I was responding to the claim that Automator was an efficient replacement for bash programming; it is not. That's why these kinds of environments haven't caught on with experts.
And while bash may be a little too obscure for your mother, non-experts generally don't have any more trouble learning well-designed scripting languages than graphical environments.
And the reason there's zero demand for it is because Java applications that are ported to the Mac have so far been done very sloppily, resulting in a bad user experience all around.
Oh, what fun. On the one hand, we have vociferous Java WORA advocates, who claim that no platform adaptation is needed, and on the other hand, we have vociferous Mac advocates, who complain if applications don't look exactly the way they are used to. Please, do let the fun begin and slug it out.
What's particularly fun about this is that Java hackers are probably some of Apple's most loyal customers, and that Apple desparately needs a successor to Objective-C and all they got is Java. This will be interesting to watch.
OS X is also important to pay homage to the UNIX core and X-windows interfaces from NeXt that went into the new-from-the-ground-up OS
It's amazing how many things you got wrong in a single sentence:
NeXT did not ship an "X-windows" interface. Quite to the contrary, Apple does not want you to use "X-windows", they want you to use Apple's native, proprietary window system derived from NeXT.
OS X uses the Mach kernel, not a UNIX kernel. OS X has some BSD UNIX code in it to make it behave like a UNIX system.
There is little "new-from-the-ground-up" about OS X; the kernel is largely the Mach kernel, the compiler is largely gcc, the language is Objective-C, and the GUI toolkit is largely NeXT's, all software from the mid-1980's.
The "X" in "OS X" actually doesn't pay homage to the X Window System. I don't know whether Apple marketing just didn't know better or didn't give a damn, but I consider Apple's use of the name "OS X" rather disrespectful.
Automator has to be one of the coolest things I've seen in a gui.. ever.
Well, I'm sorry you have been so deprived; graphical programming and scripting environments like that have been around for a long time, in endless variations.
It looks like Apple has finally found an elegant way to make a GUI accomplish tasks like these faster than I could at a bash prompt.
Theres not even icc profiling available, which is an absolute must have.
Sure there is ICC profiling, either outside the Gimp or as a plug-in. However, few people seem to use it or want it.
No adjustment layers makes it laughable as a professional editting tool.
Photoshop didn't use to have those either, yet plenty of professionals, even of your ilk, used to use it.
To say that 99% of professionals could use gimp and not lose anything compared to photoshop is just ridiculous. Why would you even suggest that.
You lose lots of functionality, it just happens to be functionality most people who work with images for a living don't actually need. (Note that most people who work with images for a living are neither photographers nor graphic designers nor prepress professionals.)
You obviously don't work with images professionally.
You obviously share the uninformed arrogance so common to many photographers and designers. I'm neither a photographer nor a designer, but I work with images professionally and almost certainly know a lot more about color than you do. I have never needed more color management than I get on Linux. If enough of the Gimp user community needs color management, it will be added, hopefully in a better way than in Photoshop.
Isn't it about time we dropped the pretence and simply supported those companies that actually innovate and deliver?
Adobe did not invent photo editing, nor did they invent most of the features in Photoshop. They were simply the first company to ship this kind of software for popular PC platforms.
That is why it is particularly annoying that Adobe has such a lock on this market. If you think it is time that we dropped the "pretence" and we "supported those companies that actually innovate", then you should not support Adobe. Adobe did not invent most of what they are making big bucks with.
I generally have a more relaxed attitude than yours: let Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and all those other companies clone to their heart's content. But I draw the line when people like you claim that those companies invented it all; they did not--they mostly just package other people's technologies.
Nobody is even pretending that there is a real alternative to Photoshop any more
For 99% of people working with images professionally, the Gimp does everything they need. One reason to see that is that the Gimp has already more functionality than professional versions of Photoshop of only a few years ago already.
So yeah, people are going to whine that it doesn't act like photoshop*. Their brains are trained for photoshop just the way your brain is trained for vim in the above example
Actually, my brain is trained for Gimp; I like the interface the way it is. If it gets changed to act like Photoshop, that's an overall minus for me.
