i agree completely. it was a big risk when i took the plung to buy my powerbook. i basically sold my old laptop and had to spend and extra 900 to get the powerbook. however the switch was so worth it in my opinion, that i would have given $2000 easily if i had the opportunity again. the best thing you can do if you're interested in the mac platform but can't afford the hardware is to buy a used mac on ebay, a nice old 333 that can run jaguar or something, and just play with it! it's not that much and you get most of the latest software available to you.
I'm in that boat. I got a WWDC scholarship to go to Apple's developer conference, and my application was basically "UNIX UNIX UNIX". I think they see this as a major new market: We can't get all the Windows users to switch, why not take a stab at the already-busy niche market? If you took a look in the OS 9 days just about everything popular that was a hobby OS is a close UNIX or direct UNIX deritivative. BeOS, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. If all these hobbiests are willing to do it for free and fun, why not take advantage of that and make it even better?
I just started my mac os x programming. I wrote a lengthy objective-c tutorial to get familiar with the language, and I'm going to write similar tutorials for AppKit and AppleScript. (I like to write tutorials as part of my learning. Helps me and others at the same time I think). It's a great language and environment based on what i know so far. Much much nicer than C++ coding.
Yes. it's ONLY TAKEN THEM 4 YEARS TO RELEASE AN EXTREMELY SIMPLE PATCH. *collective head banging of thousands of web developers across the world hitting their desks in frustration for this bug that has been overlooked for so damn long just to stifle the growth of png on the web thanks to the monopolistic microsoft*. ok. i'm done now.
that's all great, but i still wouldn't hire you as a interface designer. it's a whole lot easier to criticize than it is to actually do isn't it? how about you try putting together an environment as complex as kde and gnome without any basis for past environments. kde is in almost every way possible a complete rip off of windows. konqueror just continues that poor tradition.
apple is not the end-all of UI design, but they are better than the kde and microsoft teams. put a user who's never used a computer infront of plastic, aqua, and windows xp and i guarantee every response will say aqua looks the best. i don't care if YOU hate it, i care about the majority. and i'm sorry mr. the-world-revolves-around-me but you aren't the majority of users. why don't you have any perspective? objectivity? are these things just simply beyond your zealotry thinking? you hate the dock, yet you don't offer any implementations that are better. you hate aqua, but you don't show me an interface that is cleaner/more complete/easier to use. you bitch about all this and yet never once do you tell me what OSS can do to change it. shut up. you're just ranting and i'm tired of wasting my time with you.
less intuitive? i stopped reading there. you've obviously never used gnome or kde. or perhaps your idea of intuitive is blackbox. with mac things just work. with windows, they sometimes work. in linux, open the console. because once something stops working, nothing short of that will fix it most of the time. and let me tell you, once it dives into the realm of the console you've just cut off the intuitiveness boundary of 99% of computer users.
constantly gets in your way? so every time i boot windows and it asks me about 15 times "do you want to take a tour, do you want to make a.net account" etc etc you consider this worse? mac's a hell a lof further off than windows. so i suppose buying a hodge podge of hardware and getting a system that barely works (or maybe it does because you had to hand pick the individual hardware components for you linux system one by one to make sure everything was compatible) is better?
It felt like "just what *we* think you need, and nothing more".
what far too many of you "power users" take for granted is just how much usability engineering goes into the average *easy* to use desktop application. apple does so much more usability testing, and has so many more qualified usability professionals on its staff, compared to most OSS projects that it often only takes apple a mere fraction of the time to make a closed source app 10 times as usable as the free equivalent. take a look at ichat, mail, ical, and safari. then compare them to apps like gaim, kopete, evolution, kmail, epiphany, and konqueror (shudder). it's not that apple only picks the features they think you need, it's that based on market surveys and usability testing they've determined that the vast majority of users prefer features X through Z and expect them to be in certain places.
