using native widgets to render the UI, maybe that's why it's faster for me.
Will people please stop bitching about this? If you don't want mail/irc/composer installed then use the net installer and uncheck the boxes. Moz is very componentized, and it will not install them. Don't expect huge reductions in download time or massive increases in speed however - all that stuff is load on demand anyway, so it only slows down your machine when you actually use them.
Re:Interaction, not Merging
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Phoenix 0.3 Is Out
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· Score: 5, Insightful
This was actually the original UNIX philosopy, lots of small tools interacting to achieve something complex. Let us bring this idea to the desktop and create the most flexible, powerful, easy-to-use desktop ever seen.
And is still continued today... the difference? The components are no longer split along process lines and don't communicate using pipes and stdin/stdout. They use the fantastically more powerful mechanisms of XPCOM/CORBA etc.
I've seen this a lot. Out comes a new GNOME/KDE release, people moan and say "What happened to the unix philosophy of small tools?" They are alive and kicking, but those tools have now transcended the arbitrary limitations of text streams.
I've even seen this in reference to Emacs! People kick Emacs for its bloat, but at least if you get XEmacs everything is modular and packaged. You just pick the functionality you want right off. It's all componentized along lisp functions.
Why do people think modularity stops at the command line? It's alive and well, especially in Linux which has to be the most modular OS in history.
It should be noted that DCOP is hardly an advanced rpc protocol. In particular, it's tied to Qt, and is text based (iirc). Something like CORBA is better, but unfortunately is much harder to setup and understand. Hopefully some day somebody will build an object model that doesn't suck.
And as a side note, at least on Windows, Mozilla has been just as fast as IE for ages now. Using QuickStart makes startup instant, although here at work I never bothered switching it on as it starts quickly enough for me anyway. Pheonix is worth more as a test bed for experimental UI design that a "light" browser, as it'll end up becoming heavy as time goes on anyway.
Yeah, but most of the (important) MacOS apps are not Cocoa based. Also, it's not that simple is it? Cocoa apps expect to be run on OS X, they also make use of OS X specific stuff. Would those apps look/feel right if suddenly stripped of Aqua? What about all the closed source apps?
Note I don't believe all apps should be open source (well, ideally they should obviously, but that's currently not economically possible). But that's like saying, "There is a POSIX emulation layer for Windows, so I can port my Linux apps to Windows easily". Well, that's true in one way, false in another. There's porting, then there's porting isn't there?
Whether or not they'd be like this if they were in a monopoly position is up to debate, but Apple is currently a far less evil company than Microsoft. Instead of putting roadblocks up for me, the Mac makes most things I want to do far easier.
Unless of course you someday decide that you don't want to use the Mac anymore, in which case you'll find you're just as badly locked in to it as 95% of the world is with Windows. I know you might think it crazy that you would ever wish to stop using the Mac, but Apple is a company, and we all know that they are hardly the most consistant things when it comes to doing what you want. What would happen if you wanted to switch to something else?
Well, you'd find that none of your apps would work on the platform of your choice, because the Mac APIs are proprietary, and there is only one implementation of them - the Apple implementation. Notice how easy it is to make open sourced Linux stuff work on the Mac? Yet that it's impossible to do the reverse? What about the Mac file formats? Even the iPod, a frickin MP3 player had to have some format reverse engineered (the index? don't remember). It's not like Apple deliberately throw up these roadblocks (though they have a history of abusing the legal system), it's just a natural consequence of lockin, which is what characterizes these kind of platforms.
[sigh]. I'm tired. Don't get me wrong, this isn't me criticizing OS X or even Apple specifically, not this time. I think it's great you're getting a journaled FS, more power to Apple and as a consequence you
But comments like the above just show that you haven't really experienced the pain of vendor lockin yet. Right now things are peachy. But in the future? What if the upgrade to 10.3 also costs $120? What will you do? Pay up I guess. Well, it's your choice, but at least understand that there are plenty of roadblocks in Mac land, it's just that they're one way only.
