Think of the database software as a librarian. The data itself is books on shelves, and the database is the librarian. The purpose of the librarian is twofold: to help you access the data, but also to mediate your access to the data. The librarian is there so that when you ask to see the library's copy of To Kill a Mockingbird it appears, but the librarian is also there to prevent you from tearing out all the book's pages and replacing them with porn.
A database that doesn't prevent the insertion of erroneous data is basically nothing more than a flat file with an API.
Quartz 2D has been hardware-accelerated in Tiger. You're going to see a significant performance boost with any program that uses Quartz 2D. (OmniGraffle is kind of the canonical example, because I believe it's still shipping with new machines.)
What the hell would be the point of that? As we've already covered, both NEXTSTEP and OpenStep were half-assed pieces of junk compared to modern platforms. (Yes, they were great for the time, but that time was 15 years ago.)
The whole idea of modular portability is that your front-end applications are entirely native. No compromises. You can afford to do that because you've broken out your application logic from your presentation layer.
Donald Knuth also hasn't used e-mail for the past 15 years. To be perfectly blunt, that was about the last time he contributed anything of real value to his field. No disrespect intended, but the guy is just not out there in front any more. He lives in a very exotic world out of which come very few practical innovations.
To answer your question, what this tells me is that the exception proves the rule.
Sounds like you're either not that familiar with Cocoa or you're not that familiar with GNUSTEP.
Short version: Until and unless GNUSTEP gets key-value coding and observing, bindings and Core Data, it's going to continue to be a fine clone of NEXTSTEP that has absolutely nothing to do with Cocoa.
Re:Powerusers && Powermacs
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Smarter? Because they bought a certain product?
Um, no, smarter because they're smarter. We're talking about people we admire here. You don't understand my comment at all, do you? I said that when you see somebody smarter than you carrying a Powerbook, you notice. I didn't say that people who carry Powerbooks are automatically smarter than you.
They built their own Altair? They know the registers on an Apple II? That earns my respect. That quantifies "smarter" in my book.
Okay, so your definition of "smarter" hinges around having a pathological interest in stuff that's utterly obsolete and of no practical use to anybody. That explains so much.
You know, I really wish your nickname were literally true.
A word about cross-platform software. The days when your application logic and your presentation layer were bound up in the same executable file are long over. We first learned the value of n-tier design in the early days of web application development, and the principles have taken over completely.
Example: The only way you'll be able to write a 64-bit application for Tiger is to have a presentation layer and a separate, faceless task. Apple isn't going to take the time to port Cocoa and the other UI-related frameworks to 64-bit because (1) it'll be a significant amount of work and (2) programs linked with 64-bit versions of the front-end frameworks will launch and run more slowly. Instead, all the core OS libraries will be delivered in 64-bit versions. Developers will write front-end applications that communicate with back-end tasks through some messaging protocol like distributed objects.
With that said, the days of writing cross-platform software are also over. See, your core application logic will reside in a faceless back-end that can run on any platform with a simple recompile. Meanwhile, you'll have very small and very simple front-end applications that are specific to each platform you want to support. Want a Windows version? You'll write a Windows front-end. Want a Mac version? Write a Cocoa front-end. Want a Linux version? Spend a month fighting with X and then give up and go back to working on your Windows and Mac front-ends.
Re:Powerusers && Powermacs
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Replace "cooler" with "smarter" and you're right on. When you see people you've admired for years walking around with Powerbooks, you start to get the idea that maybe they know something you don't, you know?
It's not zealotry. It's choice. Most people who use computers professionally have zero interest in spending their leisure time sitting in front of them. They'd rather go camping with their kids or what have you.
What I find far more interesting is the opposite effect: All the people --I won't call them "zealots," but I don't think I'd be too far off the mark if I did --who think that what makes or breaks a computer's value story is whether or not there are any games available. That's a hugely myopic world-view, I think.
Compared to Mac OS X, both NEXTSTEP and OpenStep were half-assed pieces of junk. Seriously. Both of them gave you about a third of what you really needed to write top-shelf application software.
When Apple took NEXTSTEP and wedded it with Core Foundation and QuickTime and OpenGL and the other vital APIs, then and only then did it become a complete development environment.
Of course with things like Key-Value introspection and Cocoa Bindings and Core Data, we're really moving beyond what a traditional application development environment it and getting closer to a data-abstraction environment. While some applications won't benefit from that at all, of course, some will be able to be completely refactored in ways that make them a hell of a lot simpler.
Not to nag, but you're mistaken about Safari and textured windows. The UI guideline is that textured windows are okay for any application that uses a source list. The bookmarks display is a source list. So Safari is entirely within the rules.
That's not what Automator does. It's understandable why you'd get this wrong, but please check out "Working with Automator."