So, why should the Gimp interface be changed to be more like the interface a bunch of graphic designers are used to? Do most of those graphic designers who keep whining about the Gimp make contributions to open source?
Interface is half the battle, but it isn't the entire battle and it definitely isn't the war.
If the war is to get current graphic designers and OS X users to use free software, I think it's a war not worth fighting.
Yes, please do that; I can't imagine any advantage anybody else would have from you using Gimp on OS X. In addition, please stop complaining that other people aren't porting software to your favorite proprietary platform and window system for free and in exactly the way you personally prefer it.
Lets designers pick their own software, we know what we need and how to use it, and more importantly, WHY we need it.
Yes. Trouble only arises when you try to tell other people what they should do. For my uses of the Gimp, Pantone, color management, and CMYK are somewhere between useless and a nuisance. Designers and photographers are not the only professional users of images.
There are excellent command line tools for color management on Linux. If you like, you can script those into the Gimp so that they are invoked at load/save time and for color space transformations. Maybe such scripts should become part of the Gimp standard distribution so that the whining stops.
However, beyond that, I think any closer association between the Gimp and color management is not necessarily a good idea. Maybe you like the feature, to me it would be a nuisance.
16bpp is nice, but for most of its life, Photoshop didn't support 16bpp either, and yet professionals were using it widely.
it doesn't support "Crop and Rotate" the way Photoshop does (very convenient trick to implement both in a single keystroke)
You can implement features like that in a couple of lines of scripting. Or you can just turn on "dynamic menu shortcuts" and pick more convenient shortcuts.
That's my point. Complaining that Apple hasn't miraculously made HP's and Epson's printers... in addition to their own hardware and software... "just work" is, well, churlish.
The problem with CUPS is that it doesn't handle inevitable hardware problems gracefully. Another problem is that it gets into weird states all by itself. And on the Macintosh, yet another problem is that the local user interface Apple has written for CUPS sucks even more badly than the CUPS web interface, resulting in lots of usability problems. Those are Apple's problems, not anybody else's.
And yet my son mails me his homework to print from my Mac instead of his Windows box, because CUPS actually works and Windows printing doesn't.
Printing is a hard problem in general and printer spooler software has serious problems on all platforms. My point is that Apple didn't solve this problem--they have the same problems with printing as Windows and Linux. Consider yourself lucky that your CUPS works while your Windows printer doesn't work. I have been in the reverse situation.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, because I don't see that happening.
In fact, the problem with "shape-shifting robots" has not been a lack of imagination on the part of roboticists (going back at least to the 1970's) or the lack of control software, but a lack of tiny actuators, low-power processing, and batteries.
Sorry, fighting with my OS and recompiling my kernel stopped being interesting about ten years ago. Someday you'll get there. Someday.
Debian packages up a huge number of applications and kernels precompiled. That's one of its big advantages: with Debian, you need to manually compile software less than with any other distro.
And, yes, someday you'll get it. But until then, you will probably continue trolling and spewing uninformed nonsense.
I think you fundamentally mischaracterize Debian when you look at it as some kind of bleeding edge system for hackers and nerds.
Debian and its package management system is still the easiest way of keeping a software installation up to date, for anybody, hacker or not. SuSE and RedHat are trying, but they aren't as good or easy to use yet.
And Windows and Macintosh aren't even trying to do anything comparable--software installation and maintenance on those platforms is in complete shambles compared to Linux.
The longer Debian goes without a real release, the less and less people are going to care about it.
You sound like you are thinking about Debian like RedHat or Suse. But Debian works differently. A "real release" of Debian doesn't matter--people just get core Debian onto their computers in some way (live CDs like Ubuntu and Knoppix are particularly popular), and then upgrade to whatever level they feel comfortable with (stable+security, testing+security, unstable).
but I can't really see how iTunes could have been achieved with the Microsoft Widgets
iTunes is a listbox, a table, a bunch of buttons, and a search box. You can put that together trivially in just about any modern GUI toolkit, and the iTunes interface has already been cloned multiple times (it itself is largely a clone of other people's interfaces, so there is no reason to complain about that).