if you "were" seriously considering an apple, you should still. not only do you get all this wonderful unusable unix software, but you get a few usable gems like apple's ilife and commercial software like photoshop and even a few games (more than linux) that are official supported. jeez, you people have no perspective sometimes.
you should try gnome, it leans a lot more towards your needs and wants in a desktop environment for *nix. i've often said that kde's biggest problem is it does too much. it includes all the 50 features you'll never need and hides the 1 feature you want in the corner.. where as apple tends to put the 10 features most people need and 5 hidden in the back for the rare occasions. information overload is a problem too few developers don't consider. i really don't want a single program to open pdfs, text documents, html files, bookmarks, tabs, frames, more. once a program starts to do too much, it does everything poorly.
welcome to the real world. people make proprietary software and sell it. despite what you think, a lot of this proprietary software is further along than OSS alternatives.
where's my streaming ogg video, TODAY? nowhere to be seen. no one supports it, no one even considers it. however companies do consider and support wmv, rm, and mov today, not tomorrow.
flash does not work on ppc linux. macromedia has specifically not released a build for it. SVG, much like ogg, is NOT THERE YET. i don't see Macromedia SVG Studio MX 2004 anywhere in sight. there's nothing that comes close to flash content creation applications. despite all that, SVG is in the same boat as ogg. it's great, but no one supports it yet. (except for maybe konqueror).
gimp is great, i even have 2.0 installed on my powerbook. but it's not a professional quality printing and graphics production application. this debate comes up everytime someone criticizes the OSS world and mentions photoshop.
linux does not run windows applications on ppc hardware ya know. WINE == wine is not an emulator. darwine is showing far more progress than anything in the linux-ppc world for ppc/x86/windows emulation. so expect mac os x to have the ability to just "double click" an exe file and run it integrated into the aqua environment far before the linux folks get this priveledge.
so you have working flash in mozilla right? and photoshop without mac-on-linux? what about shadows, transparency, and vector scaling all real time? can you stream wmv, rm, and mov all from your web browser flawlessly? do you have video/voice conferencing in gaim? i NEVER understood the "linux on powerbook" zealots. for god sakes. install X11.app, X11 sdk, xcode, and darwinports/fink and you practically have the entire *nix environmen give or take a little ALONG with all the wonderful commercial software for os x.
libraries can be written. there are online books and good documentation projects. the code speed can be improved with a better interpreter or compiler. i'd hope it has unicode support, considering the creator is japanease and ruby is mainly used in japan. a language's popularity is no sign of it's quality. python is a poor language, unlike ruby, but highly supported much like perl. however similar to perl, python has too much cruft.
Or try an even better language that's similar to python, but with more features, similar but non-anal (tabs required) syntax, and you won't see __'s everywhere.
cd/my/mail/dir du -h --max-depth=1 108M./tristan 20K./spam 109M.
that's only after a year or so of actually having my email address. in the long run, i am one of those users who never deletes their email because they like to keep a log of their conversations. with a service like this, i could easily go many many years without worrying about running out of space. contrast this to my yahoo account which fills up to 100% just from SPAM within a couple weeks.
I hope apple does to grid computing what they did to local subnet computing. Rendezvous is an awesome technology for finding people nearby, or doing any simple/quick home networking.
gtk apps do not blend well in kde (even with a themeing system like bluecurve) so that means that gimp doesn't fit in with kde. it doesn't matter that you THINK it isn't a gnome app. it is however a gtk app. and gtk apps simply fit in better in a gtk based desktop.
i tried kopete once. it's unstable as hell. it went unfixed in gentoo's portage for about the 6-7 months i tried to use kde (and eventually switched back to gnome in frustration). it is not the same caliber of a program. and last i saw, kopete didn't run in windows too.
rhythmbox. juk sucks. plain and simple. it will be months before it catches up with the completeness of rhythmbox.
galeon. like it or love it, mozilla is a better rendering engine than khtml. hell i even use safari on my mac, at this moment, and i still think mozilla is a better engine even though i USE khtml most of the time. and on top of this, last i checked there wasn't a windows port of a khtml based browser.
