Only if you equate 'non-defective design' with 'design that allows you to transfer files by a simple drag and drop, to and from an arbitrary directory'.
OK - was a little scared when the presentation sharted with "computers are too hard" and realized none of these guys were programming when computers were much harder
If you're a programmer, chances are you don't think 'computers' are 'too hard' at all. However, not everyone's a programmer. Additionally, just because computers used to be much harder, it doesn't mean they're sufficiently easy to use now.
For what it's worth, I do think they're on to something. A ubiquitous command line with easily understandable commands (with names modelled after their actual tasks), which for an encore goes on to mold to your desires by letting you teach it commands... it'd be a hell of a thing to introduce to those who think computers are too hard.
I actually modded you insightful, and I still stand behind that and the general thrust of your post, but I have issues with two of these.
They never switched "from Firewire to USB2" on anything other than the iPod for cost and space reasons (cheaper to support one interface than both). Firewire is an IEEE standard - IEEE1394 to be precise. In addition to Apple actively using both Firewire and USB, Firewire as a published standard is just as "proprietary" as is USB.
PowerPC to Intel: The x86 architecture is just as proprietary as PowerPC is. They did move towards what's more common in the industry, but they did not "abandon proprietary technology".
They think they are "cool" and "hip," they don't care about the fact that they have to reset the permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes.
The reason I don't care about the "fact" that I have to "reset my permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes" is because I don't have to - your "fact" is not a fact. The only people I know of that have to ever mess with AppleTalk are those using Mac OS X as a server where there are many Mac OS 9 users. (The last time I tried resetting permissions for a disk as a diagnostic measure was about 16 months ago, but it's not something that needs doing frequently as any sort of maintenance. The AppleTalk point is just weird.)
This is about as relevant to the ordinary day-to-day Mac OS X user as complaining about 8+3 file names are to Windows Vista users. Mac OS X is far from perfect, but so's Vista.
Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
on
Lisp and Ruby
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree with part of your comment. Ruby is my Perl 6 until Perl 6 comes along. I'm okay with Perl's eclectic syntax and I know some other people aren't, but for now Ruby is one of the best Perl 5 alternatives.
The thing with Ruby this far is that it's still in its first major version by version number. There's not one bit of the Ruby design that I'd like to change dramatically, but there's a bunch of problems that arise from its current implementation. The one-pass compiling (which while surely easier to implement probably has performance and optimization implications down the road), non-concurrent thread policy and strings that default to the mythical "unspecified" encoding are some; things that all look to be set for correction in the upcoming Ruby 2.
Then there's the lack of thorough documentation, and the air emitted by rubygems as something tacked on instead of mostly integrated (like CPAN). I am hopeful that these things will resolve themselves in due time, but as you say, Ruby is already a language to be reckoned with.
Isn't it a possibility that the big labels dictated as part of their agreement that *all* music sold via the iTunes Store has to have DRM? Otherwise, wouldn't it be way easy for other songs from smaller labels that don't demand DRM to sail to the top of the lists because they're DRM-free? (An amicable scenario for us, but not for the big labels if you can believe that.)
I'm not saying Apple is free of guilt in this DRM mess, but if anyone were to insist on DRM being on the rest of the songs, I would far sooner bet on the major labels than Apple themselves.
"Why are free-desktop developers neglecting to consider an alternative to the penguin?"
Why does "they all run Linux" imply neglect, that "none of them ever considered the alternatives"? It seems to me that considering the alternatives is just the thing that brought the majority of the Linux users (and the Mac OS X users and the Solaris users and the *BSD users too, for that matter) to the platform where they are today.
Ironically, since this is a Linux-centric column, I think Steve Jobs summed this kind of thinking up best: "Some of our competitors say we're not offering people choice. We're offering them choice, they just don't like the choice our customers are making."
USB and Firewire have been a big boon to peripherals, you're right. Fast, reliable and with basically no need for separate drivers thanks to device classes.
I see your upgradable video and I raise you an easily accessible hard drive. Do you think more people need to upgrade their graphics or their hard drive?
Don't think Apple hasn't gotten their eye on this, though. Their market share is growing. If the growth turns out to be proportional to the rest of the PC industry (which admittedly it probably isn't), more and more people are demanding this. I do think that the product will eventually come into existance - or everyone will simply adapt to having an iMac. We know all-in-ones aren't the sacks of crap they used to be a few years ago.