No, Apple breaks UI conventions on Windows because they want to (probably for marketing reasons).
CUPS doesn't work any better on Linux, does it now?
So what? CUPS is a p.o.s. on both Linux and Mac, which only goes to show that assertions like "Macs just work" are wrong. Macs are as broken as other platforms, they just package it more stylishly.
1. OS X has come a long bloody way since it first came out.
And Linux has come even further in the same amount of time, to the point where it is now a better choice than OS X all around.
2. The alternative isn't Linux, except for a very few people.
The alternative is very much Linux: SuSE, Ubuntu, and other user-friendly distributions are better than Macintosh in terms of consistency, maintainability, performance, and functionality.
Sounds like they've made cookies, but more than one site can read them. My guess is you'd have to authorize the site to read them, but this is bad news.
Cookies can already be read by more than one site. Furthermore, the restrictions on cookie domains/sites that do exist can be circumvented by having a common cookie domain that manages cookies from web bugs.
In addition to cookies, we have had auto-fill, password vaults, and client certificates. People already use auto-fill and password vaults when it makes sense, and client certificates seem to have been too cumbersome and intrusive to be acceptable.
It doesn't look to me like Microsoft has come up with any new idea here. It looks more like they are integrating features you currently get from things like the Google bar into the browser and pretend it was their idea all along.
Prior to hare-brained schemes like Passport, where exactly does Microsoft think people stored sensitive information? That's what we have had keychains, vaults, and client certificates for, supported by browsers, operating systems, and add-ons.
Maybe this whole story is an attempt to create the false impression that this is new, breakthrough technology so that Microsoft can then patent "local disk storage of personal information"? Or maybe it's just an April's Fools joke.
Slashdot Mirror
I was responding to the claim that Automator was an efficient replacement for bash programming; it is not. That's why these kinds of environments haven't caught on with experts.
And while bash may be a little too obscure for your mother, non-experts generally don't have any more trouble learning well-designed scripting languages than graphical environments.
It is developers who think that Java applications run as-is who are responsible for the shitty java applications on OS X today.
They think that because that's Sun's party line.
Java apps which 'run' on the mac are often not even tested to see how they behave.
Of course not. Java is WORA. You shouldn't have to test on more than one machine.
And the reason there's zero demand for it is because Java applications that are ported to the Mac have so far been done very sloppily, resulting in a bad user experience all around.
Oh, what fun. On the one hand, we have vociferous Java WORA advocates, who claim that no platform adaptation is needed, and on the other hand, we have vociferous Mac advocates, who complain if applications don't look exactly the way they are used to. Please, do let the fun begin and slug it out.
What's particularly fun about this is that Java hackers are probably some of Apple's most loyal customers, and that Apple desparately needs a successor to Objective-C and all they got is Java. This will be interesting to watch.
It's amazing how many things you got wrong in a single sentence:
The "X" in "OS X" actually doesn't pay homage to the X Window System. I don't know whether Apple marketing just didn't know better or didn't give a damn, but I consider Apple's use of the name "OS X" rather disrespectful.
With OSX, everything Just Works (tm), obviously because the same people who make OSX make the hardware it runs on.
Looks like another Apple marketing guy trolling on an open source site.
Well, I'm sorry you have been so deprived; graphical programming and scripting environments like that have been around for a long time, in endless variations.
It looks like Apple has finally found an elegant way to make a GUI accomplish tasks like these faster than I could at a bash prompt.
Faster than:I don't think so.
Theres not even icc profiling available, which is an absolute must have.
Sure there is ICC profiling, either outside the Gimp or as a plug-in. However, few people seem to use it or want it.
No adjustment layers makes it laughable as a professional editting tool.
Photoshop didn't use to have those either, yet plenty of professionals, even of your ilk, used to use it.
To say that 99% of professionals could use gimp and not lose anything compared to photoshop is just ridiculous. Why would you even suggest that.