Short version: Automator lets you chain together very small bits of code called Actions to create Workflows.
Think of Actions as being like UNIX tools, and Workflows as being like command pipelines, and you'll have the idea.
Automator is not a general-purpose AppleScript tool. You can write Actions in AppleScript if you want -- though Objective-C is better, in my opinion -- but you can't use Automator to just talk to any application with an AppleScript dictionary. That's not its job.
Re:No 'Up' button.
on
Hacking Mac OS X
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If you want to add it, there's a "Path" button that can be applied to the Finder toolbar. Use the "Customize Toolbar..." menu item and drag the "Path" button to the Finder toolbar.
A better choice in my opinion, though, is to command-click on the window title. That's been a feature of the Mac Finder since System 7.
Re:Probably worth mentioning...
on
Hacking Mac OS X
·
· Score: 1
Shit. Forgot to check the "anonymous" box. Well, hell. I guess I'm out of the closet now.
Re:Probably worth mentioning...
on
Hacking Mac OS X
·
· Score: 1
Will not happen. A hundred dots per inch is as good as we can do reliably right now on all screen sizes, and we're not going to ship some screens with different dots per inch than others.
Maybe it was $650. All I remember for sure is that it was a three-digit price for the 2-processor copy and a four-digit price for the more-processor copy. Same software, different prices depending on the target machine.
What the fuck? "Troll?" What the hell is going on on this web site, anyway? You know how Wikipedia has become useless because the only people who are motivated to contribute to it are idiots who want to push an agenda or who just get off on vandalizing things? Same thing here with this stupid moderation thing.
Um. Yeah. I'm guessing you probably are. The first thing everybody turns OFF in Illustrator is the stupid "show fonts in their own faces" thing. For the first, everybody knows what all their fonts look like already. For the second, it slows the program down something awful to have to load and cache a few hundred fonts every time the program starts.
The answer is no, of course. There's no version for DOS or VMS either, and if all you have is an old IBM mainframe with a punch-card reader, you're shit outta luck.
But the far more interesting question here is, "Who is this 'we' you refer to?"
Slashdot Mirror
To put it bluntly, no.
Think of the database software as a librarian. The data itself is books on shelves, and the database is the librarian. The purpose of the librarian is twofold: to help you access the data, but also to mediate your access to the data. The librarian is there so that when you ask to see the library's copy of To Kill a Mockingbird it appears, but the librarian is also there to prevent you from tearing out all the book's pages and replacing them with porn.
A database that doesn't prevent the insertion of erroneous data is basically nothing more than a flat file with an API.
Quartz 2D has been hardware-accelerated in Tiger. You're going to see a significant performance boost with any program that uses Quartz 2D. (OmniGraffle is kind of the canonical example, because I believe it's still shipping with new machines.)
Your problem is not related to the graphics card. Exposé's performance isn't dependent on how much graphics RAM you have.
Odds are that you're not running with enough main memory. Upgrade your RAM and your problem will disappear.
It's worth mentioning that while Core Data is conceptually similar to EOF, but it shares zero code. Core Data is a brand new implementation.
What the hell would be the point of that? As we've already covered, both NEXTSTEP and OpenStep were half-assed pieces of junk compared to modern platforms. (Yes, they were great for the time, but that time was 15 years ago.)
The whole idea of modular portability is that your front-end applications are entirely native. No compromises. You can afford to do that because you've broken out your application logic from your presentation layer.
Donald Knuth also hasn't used e-mail for the past 15 years. To be perfectly blunt, that was about the last time he contributed anything of real value to his field. No disrespect intended, but the guy is just not out there in front any more. He lives in a very exotic world out of which come very few practical innovations.
To answer your question, what this tells me is that the exception proves the rule.
Sounds like you're either not that familiar with Cocoa or you're not that familiar with GNUSTEP.
Short version: Until and unless GNUSTEP gets key-value coding and observing, bindings and Core Data, it's going to continue to be a fine clone of NEXTSTEP that has absolutely nothing to do with Cocoa.
Smarter? Because they bought a certain product?
Um, no, smarter because they're smarter. We're talking about people we admire here. You don't understand my comment at all, do you? I said that when you see somebody smarter than you carrying a Powerbook, you notice. I didn't say that people who carry Powerbooks are automatically smarter than you.
They built their own Altair? They know the registers on an Apple II? That earns my respect. That quantifies "smarter" in my book.
Okay, so your definition of "smarter" hinges around having a pathological interest in stuff that's utterly obsolete and of no practical use to anybody. That explains so much.
You know, I really wish your nickname were literally true.
A word about cross-platform software. The days when your application logic and your presentation layer were bound up in the same executable file are long over. We first learned the value of n-tier design in the early days of web application development, and the principles have taken over completely.