I agree with you, but if the grandparent wants expansion slots I'm afraid he's right. There's some demand for an iMac with more expansion capabilities for those that don't need Xeon-level performance and has been for quite some time. I have to say I'm pining for this model less and less with the iMac getting more and more technically competent with what it's got, but it'd still be a worthwhile addition to the lineup.
I didn't originally come up with this (although I wish I did), but the US is probably the only country where there are people who believe the moon landing was fake and wrestling is real.
It is not a 'NSFW attribute'. It's also not a 'NSFW tag'. It's a new value: 'nsfw', to be put inside an attribute: 'rel', which is contained within the tag 'a'.
X: tag and contents A: opening tag, where attributes and tag name are specified B: closing tag 1: tag name 2: attribute name 3: attribute value 4: tag contents
This boils down to the following: "a href" is not a tag (and neither is "img src"); "a" is the tag, and "href" is the name of the commonly used attribute specified on the tag. In "rel='nsfw'", "rel" is the name of the attribute, and "nsfw" is the value of that attribute. It still disturbs me how even some self-appointed "HTML teachers" talk about "'a href' tags".
I wish MS [and other developers] spent more time copying the UI idea's of Apple, which generally have fewer of the more arcane options that people rarely if ever change from their default values. Focus on what people WILL use, not what they COULD use.
First: You're right. Fixing the interface is not innovative. But if this was a 20 Best Ideas list or 20 Best Things To Have Happened list, damn straight the Ribbon in Office 2007 would have placed on it, and that's a line I didn't think I'd write about this time last year.
Per the Office team's own research, most of the stuff people were asking to be able to do was already in Office. This means two things: that there's not a lot left to add - except for the way they keep hanging out at Standards station, neglecting the 10:30 to compatibilityville in favor of the semiannual Microsoft MysteryMeat Express (Enterprise Edition) - and that what's there is probably used by a lot of people. It's likely that no piece of actual office software is being used by more people than Word and Excel, and they can't just rip out features.
It's true that you probably don't use more than 20% of the features, but with everyone using a *different* 20% and with so many millions of people using it, you can imagine that there's a fairly good cover on features that are used. You can also imagine the flak they'd take for this. It is insanely hard to remove stuff and save face. I am not saying that "just pile it on" is a good development strategy or makes the best product for me personally (I totally agree with the paragraph I quoted), but what they currently do have is a pile. (Add "of shit" here if it makes you feel better.)
Normally I'd be with you regarding the interface: simpler is better. But the features that are in Office need to stay, and the interface sucks. The Ribbon has proven itself as a very good replacement for the mess that we used to have. It may not be *innovative* as such, but "Microsoft finally does *something* about the Office interface" is a good thing - bullet-on-cardboard-box-worthy, too - that will have a large positive impact, and for that, at least, they are worthy of recognition.
(And for what it's worth, Excel does have some real honest-to-goodness new features. Excel is probably the best, most focused and most interoperable app Microsoft puts out these days. Although I'm nowadays using Apple's bundled Mail app, I am also still a fan of Outlook's general reading interface layout (the look of the email pane), but I'm glad to get rid of most of the rest of that app, including the Options panels (with all those windows and buttons and hidden options it's like one of those Russian dolls), the winmail.dat bullshit or why not the way all those exploits can get in.)
That depends on exactly what kind of software. Writing good cross-platform GUI software for any two platforms is a pain in the ass, because no two GUIs are alike and you're going to end up compromising or alienating part of your base. Firefox is notably struggling here despite big efforts in connecting the dots to deep native technology on all fronts. Command line tools solely based on POSIX are way easy to compile for both Mac and Linux (and *BSD and other Unices) though.
I'm not saying that it is dirt cheap. However, I am saying that marketing the Windows version under Parallels or Boot Camp as a Mac version would be marketing suicide, and that tweaking the Windows version to cater to the Mac users would also be ill-advised. You and I know how ridiculous this is, but some people here seem to think that it's really a viable option. (I encourage them to try it, though, and let us see if the whole survival of the fittest thing still holds up.)
I agree with the general thrust of your argument though.
The Objective-C-to-Java bridge is being abandoned because it really didn't make things easier for Java developers and because it was a pain in the ass to write code with for everyone and to maintain for Apple. (However, RubyCocoa will ship with the next version of Mac OS X because it's a lesser pain in the ass on all accounts.)
You may know more people who have VPC or Parallels than not (I do too), but how sure are you that those people will be representative to the entire Mac market? To the market you want to aim your product at? (Unless it's "technologically competent user who has ever heard of Slashdot", fat chance.)