konquerer beats nautilus in some aspects, and nautilus beats konq in others. i would not argue at all that KIOSlaves rock, because they do. it's one of the glaringly obvious examples in which kde based apps rock gnome apps. however, despite all that, konq is an absolute usability NIGHTMARE. and i thought windows explorer was a file browser gone wrong! then kde brought it to a whole new level of bloat-ware. i'm glad there are still sane software developers in this world who recognize not everyone needs 100 features in a file browser simply to browse files, open files, move and manipulate files. the worst part about konquerer is that once you add a feature, it's almost impossible to remove it. don't expect a cleaned up (usable) version of konq to appear until kde 4.0 if you're lucky. and while you may stop and say "but i can't live without feature x, y, and z that isn't in nautilus!" there are about 10 other people for you who would reply "i don't even know what features x, y, and z even do. i just want features a b and c." and those 3 "simple" a, b, and c features are the ones people use 10 times more than the obscure ones.
have you been living under a rock? gtk has bindings for a TON of languages including c++. and unlike qt, it's 1) 100% open no matter WHERE or HOW you develop (including applications you charge for) 2) has C bindings. nuff said. 3) c++ bindings don't depend on some retarded pre-compiler macro (thanks moc!). being C based also makes it a lot easier to port to other language apis like ruby/perl/python, and a lot easier to port to other platforms. the qt port for windows is still stagnent on qt2 last i heard, while the gtk2 port for windows seems to be doing quite well as is evident by gimp2 and gaim.
It's pretty amazing how polar opposite many slashdotter's views about Apple have changed since the release of OS X. The science and *nix community has really embraced this newcommer to the *nix world.
Who else here used to hate macs until OS X, and now uses it as their primary machine? I'm sure I'm not alone.
The way these thing work is pretty cool. You basically have to thin sheets like a sandwitch, and in the middle are tiny little balls that make up the pixels. Each ball contains smaller magnetic material that can cause the ball to display either black or white (depending on which orientation the magnetif field is). Multiply that single ball times a several thousand and you have a very simple low power display device. Most of the other solutions for eInk are the same, and i believe this version was made by MIT.
I actually talked with some of the Sun reps at LinuxWorld this year, and they said the reason the named it Java DS is because they did a market survey, and more people had heard of Java than Sun. Pretty sad huh?
What i find remarkable is that in light of the fact that the desktop system has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with java, and the fact that the people in their customer base who would actually hear of such a product and really care all think naming a desktop system after a language is completely retarded, they go and name it Java DS anyways. They need to rethink their market.
I'm surprised no one suggested this, but i figured i would. Since many in the OSS crowd are anti RIAA, why don't we try integrating these indie music stores into apps like Rhythmbox and Juk like iTunes? I'm sure the indie companies would be more than willing for such an effort, and I think it would go a long way towards showing the general public that it's possible to accomplish such a feat without the RIAA and DRM.
i think you're missing the point. if doing this DID destroy the company, it's evident they didn't have any real value or service to provide that the users wanted. afterall, if windows media player is really that good people would just go ahead and leave it installed. likewise, if IE was really so great a lot of us wouldn't be clammoring to use firefox or mozilla as a replacement.
their competition, apple seems to be doing just fine offering a proprietary windowing system on top of a an open subsystem and free libraries/standards (think khtml for safari and xml for config files). it goes to show that one CAN be profitable with such a system.
because in with blocks, it's standard. perl requires a special syntax structure (foreach) just to do hashes. JUST for hashes. whereas ruby's is standard, and can be used for much more than arrays, and hashes. it's also used for threads, such as this:
thread = Thread.new do executeThreadCodeHere end
the code in that block makes a new thread. the do... end code is a "block" (think of it as a dynamically created function) that's passed as a parameter to the thread constructor. that's not special syntax, this is part of the language's feature set. do you understand now?