You lose lots of functionality, it just happens to be functionality most people who work with images for a living don't actually need. (Note that most people who work with images for a living are neither photographers nor graphic designers nor prepress professionals.)
You obviously don't work with images professionally.
You obviously share the uninformed arrogance so common to many photographers and designers. I'm neither a photographer nor a designer, but I work with images professionally and almost certainly know a lot more about color than you do. I have never needed more color management than I get on Linux. If enough of the Gimp user community needs color management, it will be added, hopefully in a better way than in Photoshop.
Isn't it about time we dropped the pretence and simply supported those companies that actually innovate and deliver?
Adobe did not invent photo editing, nor did they invent most of the features in Photoshop. They were simply the first company to ship this kind of software for popular PC platforms.
That is why it is particularly annoying that Adobe has such a lock on this market. If you think it is time that we dropped the "pretence" and we "supported those companies that actually innovate", then you should not support Adobe. Adobe did not invent most of what they are making big bucks with.
I generally have a more relaxed attitude than yours: let Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and all those other companies clone to their heart's content. But I draw the line when people like you claim that those companies invented it all; they did not--they mostly just package other people's technologies.
Nobody is even pretending that there is a real alternative to Photoshop any more
For 99% of people working with images professionally, the Gimp does everything they need. One reason to see that is that the Gimp has already more functionality than professional versions of Photoshop of only a few years ago already.
So yeah, people are going to whine that it doesn't act like photoshop*. Their brains are trained for photoshop just the way your brain is trained for vim in the above example
Actually, my brain is trained for Gimp; I like the interface the way it is. If it gets changed to act like Photoshop, that's an overall minus for me.
So, why should the Gimp interface be changed to be more like the interface a bunch of graphic designers are used to? Do most of those graphic designers who keep whining about the Gimp make contributions to open source?
Interface is half the battle, but it isn't the entire battle and it definitely isn't the war.
If the war is to get current graphic designers and OS X users to use free software, I think it's a war not worth fighting.
I personally will stick to using photoshop.
Yes, please do that; I can't imagine any advantage anybody else would have from you using Gimp on OS X. In addition, please stop complaining that other people aren't porting software to your favorite proprietary platform and window system for free and in exactly the way you personally prefer it.
Lets designers pick their own software, we know what we need and how to use it, and more importantly, WHY we need it.
Yes. Trouble only arises when you try to tell other people what they should do. For my uses of the Gimp, Pantone, color management, and CMYK are somewhere between useless and a nuisance. Designers and photographers are not the only professional users of images.
And Gimp needs colour managment.
There are excellent command line tools for color management on Linux. If you like, you can script those into the Gimp so that they are invoked at load/save time and for color space transformations. Maybe such scripts should become part of the Gimp standard distribution so that the whining stops.
However, beyond that, I think any closer association between the Gimp and color management is not necessarily a good idea. Maybe you like the feature, to me it would be a nuisance.
The Gimp does not support 16bpp
16bpp is nice, but for most of its life, Photoshop didn't support 16bpp either, and yet professionals were using it widely.
it doesn't support "Crop and Rotate" the way Photoshop does (very convenient trick to implement both in a single keystroke)
You can implement features like that in a couple of lines of scripting. Or you can just turn on "dynamic menu shortcuts" and pick more convenient shortcuts.
This will eventually probably just be carried out at birth. The procedure will likely hardly be much more involved than an injection or circumcision.
That's my point. Complaining that Apple hasn't miraculously made HP's and Epson's printers... in addition to their own hardware and software... "just work" is, well, churlish.
The problem with CUPS is that it doesn't handle inevitable hardware problems gracefully. Another problem is that it gets into weird states all by itself. And on the Macintosh, yet another problem is that the local user interface Apple has written for CUPS sucks even more badly than the CUPS web interface, resulting in lots of usability problems. Those are Apple's problems, not anybody else's.
And yet my son mails me his homework to print from my Mac instead of his Windows box, because CUPS actually works and Windows printing doesn't.