There's also psychology in it. At its core, the people that are now switching to Macs are not switching *because you can run Windows on it*. They are switching *because you can run Mac OS X on it*; the ability to run Windows on it just pushed them over the edge because Mac OS X doesn't have a 90%+ market share. If they were indifferent to what software they preferred, they'd be using a different brand of computers, and run Windows, not Mac OS X.
Most Mac users, even the ones propped up with VPC or Parallels (I plead guilty), ultimately want to run Mac-native software rather than Windows software. Parallels is life-support for existing software that people need to run, and even if it was free and shipped with all Macs and took up half the memory and disk space that it does today, it doesn't make Windows software into Mac software.
You don't need to think that Mac software is superior to Windows software to concede that Mac software has an advantage over Windows software running in a Mac simply because it gets access to all system APIs to things like address books and keychains and hardware support and preferences, and because it looks like everything else you run. Windows software just think it's running on an isolated box and won't become aware of the Mac OS X side of your computer unless you as a user go to some length and the software itself supports it, at which point the developer will already need to make way in their timeplan and budget for Mac-specific testing.
Still not convinced?
1. Mac market share is currently surging. More people, not fewer, will arrive at the Mac platform in the next few years, and building a dedicated version (and almost no well-designed application will need to be rewritten entirely from scratch) is becoming more and more economically feasible.
2. Would you want to bet your entire Mac user base on a competitor not releasing a native Mac version? Unless it's a turd, people will switch to that in a heartbeat. You will lose out months of sales as you rush a native product to market, or need to pull out of a market completely.
I'm not denying that these areas are largely synonymous with the Mac. I used that phrasing in the context that it is very much possible to use programs on other OSes to do those tasks, where previously (around 10 to 15 years ago) it was almost impossible to do so as the only tools capable enough tended to congregate on the Mac platform, or on really expensive workstations (you can insert a pricing joke here if you want). It's not that strict any more.
You're right that I misparsed your original comment - Another good reason is that today there is very little important Mac-only software. Most of it is in the form of multimedia applications which have direct equivalents or even superior replacements on the PC. - I somehow only paid attention to the second sentence (and I assure you I read your whole comment twice). For this I apologize. I am not out to find faults. If I simply wanted to distort other people's comments, rest assured I could have replied to many other comments.
I agree a lot more with the correctly parsed stanza above, but I'm still not agreeing completely. For one thing, even though "multimedia" by its very definition means nothing deeper than "two or more media in conjunction", what I think of when I hear "multimedia" are trashy 1998-era CD-based full screen more-or-less slideshows with a speaker voice. I suspect I'm not alone in this. There's another common conflict like this, that of what to read when someone says "PC". Does it mean "IBM PC-compatible" or does it mean "PC, short for personal computer" as a larger whole? It's up to the original writer to define it deeper, and it will certainly vary.
Secondly, you're right that the overbearing exclusivity is long gone. The days of "desktop publishing = Mac" and its cousin "A/V editing = Mac" have been over for quite some time, but I think it's an over-generalization to claim *as fact* (if the "the simple fact" modifier extended beyond the comma in the second-to-last sentence) that there are "no other major Mac-only applications". It all depends on how you define major and in which field of work, and hinges on you knowing every possible application in all fields of work if you mean "in general". It's too fuzzy to be able to apply with the finality you seem to want to lend it.
"Important" also seems very subjectively defined. If, as you say, one of the two most common purposes for using a Mac is "general home computing", there's a lot of applications that suddenly qualify as important - certainly a fair number of which are Mac-only.
There aren't as many Mac-only applications as there used to be, but this doesn't in any way block Mac-only applications from offering features only found on the Mac platform, just as there are Windows-only applications taking advantage of, say, Windows XP-only features. Unless you are willing to point to an empirical and universally accepted definition of "major application" and the field of work in which applications competing for this status would live, I'm not okay with you claiming it as fact, if that was what you were doing.
Let me note again that I'm okay with you holding these as your opinions. (Why wouldn't I be?) I'm taking issue, however, with conflating opinion with fact, like stating "there are no other major Mac-only applications", a statement that seems fairly ridiculous to someone who's been using Mac OS X for a number of years, like me.
Some of the Mac-only software is just software that's done really well. I'm typing this from inside NetNewsWire, for example, one of the first modern feed (RSS/Atom) readers, and still one of the very best. I use FeedDemon on Windows, and I've tried about 10 others, but it's not just the same. This pattern repeats itself quite a lot to a lesser degree. I won't attach any deeper thought or meaning into it, but sometimes Mac software that's Mac software only (and not a multi-platform product or outright port) tends to be really good software.