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i agree completely. it was a big risk when i took the plung to buy my powerbook. i basically sold my old laptop and had to spend and extra 900 to get the powerbook. however the switch was so worth it in my opinion, that i would have given $2000 easily if i had the opportunity again. the best thing you can do if you're interested in the mac platform but can't afford the hardware is to buy a used mac on ebay, a nice old 333 that can run jaguar or something, and just play with it! it's not that much and you get most of the latest software available to you.
I'm in that boat. I got a WWDC scholarship to go to Apple's developer conference, and my application was basically "UNIX UNIX UNIX". I think they see this as a major new market: We can't get all the Windows users to switch, why not take a stab at the already-busy niche market? If you took a look in the OS 9 days just about everything popular that was a hobby OS is a close UNIX or direct UNIX deritivative. BeOS, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. If all these hobbiests are willing to do it for free and fun, why not take advantage of that and make it even better?
I just started my mac os x programming. I wrote a lengthy objective-c tutorial to get familiar with the language, and I'm going to write similar tutorials for AppKit and AppleScript. (I like to write tutorials as part of my learning. Helps me and others at the same time I think). It's a great language and environment based on what i know so far. Much much nicer than C++ coding.
Yes. it's ONLY TAKEN THEM 4 YEARS TO RELEASE AN EXTREMELY SIMPLE PATCH. *collective head banging of thousands of web developers across the world hitting their desks in frustration for this bug that has been overlooked for so damn long just to stifle the growth of png on the web thanks to the monopolistic microsoft*. ok. i'm done now.
that's all great, but i still wouldn't hire you as a interface designer. it's a whole lot easier to criticize than it is to actually do isn't it? how about you try putting together an environment as complex as kde and gnome without any basis for past environments. kde is in almost every way possible a complete rip off of windows. konqueror just continues that poor tradition.
apple is not the end-all of UI design, but they are better than the kde and microsoft teams. put a user who's never used a computer infront of plastic, aqua, and windows xp and i guarantee every response will say aqua looks the best. i don't care if YOU hate it, i care about the majority. and i'm sorry mr. the-world-revolves-around-me but you aren't the majority of users. why don't you have any perspective? objectivity? are these things just simply beyond your zealotry thinking? you hate the dock, yet you don't offer any implementations that are better. you hate aqua, but you don't show me an interface that is cleaner/more complete/easier to use. you bitch about all this and yet never once do you tell me what OSS can do to change it. shut up. you're just ranting and i'm tired of wasting my time with you.
less intuitive? i stopped reading there. you've obviously never used gnome or kde. or perhaps your idea of intuitive is blackbox. with mac things just work. with windows, they sometimes work. in linux, open the console. because once something stops working, nothing short of that will fix it most of the time. and let me tell you, once it dives into the realm of the console you've just cut off the intuitiveness boundary of 99% of computer users.
.net account" etc etc you consider this worse? mac's a hell a lof further off than windows. so i suppose buying a hodge podge of hardware and getting a system that barely works (or maybe it does because you had to hand pick the individual hardware components for you linux system one by one to make sure everything was compatible) is better?
constantly gets in your way? so every time i boot windows and it asks me about 15 times "do you want to take a tour, do you want to make a
It felt like "just what *we* think you need, and nothing more".
what far too many of you "power users" take for granted is just how much usability engineering goes into the average *easy* to use desktop application. apple does so much more usability testing, and has so many more qualified usability professionals on its staff, compared to most OSS projects that it often only takes apple a mere fraction of the time to make a closed source app 10 times as usable as the free equivalent. take a look at ichat, mail, ical, and safari. then compare them to apps like gaim, kopete, evolution, kmail, epiphany, and konqueror (shudder). it's not that apple only picks the features they think you need, it's that based on market surveys and usability testing they've determined that the vast majority of users prefer features X through Z and expect them to be in certain places.
if you "were" seriously considering an apple, you should still. not only do you get all this wonderful unusable unix software, but you get a few usable gems like apple's ilife and commercial software like photoshop and even a few games (more than linux) that are official supported. jeez, you people have no perspective sometimes.