Printing is a hard problem in general and printer spooler software has serious problems on all platforms. My point is that Apple didn't solve this problem--they have the same problems with printing as Windows and Linux. Consider yourself lucky that your CUPS works while your Windows printer doesn't work. I have been in the reverse situation.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, because I don't see that happening.
Maybe you just aren't looking...
I'm sorry, but this thing does not meet any definition of "nanotech". Talking about "nanotech" in that context looks just like an attempt to grab headlines.
In fact, the problem with "shape-shifting robots" has not been a lack of imagination on the part of roboticists (going back at least to the 1970's) or the lack of control software, but a lack of tiny actuators, low-power processing, and batteries.
Nice troll, though. At least I went for it.
You are the troll here.
Sorry, fighting with my OS and recompiling my kernel stopped being interesting about ten years ago. Someday you'll get there. Someday.
Debian packages up a huge number of applications and kernels precompiled. That's one of its big advantages: with Debian, you need to manually compile software less than with any other distro.
And, yes, someday you'll get it. But until then, you will probably continue trolling and spewing uninformed nonsense.
They are not "apathetic" when it comes to packaging software, and that's what matters to me as a Debian user.
I think you fundamentally mischaracterize Debian when you look at it as some kind of bleeding edge system for hackers and nerds.
Debian and its package management system is still the easiest way of keeping a software installation up to date, for anybody, hacker or not. SuSE and RedHat are trying, but they aren't as good or easy to use yet.
And Windows and Macintosh aren't even trying to do anything comparable--software installation and maintenance on those platforms is in complete shambles compared to Linux.
The longer Debian goes without a real release, the less and less people are going to care about it.
You sound like you are thinking about Debian like RedHat or Suse. But Debian works differently. A "real release" of Debian doesn't matter--people just get core Debian onto their computers in some way (live CDs like Ubuntu and Knoppix are particularly popular), and then upgrade to whatever level they feel comfortable with (stable+security, testing+security, unstable).
but I can't really see how iTunes could have been achieved with the Microsoft Widgets
iTunes is a listbox, a table, a bunch of buttons, and a search box. You can put that together trivially in just about any modern GUI toolkit, and the iTunes interface has already been cloned multiple times (it itself is largely a clone of other people's interfaces, so there is no reason to complain about that).
No, Apple breaks UI conventions on Windows because they want to (probably for marketing reasons).
CUPS doesn't work any better on Linux, does it now?
So what? CUPS is a p.o.s. on both Linux and Mac, which only goes to show that assertions like "Macs just work" are wrong. Macs are as broken as other platforms, they just package it more stylishly.
1. OS X has come a long bloody way since it first came out.
And Linux has come even further in the same amount of time, to the point where it is now a better choice than OS X all around.
2. The alternative isn't Linux, except for a very few people.
The alternative is very much Linux: SuSE, Ubuntu, and other user-friendly distributions are better than Macintosh in terms of consistency, maintainability, performance, and functionality.
Sounds like they've made cookies, but more than one site can read them. My guess is you'd have to authorize the site to read them, but this is bad news.
Cookies can already be read by more than one site. Furthermore, the restrictions on cookie domains/sites that do exist can be circumvented by having a common cookie domain that manages cookies from web bugs.
In addition to cookies, we have had auto-fill, password vaults, and client certificates. People already use auto-fill and password vaults when it makes sense, and client certificates seem to have been too cumbersome and intrusive to be acceptable.
It doesn't look to me like Microsoft has come up with any new idea here. It looks more like they are integrating features you currently get from things like the Google bar into the browser and pretend it was their idea all along.
Prior to hare-brained schemes like Passport, where exactly does Microsoft think people stored sensitive information? That's what we have had keychains, vaults, and client certificates for, supported by browsers, operating systems, and add-ons.
Maybe this whole story is an attempt to create the false impression that this is new, breakthrough technology so that Microsoft can then patent "local disk storage of personal information"? Or maybe it's just an April's Fools joke.