Of course, not everyone runs such software, and not everything on the platform is that good, but it's a critical error to claim that even "most" Mac software is "multimedia applications".
I'm in a University-level course now. There are tons of Macs in the hands of students - both laypeople and "artsy" people (package design and 3D courses) and technical people (programming courses); I'd say that *here*, Macs have anywhere between 40% and 60%. It's obviously different in other places, but at least in Sweden, they're still very much in the game because they've been really offensive with marketing student discounts (10% on hardware, 50% on software).
You're saying: you're going to buy a Mac to boot into Windows to play games - why not buy a Windows PC? The obvious answer, and the answer I'm getting from *everyone* is: I want to be able to run *both* Mac OS X and Windows. (A fair amount also include Linux or BSD distributions here.) Buying a Mac to *just* use Windows is nuts, but no one is doing that. Of course, it's also true that more and more games are coming out for OS X specifically, but it's still far from every game or even every good game (in that case, whither anything based on Steam?).
Steve Jobs is not the greatest guy on earth. The man's well-known to be a complete asshole in some situations. Where he's wrong, he usually stays wrong. That doesn't mean he hasn't gotten a lot right. Jobs isn't getting accolades because he is perfect and because he fired a bunch of people - he's getting accolades because when he came to Apple, they were six weeks from basically bankrupcy, and now they've been ringing up stock market high scores day after day, and during most of the time in-between, he's been CEO.
I have no mandate whatsoever to claim that the purge-like cuts were justified and fair to the employees. Apple's board of directors, the CEO and some other people (including Steve Jobs) planned the action, and their goal was to turn the company around for the good of everyone owning stock in AAPL, the way the law dictates that they must run the company. That's it. Presumably, it had nothing to do with the daily rule at Apple. It reeked of desparate measures for desperate times. Apple's in such a position today that they can probably afford to have a bunch of projects running that don't contribute a lot to the bottom line, and I'm not aware of any cuts like the big one ever since. (Which is not to say, again, that Steve Jobs is the god of management. But I wouldn't know anything about that.)
I should also say that you're right - if there are tons of projects around that do nothing to help the company forward, and that are leeching money when the company is already bleeding, it is a senior management issue, because they shouldn't have let the projects get to that state at all.
Apple had started at least four efforts to produce a new OS generation from 1990 to 1997. I'm told there were groups who had evangelists but not actually people coding the product. There was a lot of needless slack to get rid of when the company was circling the drain.
Getting out every employee to justify their position is ridiculous for many reasons (and for his next number, Mr Jobs will fit 3000 employees in a board room and interview them one by one), but getting out every *manager* to say exactly what Apple are gaining by keeping their project is a good reality check. This is exactly what managers are there for. If you have a manager, and he can't justify his project's place in the big company plan, why is he even going to work?
Cuts are never going to be pretty, but if you can at least save the bits of the company that are efficient and doing work that the company will need to prosper again, it's better than any other alternative. Note that Apple hasn't had a cut since.
Not that this is going to mar your healthy "jobs is such an a**hole" attitude.
What happened to respect towards one another? In the best classes I've seen, everyone worked together as a group to achieve a common goal. The worst classes I've seen is not the ones with a few asshole students, they're the ones with the self-assertive teacher who's can't slap inattentive students with a ruler anymore because of this newfangled human rights thing, and who is driven mad about it because it's the only way she can deal with the problem.
Teachers as a separate level of authority is circling the drain. Trying to become even more authorative and giving away even more homework to try to solve the problem just pushes struggling students over the edge - going from "I may not know this stuff cold, but I'm making an effort" to "fuck this and fuck the teacher".
I agree that it may not help that not every parent is perfect. But I don't believe in discipline or imposed authority. The fact remains that with good teachers, discipline isn't needed, because all of a sudden, class is engaging or in some cases at least not criminally boring. When class is engaging, people actually learn, and there's no need for watering down anything.
(This doesn't address what to do with the real assholes - the ones that won't ever get better, if you will. They can be both students and teachers, for that matter. But cracking down on everyone to prevent the few assholes never made anything better. If pointing this out makes me a "whining liberal idiot", so be it. )
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Only if you equate 'non-defective design' with 'design that allows you to transfer files by a simple drag and drop, to and from an arbitrary directory'.