you should try gnome, it leans a lot more towards your needs and wants in a desktop environment for *nix. i've often said that kde's biggest problem is it does too much. it includes all the 50 features you'll never need and hides the 1 feature you want in the corner.. where as apple tends to put the 10 features most people need and 5 hidden in the back for the rare occasions. information overload is a problem too few developers don't consider. i really don't want a single program to open pdfs, text documents, html files, bookmarks, tabs, frames, more. once a program starts to do too much, it does everything poorly.
welcome to the real world. people make proprietary software and sell it. despite what you think, a lot of this proprietary software is further along than OSS alternatives.
where's my streaming ogg video, TODAY? nowhere to be seen. no one supports it, no one even considers it. however companies do consider and support wmv, rm, and mov today, not tomorrow.
flash does not work on ppc linux. macromedia has specifically not released a build for it. SVG, much like ogg, is NOT THERE YET. i don't see Macromedia SVG Studio MX 2004 anywhere in sight. there's nothing that comes close to flash content creation applications. despite all that, SVG is in the same boat as ogg. it's great, but no one supports it yet. (except for maybe konqueror).
gimp is great, i even have 2.0 installed on my powerbook. but it's not a professional quality printing and graphics production application. this debate comes up everytime someone criticizes the OSS world and mentions photoshop.
linux does not run windows applications on ppc hardware ya know. WINE == wine is not an emulator. darwine is showing far more progress than anything in the linux-ppc world for ppc/x86/windows emulation. so expect mac os x to have the ability to just "double click" an exe file and run it integrated into the aqua environment far before the linux folks get this priveledge.
so you have working flash in mozilla right? and photoshop without mac-on-linux? what about shadows, transparency, and vector scaling all real time? can you stream wmv, rm, and mov all from your web browser flawlessly? do you have video/voice conferencing in gaim? i NEVER understood the "linux on powerbook" zealots. for god sakes. install X11.app, X11 sdk, xcode, and darwinports/fink and you practically have the entire *nix environmen give or take a little ALONG with all the wonderful commercial software for os x.
libraries can be written. there are online books and good documentation projects. the code speed can be improved with a better interpreter or compiler. i'd hope it has unicode support, considering the creator is japanease and ruby is mainly used in japan. a language's popularity is no sign of it's quality. python is a poor language, unlike ruby, but highly supported much like perl. however similar to perl, python has too much cruft.
Or try an even better language that's similar to python, but with more features, similar but non-anal (tabs required) syntax, and you won't see __'s everywhere.
that's only after a year or so of actually having my email address. in the long run, i am one of those users who never deletes their email because they like to keep a log of their conversations. with a service like this, i could easily go many many years without worrying about running out of space. contrast this to my yahoo account which fills up to 100% just from SPAM within a couple weeks.
I hope apple does to grid computing what they did to local subnet computing. Rendezvous is an awesome technology for finding people nearby, or doing any simple/quick home networking.
you act like ANY OTHER computer manufacturer is different. pull your head out of your ass.
gtk apps do not blend well in kde (even with a themeing system like bluecurve) so that means that gimp doesn't fit in with kde. it doesn't matter that you THINK it isn't a gnome app. it is however a gtk app. and gtk apps simply fit in better in a gtk based desktop.
i tried kopete once. it's unstable as hell. it went unfixed in gentoo's portage for about the 6-7 months i tried to use kde (and eventually switched back to gnome in frustration). it is not the same caliber of a program. and last i saw, kopete didn't run in windows too.
rhythmbox. juk sucks. plain and simple. it will be months before it catches up with the completeness of rhythmbox.
galeon. like it or love it, mozilla is a better rendering engine than khtml. hell i even use safari on my mac, at this moment, and i still think mozilla is a better engine even though i USE khtml most of the time. and on top of this, last i checked there wasn't a windows port of a khtml based browser.