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All of those things. I think type ahead find was written by an open source contributor (of course the module owners helped out, as with most Moz features). Mozilla is very very easy to hack on, as it's very componentized and large parts of it are just text files (xml/js/css). And finally they've been doing stuff like code review, super review, commit for a while so they are pretty slick about it.
Try blowing away your profile, that normally fixes problems such as that. It may also be a skin problem, the skin format changed (again) recently.
Right on. I'm waiting for somebody (it won't be me) to create an SVG based gui_server that accepts binary serialized XML on a socket, transforms it, renders it and synchs events back to the app. That would then in turn render either using X (with spiffy vector extensions) or OpenGL. Evas can do this. That would rock absolutely, and if you wanted to mix and match, you can use XEmbed as well. You could have XUL transformed to SVG :) Why not? Kinda like Quartz and Display PDF except better.
Yes, we are very far along architecture wise, it's basically just building it now (the hard bit, in other words :)
Hopefully I'll be able to get a slashdot story on it sometime, otherwise watch my sig for a link to it. If you want to ask any questions, you can email me on mike theoretic com. There will be a technical summary of the various pieces on the site by next week, promise.
You still don't understand the word "free" do you. I paid for Linux, as have many, many other people. What is so hard to understand about this. You can get Linux for free yes, but when it comes from a company you pay for it. Easy, no?
How dare they protect the name and look-and-feel that they invented? They actually named the linux theme "Aqua", not very subtle for a rip-off. They ARE allowed to protect the name, aren't they?? Speaking of look-and-feel, remember how well the OSS community showed off their maturity when RedHat took the OPEN SOURCE KDE and Gnome look-and-feels and unified them.
Missed the point again. The point is that you cannot defend a look and feel in court. If Aqua is a trademark you can stop people using that name, but they didn't do that did they? They sent him a very threatening letter, which had no legal grounding at all. RedHat also now have their own look and feel, good for them. I have no issues with companies creating their own look and feels, I have issues with them abusing the legal system to try and protect it. You can make any derivative of BlueCurve you like, as long as it's not called BlueCurve.
This is funny cause apple has had a LONG time anti-DRM stance. DRM on the iPod is OPTIONAL. I've never had problems putting MP3's on it. Have you?
Define optional. If you mean, you can hack it and switch it off then yes, but in that case Windows Media DRM is also "optional". I know of no other MP3 player that forces you to use various hacks and 3rd party tools like the iPod does.
Yeah, they give nothing back. Except for that free unix distro, Darwin, and that whole Rendevouz thing. Also, GNU != Linux. Even assuming apple uses LOTS of GNU code in it's quicktime player, they are under no obligation to give back to the community. That's part of the GPL and LGPL. Plus, why linux? Why should apple devote resources to porting a Quicktime player to an OS with almost no share of the desktop market.
Darwin is not anything special OK? Large parts of which, it should be noted, were already written. It's also a distro with no graphics capabilties and virtually no desktop apps. What use is that? Linux/FreeBSD already do nicely on the server thanks.
If Apple did use lots of GNU code in QuickTime then they would be legally obliged to give the whole thing back to the community, that's what the GPL forces you to do.
Finally, "no desktop market share" is FUD, pure and simple. If we take Apples own (optimistic) estimates of MacOS X market share, and an independant third parties (IDC) estimate of Linux desktop market share, you still arrive at Linux have at minimum double, and at best 4 times the desktop market share of MacOS. No, really. Check for yourself. MacOS X 0.4%, Linux 2%. Anyway, as to why Apple should devote resources to it, how about because they insist on buying up various bits of content to try and prop up QuickTime as a media platform. Real can manage to produce a player for Linux, so why can't Apple, who arguably owe a whole lot more?
Interesting you should mention that. Apparently Passport does indeed now have a Kerberos stack (I had previously thought that would be too hard to do), and the XBox service uses it. They are cross tying their products already.
For instance: they charge $120,000 for one level of membership (i forget which). We were told in no uncertain terms that there was no reason for this other than to keep the little guys out, and that virtually all the money would be returned. He joked they'd have to live in Hawaii or something to spend that much.