Example: The only way you'll be able to write a 64-bit application for Tiger is to have a presentation layer and a separate, faceless task. Apple isn't going to take the time to port Cocoa and the other UI-related frameworks to 64-bit because (1) it'll be a significant amount of work and (2) programs linked with 64-bit versions of the front-end frameworks will launch and run more slowly. Instead, all the core OS libraries will be delivered in 64-bit versions. Developers will write front-end applications that communicate with back-end tasks through some messaging protocol like distributed objects.
With that said, the days of writing cross-platform software are also over. See, your core application logic will reside in a faceless back-end that can run on any platform with a simple recompile. Meanwhile, you'll have very small and very simple front-end applications that are specific to each platform you want to support. Want a Windows version? You'll write a Windows front-end. Want a Mac version? Write a Cocoa front-end. Want a Linux version? Spend a month fighting with X and then give up and go back to working on your Windows and Mac front-ends.
Looked real closely at your mobile phone lately?
Replace "cooler" with "smarter" and you're right on. When you see people you've admired for years walking around with Powerbooks, you start to get the idea that maybe they know something you don't, you know?
It's not zealotry. It's choice. Most people who use computers professionally have zero interest in spending their leisure time sitting in front of them. They'd rather go camping with their kids or what have you.
What I find far more interesting is the opposite effect: All the people --I won't call them "zealots," but I don't think I'd be too far off the mark if I did --who think that what makes or breaks a computer's value story is whether or not there are any games available. That's a hugely myopic world-view, I think.
Compared to Mac OS X, both NEXTSTEP and OpenStep were half-assed pieces of junk. Seriously. Both of them gave you about a third of what you really needed to write top-shelf application software.
When Apple took NEXTSTEP and wedded it with Core Foundation and QuickTime and OpenGL and the other vital APIs, then and only then did it become a complete development environment.
Of course with things like Key-Value introspection and Cocoa Bindings and Core Data, we're really moving beyond what a traditional application development environment it and getting closer to a data-abstraction environment. While some applications won't benefit from that at all, of course, some will be able to be completely refactored in ways that make them a hell of a lot simpler.
Not to nag, but you're mistaken about Safari and textured windows. The UI guideline is that textured windows are okay for any application that uses a source list. The bookmarks display is a source list. So Safari is entirely within the rules.
You don't have to click twice. Click-and-hold is the Mac paradigm for pull-down elements.
And yeah, seeing as how I've never heard this complaint before, ever, I'm gonna go with "unnecessarily picky" here.
You asked for a "single-click way." I told you about the "Path" button. Where's the problem, exactly?
Evidently what you're referring to is not "such a common task," seeing as how I can't even figure out what you're talking about.
That's not what Automator does. It's understandable why you'd get this wrong, but please check out "Working with Automator."
Short version: Automator lets you chain together very small bits of code called Actions to create Workflows.
Think of Actions as being like UNIX tools, and Workflows as being like command pipelines, and you'll have the idea.
Automator is not a general-purpose AppleScript tool. You can write Actions in AppleScript if you want -- though Objective-C is better, in my opinion -- but you can't use Automator to just talk to any application with an AppleScript dictionary. That's not its job.
If you want to add it, there's a "Path" button that can be applied to the Finder toolbar. Use the "Customize Toolbar..." menu item and drag the "Path" button to the Finder toolbar.
A better choice in my opinion, though, is to command-click on the window title. That's been a feature of the Mac Finder since System 7.
Shit. Forgot to check the "anonymous" box. Well, hell. I guess I'm out of the closet now.
Will not happen. A hundred dots per inch is as good as we can do reliably right now on all screen sizes, and we're not going to ship some screens with different dots per inch than others.
Maybe it was $650. All I remember for sure is that it was a three-digit price for the 2-processor copy and a four-digit price for the more-processor copy. Same software, different prices depending on the target machine.
What the fuck? "Troll?" What the hell is going on on this web site, anyway? You know how Wikipedia has become useless because the only people who are motivated to contribute to it are idiots who want to push an agenda or who just get off on vandalizing things? Same thing here with this stupid moderation thing.
Um. Yeah. I'm guessing you probably are. The first thing everybody turns OFF in Illustrator is the stupid "show fonts in their own faces" thing. For the first, everybody knows what all their fonts look like already. For the second, it slows the program down something awful to have to load and cache a few hundred fonts every time the program starts.
You know, this "let's steal everything that's not fucking nailed down" attitude is driving this once-interesting web site into the ground.
The answer is no, of course. There's no version for DOS or VMS either, and if all you have is an old IBM mainframe with a punch-card reader, you're shit outta luck.
But the far more interesting question here is, "Who is this 'we' you refer to?"