If you're a programmer, chances are you don't think 'computers' are 'too hard' at all. However, not everyone's a programmer. Additionally, just because computers used to be much harder, it doesn't mean they're sufficiently easy to use now.
For what it's worth, I do think they're on to something. A ubiquitous command line with easily understandable commands (with names modelled after their actual tasks), which for an encore goes on to mold to your desires by letting you teach it commands... it'd be a hell of a thing to introduce to those who think computers are too hard.
I do think Jef Raskin would be proud of his son.
I actually modded you insightful, and I still stand behind that and the general thrust of your post, but I have issues with two of these.
They never switched "from Firewire to USB2" on anything other than the iPod for cost and space reasons (cheaper to support one interface than both). Firewire is an IEEE standard - IEEE1394 to be precise. In addition to Apple actively using both Firewire and USB, Firewire as a published standard is just as "proprietary" as is USB.
PowerPC to Intel: The x86 architecture is just as proprietary as PowerPC is. They did move towards what's more common in the industry, but they did not "abandon proprietary technology".
The reason I don't care about the "fact" that I have to "reset my permissions and turn on Appletalk every five minutes" is because I don't have to - your "fact" is not a fact. The only people I know of that have to ever mess with AppleTalk are those using Mac OS X as a server where there are many Mac OS 9 users. (The last time I tried resetting permissions for a disk as a diagnostic measure was about 16 months ago, but it's not something that needs doing frequently as any sort of maintenance. The AppleTalk point is just weird.)
This is about as relevant to the ordinary day-to-day Mac OS X user as complaining about 8+3 file names are to Windows Vista users. Mac OS X is far from perfect, but so's Vista.
I agree with part of your comment. Ruby is my Perl 6 until Perl 6 comes along. I'm okay with Perl's eclectic syntax and I know some other people aren't, but for now Ruby is one of the best Perl 5 alternatives.
The thing with Ruby this far is that it's still in its first major version by version number. There's not one bit of the Ruby design that I'd like to change dramatically, but there's a bunch of problems that arise from its current implementation. The one-pass compiling (which while surely easier to implement probably has performance and optimization implications down the road), non-concurrent thread policy and strings that default to the mythical "unspecified" encoding are some; things that all look to be set for correction in the upcoming Ruby 2.
Then there's the lack of thorough documentation, and the air emitted by rubygems as something tacked on instead of mostly integrated (like CPAN). I am hopeful that these things will resolve themselves in due time, but as you say, Ruby is already a language to be reckoned with.
Isn't it a possibility that the big labels dictated as part of their agreement that *all* music sold via the iTunes Store has to have DRM? Otherwise, wouldn't it be way easy for other songs from smaller labels that don't demand DRM to sail to the top of the lists because they're DRM-free? (An amicable scenario for us, but not for the big labels if you can believe that.)
I'm not saying Apple is free of guilt in this DRM mess, but if anyone were to insist on DRM being on the rest of the songs, I would far sooner bet on the major labels than Apple themselves.
"Why are free-desktop developers neglecting to consider an alternative to the penguin?"
Why does "they all run Linux" imply neglect, that "none of them ever considered the alternatives"? It seems to me that considering the alternatives is just the thing that brought the majority of the Linux users (and the Mac OS X users and the Solaris users and the *BSD users too, for that matter) to the platform where they are today.
Ironically, since this is a Linux-centric column, I think Steve Jobs summed this kind of thinking up best: "Some of our competitors say we're not offering people choice. We're offering them choice, they just don't like the choice our customers are making."
Yikes. Looks like fun with tin-foil.
USB and Firewire have been a big boon to peripherals, you're right. Fast, reliable and with basically no need for separate drivers thanks to device classes.
I see your upgradable video and I raise you an easily accessible hard drive. Do you think more people need to upgrade their graphics or their hard drive?
Exactly.
Don't think Apple hasn't gotten their eye on this, though. Their market share is growing. If the growth turns out to be proportional to the rest of the PC industry (which admittedly it probably isn't), more and more people are demanding this. I do think that the product will eventually come into existance - or everyone will simply adapt to having an iMac. We know all-in-ones aren't the sacks of crap they used to be a few years ago.
I agree with you, but if the grandparent wants expansion slots I'm afraid he's right. There's some demand for an iMac with more expansion capabilities for those that don't need Xeon-level performance and has been for quite some time. I have to say I'm pining for this model less and less with the iMac getting more and more technically competent with what it's got, but it'd still be a worthwhile addition to the lineup.