Even more worrying was that quite a few of our questions were met with "Sorry, we can't tell you that". A lot of stuff they're doing is "commercially sensitive" apparently. For instance, they demoed a true single sign in/federation demo at the conf, the open sourced reference server doesn't have any web front ends or demos like that. I asked whether I could have copy at the end - no can do, it's based on Novells own authentication engine. Maybe if we can convince the management they said. That's just great.
Finally it's worth remembering that Liberty is a group of companies each with lots of accounts. They want to "federate" those accounts to streamline their websites and business processes, to make it easier for the customer to have "relationships" with them (a common term at this conference). Hence the fact that they now refer to "Simplified Sign On", not Single Sign on. Only time will tell, but I think our ideas are better.
[grin] I know it was joke, but just for future reference quite a few parts of Wine are now being developed on Windows, at it makes it easier to locate bugs. In theory, as they are recreating the DLLs, you can in fact drop in parts of the Wine project DLLs into Windows and have a semi-MS free Windows installation. Scary huh? :)
Second point, so what? Passport has practically zero penetration, even less since the screwed over doristheflorist.com and removed the Wallet functionality (for being unnecessary bloat). Now don't me wrong, I'm sure MS will push Passport until it gets bigger and better, but at the moment that isn't an issue.
Final point, digital identity is a good idea, and the world will be an easier and more secure place for those who want it to be when we can have digital identities. So, what are we doing about it?
The PingID project is developing an open royalty free set of protocols, with an open source (though unfortunately non-free) reference implementation of the server. This will be something you can download and install onto your server for free, that will then let you sign in to various accounts that support the protocols, manage your personal document store and any authorizations you have given out (at least, in the beginning). The url is pingid.org but I'm not linking to it, because we're going to be putting up a new site that more accurately reflects the new open source nature of the project in like 3 or 4 days, so I don't want people to go look and go "huh, he was talking out of his ass". Code for v0.1 will be coming in a few weeks hopefully, I get paid to hack on it part time. Join the mailing lists to help out and track its progress. So far, this is really the only open answer to digital identity we've found, so I'm pretty glad I'm a part of it :)
Still, it seems rather arbitrary. What does this distinction gain the user, when nobody other than those who know their HIG inside out can figure out the connection? Also, some of those app connections are somewhat dubious. What does QuickTime replace? A VCR perhaps? What about iChat. The closest analogy in the real world is a phone, but that's very rough indeed. If the Address Book is a replacement for a real world item, why is the text editor not (replacement for notepad)? I dunno, and don't really care to be honest. I was just pointing out that Apple are not the gui design gods people often assume they are.
Also, iirc Interface Builder is based on absolute positioning mostly, with guidelines to let you line things up. The technique used by Glade/GTK/XUL, box packing, has several advantages like being able to scale the GUI up to any size you like (good for resolution independance) in any aspect ratio and still have it look right.
Anyway, I digress. I don't think this guy is talking about desktop design. He's talking about fantastically complex pieces of software, probably specialist stuff.
I'd suggest he exames emacs and vi. Given that they have practically no GUI elements, they nonetheless expose a lot of functionality via the keyboard (and mouse too). It may be worth considering having a "lite" graphical UI and a heavy duty keyboard based UI for this question.
The point of IE was not to build a better browser, it was to destroy Netscape. After that had been (apparently) achieved, I think most of the team were pulled in order to work on stuff like .NET
Don't expect IE to move forwards now - why should they? Opera is not competition to IE, neither is Mozilla. Although they are both better, IE is there on the desktop, and Moz/Opera are not.
I've given up hope of Mozilla beating IE on Windows. It will take over the world, but it'll be on the back of Linux, there just isn't enough incentive to switch browsers.
I never said, Apple doesn't use any standardised technology. Everybody does to some extent, yes, even Microsoft. Most of what you spouted is old news, pretty much everybody uses them (usb?), and Apple only use stuff like CUPS because it makes no sense for them to reinvent stuff that already exists. They did not invent ZeroConf, they merely made an implementation of it. The POSIX compatability it should be noted is not exactly complete - despite being based on the efforts of the free unix people, it's still not compatible.