konquerer beats nautilus in some aspects, and nautilus beats konq in others. i would not argue at all that KIOSlaves rock, because they do. it's one of the glaringly obvious examples in which kde based apps rock gnome apps. however, despite all that, konq is an absolute usability NIGHTMARE. and i thought windows explorer was a file browser gone wrong! then kde brought it to a whole new level of bloat-ware. i'm glad there are still sane software developers in this world who recognize not everyone needs 100 features in a file browser simply to browse files, open files, move and manipulate files. the worst part about konquerer is that once you add a feature, it's almost impossible to remove it. don't expect a cleaned up (usable) version of konq to appear until kde 4.0 if you're lucky. and while you may stop and say "but i can't live without feature x, y, and z that isn't in nautilus!" there are about 10 other people for you who would reply "i don't even know what features x, y, and z even do. i just want features a b and c." and those 3 "simple" a, b, and c features are the ones people use 10 times more than the obscure ones.
have you been living under a rock? gtk has bindings for a TON of languages including c++. and unlike qt, it's 1) 100% open no matter WHERE or HOW you develop (including applications you charge for) 2) has C bindings. nuff said. 3) c++ bindings don't depend on some retarded pre-compiler macro (thanks moc!). being C based also makes it a lot easier to port to other language apis like ruby/perl/python, and a lot easier to port to other platforms. the qt port for windows is still stagnent on qt2 last i heard, while the gtk2 port for windows seems to be doing quite well as is evident by gimp2 and gaim.
I'm surprised redhat has stuck with gnome this long as their DE of choice. It is more usable, and that's why I am glad personally they have.
With so many of the gtk programs riviling the qt equivalents, I wonder why companies always flock towards Qt.
It's pretty amazing how polar opposite many slashdotter's views about Apple have changed since the release of OS X. The science and *nix community has really embraced this newcommer to the *nix world.
Who else here used to hate macs until OS X, and now uses it as their primary machine? I'm sure I'm not alone.
The way these thing work is pretty cool. You basically have to thin sheets like a sandwitch, and in the middle are tiny little balls that make up the pixels. Each ball contains smaller magnetic material that can cause the ball to display either black or white (depending on which orientation the magnetif field is). Multiply that single ball times a several thousand and you have a very simple low power display device. Most of the other solutions for eInk are the same, and i believe this version was made by MIT.
I actually talked with some of the Sun reps at LinuxWorld this year, and they said the reason the named it Java DS is because they did a market survey, and more people had heard of Java than Sun. Pretty sad huh?
What i find remarkable is that in light of the fact that the desktop system has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with java, and the fact that the people in their customer base who would actually hear of such a product and really care all think naming a desktop system after a language is completely retarded, they go and name it Java DS anyways. They need to rethink their market.
considering that today's macpoll shows that 95% of them use google anyways, and that if you really wanted you could change it does this matter?
I'm surprised no one suggested this, but i figured i would. Since many in the OSS crowd are anti RIAA, why don't we try integrating these indie music stores into apps like Rhythmbox and Juk like iTunes? I'm sure the indie companies would be more than willing for such an effort, and I think it would go a long way towards showing the general public that it's possible to accomplish such a feat without the RIAA and DRM.
i think you're missing the point. if doing this DID destroy the company, it's evident they didn't have any real value or service to provide that the users wanted. afterall, if windows media player is really that good people would just go ahead and leave it installed. likewise, if IE was really so great a lot of us wouldn't be clammoring to use firefox or mozilla as a replacement.
their competition, apple seems to be doing just fine offering a proprietary windowing system on top of a an open subsystem and free libraries/standards (think khtml for safari and xml for config files). it goes to show that one CAN be profitable with such a system.
amen.
I remember speaking to one of the developers in the IRC channel specifically about this. Their response was "write a gnome-vfs module for it."
Granted they had a point, but that isn't as seamless as a solution if you ask me. It's about time gnome had a good ipod solution.
tell that to apple, who removed the floppy in 1998 from their machines. floppies have long since been obsolete by usb pen drives and cd-rs.
the code in that block makes a new thread. the do