I didn't originally come up with this (although I wish I did), but the US is probably the only country where there are people who believe the moon landing was fake and wrestling is real.
It is not a 'NSFW attribute'. It's also not a 'NSFW tag'. It's a new value: 'nsfw', to be put inside an attribute: 'rel', which is contained within the tag 'a'.
Here's a little nomenclature update.
+- X -+
+- A -+ +B-+
<a href="..." rel="nsfw">...</a>
-| | | | | | |
-1 2 3 2 3 4 1
X: tag and contents
A: opening tag, where attributes and tag name are specified
B: closing tag
1: tag name
2: attribute name
3: attribute value
4: tag contents
This boils down to the following: "a href" is not a tag (and neither is "img src"); "a" is the tag, and "href" is the name of the commonly used attribute specified on the tag. In "rel='nsfw'", "rel" is the name of the attribute, and "nsfw" is the value of that attribute. It still disturbs me how even some self-appointed "HTML teachers" talk about "'a href' tags".
I wish MS [and other developers] spent more time copying the UI idea's of Apple, which generally have fewer of the more arcane options that people rarely if ever change from their default values. Focus on what people WILL use, not what they COULD use.
First: You're right. Fixing the interface is not innovative. But if this was a 20 Best Ideas list or 20 Best Things To Have Happened list, damn straight the Ribbon in Office 2007 would have placed on it, and that's a line I didn't think I'd write about this time last year.
Per the Office team's own research, most of the stuff people were asking to be able to do was already in Office. This means two things: that there's not a lot left to add - except for the way they keep hanging out at Standards station, neglecting the 10:30 to compatibilityville in favor of the semiannual Microsoft MysteryMeat Express (Enterprise Edition) - and that what's there is probably used by a lot of people. It's likely that no piece of actual office software is being used by more people than Word and Excel, and they can't just rip out features.
It's true that you probably don't use more than 20% of the features, but with everyone using a *different* 20% and with so many millions of people using it, you can imagine that there's a fairly good cover on features that are used. You can also imagine the flak they'd take for this. It is insanely hard to remove stuff and save face. I am not saying that "just pile it on" is a good development strategy or makes the best product for me personally (I totally agree with the paragraph I quoted), but what they currently do have is a pile. (Add "of shit" here if it makes you feel better.)
Normally I'd be with you regarding the interface: simpler is better. But the features that are in Office need to stay, and the interface sucks. The Ribbon has proven itself as a very good replacement for the mess that we used to have. It may not be *innovative* as such, but "Microsoft finally does *something* about the Office interface" is a good thing - bullet-on-cardboard-box-worthy, too - that will have a large positive impact, and for that, at least, they are worthy of recognition.
(And for what it's worth, Excel does have some real honest-to-goodness new features. Excel is probably the best, most focused and most interoperable app Microsoft puts out these days. Although I'm nowadays using Apple's bundled Mail app, I am also still a fan of Outlook's general reading interface layout (the look of the email pane), but I'm glad to get rid of most of the rest of that app, including the Options panels (with all those windows and buttons and hidden options it's like one of those Russian dolls), the winmail.dat bullshit or why not the way all those exploits can get in.)
Nectar! Nectar! I need to drink my weight in nectar!
That depends on exactly what kind of software. Writing good cross-platform GUI software for any two platforms is a pain in the ass, because no two GUIs are alike and you're going to end up compromising or alienating part of your base. Firefox is notably struggling here despite big efforts in connecting the dots to deep native technology on all fronts. Command line tools solely based on POSIX are way easy to compile for both Mac and Linux (and *BSD and other Unices) though.
I'm not saying that it is dirt cheap. However, I am saying that marketing the Windows version under Parallels or Boot Camp as a Mac version would be marketing suicide, and that tweaking the Windows version to cater to the Mac users would also be ill-advised. You and I know how ridiculous this is, but some people here seem to think that it's really a viable option. (I encourage them to try it, though, and let us see if the whole survival of the fittest thing still holds up.)
I agree with the general thrust of your argument though.
The Objective-C-to-Java bridge is being abandoned because it really didn't make things easier for Java developers and because it was a pain in the ass to write code with for everyone and to maintain for Apple. (However, RubyCocoa will ship with the next version of Mac OS X because it's a lesser pain in the ass on all accounts.)
You may know more people who have VPC or Parallels than not (I do too), but how sure are you that those people will be representative to the entire Mac market? To the market you want to aim your product at? (Unless it's "technologically competent user who has ever heard of Slashdot", fat chance.)