How about this:
Damn them with their proprietary hardware that cannot be built by anybody but them (under threat of lawsuits).
Damn them with their entirely closed source OS above the kernel level, and what kind of madness is an "open source" kernel where they can change the conditions under which it is licensed at any time they like?
How dare they threaten lawsuits against the creator of an Aqua mozilla skin, despite everybody knowing that they themselves proved in court you can't protect a look and feel.
May they roast in hell for their DRM enabled (yes, it is) mp3 media player that had to be reverse engineered for the people that wrote much of their OS.
And why is there STILL no QuickTime player for Linux, despite the fact that they use large amounts of GNU code. A lot of open source software has been ported to MacOS, but do they port anything back in return? No.
They are in fact practically the devil.
And I love how on every point OS X wins. You agreed that it was easier to use, had better hardware integration, and better software. Plus, I think most of us agree that it's really cool tech and is prettier.
What bollocks. My points were deliberately neutral, they could be read both ways. I personally find OS X hard to use, and Linux very easy. I understand that statistically I am currently unusual.
You conveniently skip the multi vendor point, despite it being the most important. Apple can screw you anyday, so can RedHat but with Linux you can simply install a new distro and get on with things.
The minimal amount of hardware OS X will run on is a weakness, not a strength. Once more, you are locked to single vendor solutions.
OS X is far, far more expensive than Linux, despite the fact that you get far more with Linux than OS X in terms of capabilities. Show me where I can find a copy of OS X, with (native) image editing software, word processors, games, music composition software, chat programs etc all for £30. There isn't anywhere. It's cheap - that is good.
Finally, note that I did not say that Linux software was low quality. I'm using GNOME 2, with Gabber, the Gimp 1.3 and Evolution, and this is high quality stuff. It's all free as in speech too.
And then you say "Linux is free. Nuff said." as if this clinches it and Linux has won despite losing in every category other than price.
You must be new here. I paid for my copy of Linux. Free refers to not being forced to kowtow to Steves ego, free refers to freedom. If you had any clue at all you would have realised that, and would understand why it's so important.
But no. I gave a fairly neutral summing up of the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms, yet you decided to engage in senseless flamebait zealotry, as I knew somebody would. There is always somebody who can't see the bigger picture, is only interested in promoting whatever they've decided is cool today.
Understand this: Apple is only for your rights when they think it will make them money. Apple only use open standards when they could not force their own on the market. Apple have shown time and time again in their long history that when push comes to shove, they will happily screw their own customers in the name of profit.. Never, ever forget that.
There is an ActiveX control that emulates the IE APIs allowing a drop in replacement of Trident (the ie rendering engine) with Gecko. In theory I guess some registry hacks could make IE itself use Mozilla, in much the same way that Konqueror can be flipped between KHTML and Gecko. Dunno if anybody has done that yet, but for embedding apps there is already a solution.
What is doubly amusing is that when Microsoft attempted to kill (perhaps did kill) Netscape, they did so because they were scared the browser would turn into a platform that would let you write kickass apps making Windows irrelevant. In a way, this became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as if Netscape hadn't been taken over by AOL and left to do its own thing, would Mozilla (a platform as well as a browser) exist today?
I doubt that one day all desktop apps will be written using Mozilla. But it's an intriguing possibility, I look forward to the GRE with much interest.
It can do tabbed windows, task switching, virtual desktops, keygrabbing (emacs style keybindings from all over your desktop) and so on. If you run it without a desktop, and if you have the Xscreensaver collection then you can run:
and get a beautiful animated dolphin as your "wallpaper". I think that's the command anyway, i'm at work so please correct me if wrong. If you're going to save CPU cycles in one way, you might as well spend them in another :)
It's a good idea (disclaimer, I read the article a few hours ago). When I first started using vim (emacs now) my friends saw me use it for a few moments when looking over my shoulder. I did a key sequence, I don't recall what it was, and they actually said "whoa" and took a step back :) Advanced emacs usage has the same effect. If you're fast with the keyboard, this kind of thing can push efficiency through the roof.