There's also psychology in it. At its core, the people that are now switching to Macs are not switching *because you can run Windows on it*. They are switching *because you can run Mac OS X on it*; the ability to run Windows on it just pushed them over the edge because Mac OS X doesn't have a 90%+ market share. If they were indifferent to what software they preferred, they'd be using a different brand of computers, and run Windows, not Mac OS X.
Most Mac users, even the ones propped up with VPC or Parallels (I plead guilty), ultimately want to run Mac-native software rather than Windows software. Parallels is life-support for existing software that people need to run, and even if it was free and shipped with all Macs and took up half the memory and disk space that it does today, it doesn't make Windows software into Mac software.
You don't need to think that Mac software is superior to Windows software to concede that Mac software has an advantage over Windows software running in a Mac simply because it gets access to all system APIs to things like address books and keychains and hardware support and preferences, and because it looks like everything else you run. Windows software just think it's running on an isolated box and won't become aware of the Mac OS X side of your computer unless you as a user go to some length and the software itself supports it, at which point the developer will already need to make way in their timeplan and budget for Mac-specific testing.
Still not convinced?
1. Mac market share is currently surging. More people, not fewer, will arrive at the Mac platform in the next few years, and building a dedicated version (and almost no well-designed application will need to be rewritten entirely from scratch) is becoming more and more economically feasible.
2. Would you want to bet your entire Mac user base on a competitor not releasing a native Mac version? Unless it's a turd, people will switch to that in a heartbeat. You will lose out months of sales as you rush a native product to market, or need to pull out of a market completely.
I'm not denying that these areas are largely synonymous with the Mac. I used that phrasing in the context that it is very much possible to use programs on other OSes to do those tasks, where previously (around 10 to 15 years ago) it was almost impossible to do so as the only tools capable enough tended to congregate on the Mac platform, or on really expensive workstations (you can insert a pricing joke here if you want). It's not that strict any more.
You're right that I misparsed your original comment - Another good reason is that today there is very little important Mac-only software. Most of it is in the form of multimedia applications which have direct equivalents or even superior replacements on the PC. - I somehow only paid attention to the second sentence (and I assure you I read your whole comment twice). For this I apologize. I am not out to find faults. If I simply wanted to distort other people's comments, rest assured I could have replied to many other comments.
I agree a lot more with the correctly parsed stanza above, but I'm still not agreeing completely. For one thing, even though "multimedia" by its very definition means nothing deeper than "two or more media in conjunction", what I think of when I hear "multimedia" are trashy 1998-era CD-based full screen more-or-less slideshows with a speaker voice. I suspect I'm not alone in this. There's another common conflict like this, that of what to read when someone says "PC". Does it mean "IBM PC-compatible" or does it mean "PC, short for personal computer" as a larger whole? It's up to the original writer to define it deeper, and it will certainly vary.
Secondly, you're right that the overbearing exclusivity is long gone. The days of "desktop publishing = Mac" and its cousin "A/V editing = Mac" have been over for quite some time, but I think it's an over-generalization to claim *as fact* (if the "the simple fact" modifier extended beyond the comma in the second-to-last sentence) that there are "no other major Mac-only applications". It all depends on how you define major and in which field of work, and hinges on you knowing every possible application in all fields of work if you mean "in general". It's too fuzzy to be able to apply with the finality you seem to want to lend it.
"Important" also seems very subjectively defined. If, as you say, one of the two most common purposes for using a Mac is "general home computing", there's a lot of applications that suddenly qualify as important - certainly a fair number of which are Mac-only.
There aren't as many Mac-only applications as there used to be, but this doesn't in any way block Mac-only applications from offering features only found on the Mac platform, just as there are Windows-only applications taking advantage of, say, Windows XP-only features. Unless you are willing to point to an empirical and universally accepted definition of "major application" and the field of work in which applications competing for this status would live, I'm not okay with you claiming it as fact, if that was what you were doing.
Let me note again that I'm okay with you holding these as your opinions. (Why wouldn't I be?) I'm taking issue, however, with conflating opinion with fact, like stating "there are no other major Mac-only applications", a statement that seems fairly ridiculous to someone who's been using Mac OS X for a number of years, like me.
Some of the Mac-only software is just software that's done really well. I'm typing this from inside NetNewsWire, for example, one of the first modern feed (RSS/Atom) readers, and still one of the very best. I use FeedDemon on Windows, and I've tried about 10 others, but it's not just the same. This pattern repeats itself quite a lot to a lesser degree. I won't attach any deeper thought or meaning into it, but sometimes Mac software that's Mac software only (and not a multi-platform product or outright port) tends to be really good software.