Having said that, 99% of XUL is now solid anyway. If you develop apps, the syntax may change or more likely you'll get new features, but if you then want to upgrade to that version of Mozilla, you can simply run the old XUL through some XSL transforms. It's the same as with any API really, except it's easier to upgrade/alter XUL.
But have you dabbled with web design? If the answer is yes, then you can write Mozilla apps. It's due to this fact that it's so easy to write patches for Mozilla. XUL (which if you know html is easy), CSS and JavaScript are all you need to know.
You could well be a programmer with Mozilla, and never know what a pointer is.
Good examples would be Oddpost, an email app that launches from the web, and RhymBox, a Jabber client.
Note that I've spoken to the froods who did both of these projects, and they've been constantly hitting the wall in terms of what IE can do. RhymBox now uses quite a lot of ActiveX code in order to work around the general lameness of using DHTML .hta files for the ui.
I'm using the Classic theme on XP so it's using native widgets to render the UI, maybe that's why it's faster for me.
Will people please stop bitching about this? If you don't want mail/irc/composer installed then use the net installer and uncheck the boxes. Moz is very componentized, and it will not install them. Don't expect huge reductions in download time or massive increases in speed however - all that stuff is load on demand anyway, so it only slows down your machine when you actually use them.
And is still continued today ... the difference? The components are no longer split along process lines and don't communicate using pipes and stdin/stdout. They use the fantastically more powerful mechanisms of XPCOM/CORBA etc.
I've seen this a lot. Out comes a new GNOME/KDE release, people moan and say "What happened to the unix philosophy of small tools?" They are alive and kicking, but those tools have now transcended the arbitrary limitations of text streams.
I've even seen this in reference to Emacs! People kick Emacs for its bloat, but at least if you get XEmacs everything is modular and packaged. You just pick the functionality you want right off. It's all componentized along lisp functions.
Why do people think modularity stops at the command line? It's alive and well, especially in Linux which has to be the most modular OS in history.
It should be noted that DCOP is hardly an advanced rpc protocol. In particular, it's tied to Qt, and is text based (iirc). Something like CORBA is better, but unfortunately is much harder to setup and understand. Hopefully some day somebody will build an object model that doesn't suck.
And as a side note, at least on Windows, Mozilla has been just as fast as IE for ages now. Using QuickStart makes startup instant, although here at work I never bothered switching it on as it starts quickly enough for me anyway. Pheonix is worth more as a test bed for experimental UI design that a "light" browser, as it'll end up becoming heavy as time goes on anyway.
Note I don't believe all apps should be open source (well, ideally they should obviously, but that's currently not economically possible). But that's like saying, "There is a POSIX emulation layer for Windows, so I can port my Linux apps to Windows easily". Well, that's true in one way, false in another. There's porting, then there's porting isn't there?
Unless of course you someday decide that you don't want to use the Mac anymore, in which case you'll find you're just as badly locked in to it as 95% of the world is with Windows. I know you might think it crazy that you would ever wish to stop using the Mac, but Apple is a company, and we all know that they are hardly the most consistant things when it comes to doing what you want. What would happen if you wanted to switch to something else?
Well, you'd find that none of your apps would work on the platform of your choice, because the Mac APIs are proprietary, and there is only one implementation of them - the Apple implementation. Notice how easy it is to make open sourced Linux stuff work on the Mac? Yet that it's impossible to do the reverse? What about the Mac file formats? Even the iPod, a frickin MP3 player had to have some format reverse engineered (the index? don't remember). It's not like Apple deliberately throw up these roadblocks (though they have a history of abusing the legal system), it's just a natural consequence of lockin, which is what characterizes these kind of platforms.
[sigh]. I'm tired. Don't get me wrong, this isn't me criticizing OS X or even Apple specifically, not this time. I think it's great you're getting a journaled FS, more power to Apple and as a consequence you
But comments like the above just show that you haven't really experienced the pain of vendor lockin yet. Right now things are peachy. But in the future? What if the upgrade to 10.3 also costs $120? What will you do? Pay up I guess. Well, it's your choice, but at least understand that there are plenty of roadblocks in Mac land, it's just that they're one way only.