Of course, not everyone runs such software, and not everything on the platform is that good, but it's a critical error to claim that even "most" Mac software is "multimedia applications".
I'm in a University-level course now. There are tons of Macs in the hands of students - both laypeople and "artsy" people (package design and 3D courses) and technical people (programming courses); I'd say that *here*, Macs have anywhere between 40% and 60%. It's obviously different in other places, but at least in Sweden, they're still very much in the game because they've been really offensive with marketing student discounts (10% on hardware, 50% on software).
You're saying: you're going to buy a Mac to boot into Windows to play games - why not buy a Windows PC? The obvious answer, and the answer I'm getting from *everyone* is: I want to be able to run *both* Mac OS X and Windows. (A fair amount also include Linux or BSD distributions here.) Buying a Mac to *just* use Windows is nuts, but no one is doing that. Of course, it's also true that more and more games are coming out for OS X specifically, but it's still far from every game or even every good game (in that case, whither anything based on Steam?).
Steve Jobs is not the greatest guy on earth. The man's well-known to be a complete asshole in some situations. Where he's wrong, he usually stays wrong. That doesn't mean he hasn't gotten a lot right. Jobs isn't getting accolades because he is perfect and because he fired a bunch of people - he's getting accolades because when he came to Apple, they were six weeks from basically bankrupcy, and now they've been ringing up stock market high scores day after day, and during most of the time in-between, he's been CEO.
I have no mandate whatsoever to claim that the purge-like cuts were justified and fair to the employees. Apple's board of directors, the CEO and some other people (including Steve Jobs) planned the action, and their goal was to turn the company around for the good of everyone owning stock in AAPL, the way the law dictates that they must run the company. That's it. Presumably, it had nothing to do with the daily rule at Apple. It reeked of desparate measures for desperate times. Apple's in such a position today that they can probably afford to have a bunch of projects running that don't contribute a lot to the bottom line, and I'm not aware of any cuts like the big one ever since. (Which is not to say, again, that Steve Jobs is the god of management. But I wouldn't know anything about that.)
I should also say that you're right - if there are tons of projects around that do nothing to help the company forward, and that are leeching money when the company is already bleeding, it is a senior management issue, because they shouldn't have let the projects get to that state at all.
Apple had started at least four efforts to produce a new OS generation from 1990 to 1997. I'm told there were groups who had evangelists but not actually people coding the product. There was a lot of needless slack to get rid of when the company was circling the drain.
Getting out every employee to justify their position is ridiculous for many reasons (and for his next number, Mr Jobs will fit 3000 employees in a board room and interview them one by one), but getting out every *manager* to say exactly what Apple are gaining by keeping their project is a good reality check. This is exactly what managers are there for. If you have a manager, and he can't justify his project's place in the big company plan, why is he even going to work?
Cuts are never going to be pretty, but if you can at least save the bits of the company that are efficient and doing work that the company will need to prosper again, it's better than any other alternative. Note that Apple hasn't had a cut since.
Not that this is going to mar your healthy "jobs is such an a**hole" attitude.
Or the Simpsons version:
"You call that a knife? THIS is a knife!"
"That's not a knife, that's a spoon."
"Ah, I see you've played knifey-spooney before!"
"How about kids actually knowing their place"
What happened to respect towards one another? In the best classes I've seen, everyone worked together as a group to achieve a common goal. The worst classes I've seen is not the ones with a few asshole students, they're the ones with the self-assertive teacher who's can't slap inattentive students with a ruler anymore because of this newfangled human rights thing, and who is driven mad about it because it's the only way she can deal with the problem.
Teachers as a separate level of authority is circling the drain. Trying to become even more authorative and giving away even more homework to try to solve the problem just pushes struggling students over the edge - going from "I may not know this stuff cold, but I'm making an effort" to "fuck this and fuck the teacher".
I agree that it may not help that not every parent is perfect. But I don't believe in discipline or imposed authority. The fact remains that with good teachers, discipline isn't needed, because all of a sudden, class is engaging or in some cases at least not criminally boring. When class is engaging, people actually learn, and there's no need for watering down anything.
(This doesn't address what to do with the real assholes - the ones that won't ever get better, if you will. They can be both students and teachers, for that matter. But cracking down on everyone to prevent the few assholes never made anything better. If pointing this out makes me a "whining liberal idiot", so be it. )