Eek (geekery)
And the more I like MacOS better than Linux.
At this point, I think all that I use XDarwin for is xterm and xemacs (both far better than Terminal.app and TextEdit.app, respectively) and the other handful of UNIX apps which don't have Mac equivalents (such as LyX). But I think I'm getting to the point where I've finally had enough of tinkering around with a cantankerous OS and am willing to adapt my workflow habits to the ones MacOS affords.
I still think that pwm is far better than Aqua, though, but the OSX workflow isn't really suited to the pwm way of doing things. And I'm actually starting to appreciate the OSX workflow, even though it means not really being able to work on multiple things at once, but that's more an issue of not having much screen space on the iBook than anything to do with the UI.
I mean, really, the only things I tabgroup these days are xterm and a web browser, and Safari's tabbed browsing actually performs better in many respects than pwm's pervasive native tabs.
Anyway, I came to this realization earlier today when I was giving my master's project writeup to Dr. Leung, and he wanted to know what was on the CD... I told him it had the full-color PDFs of the writeup, and binary distributions of Solace for Linux and the Mac. He said that he'd gotten rid of his Mac at home (which wouldn't have been capable of running Solace anyway; it was some ancient Performa or something) and got a new Windows machine. Then we started to discuss WinXP vs. Mac OS X, and I found myself, like, rigorously evangelizing OSX, because all of the things he was having difficulty with in XP (managing scheduling, keeping track of files, organizing his photos, IMing with his family back in Hong Kong, and doing random things with his home movies) are things which OSX totally excells at.
He started to have buyer's remorse on his new laptop (a Dell), and said that it was under the 30-day "satisfaction period" and that he only got the Dell because it was $200 cheaper than an equivalent 12" AlBook, and he'd actually prefer the 12" AlBook anyway (what with being more portable and so on), and he asked me point-blank if he should pay the $50 shipping to return the Dell and get an AlBook.
I thought, "Holy shit, I've become a Mac evangelist. And worse, Dr. Leung is putting a lot of trust in my opinion right now."
So I said something like, "Well, do what you think you should... I mean, you know, weigh the pros and cons and so on."
He said that he'd ask his wife for her opinion.
In retrospect, it seems to me that he really is unhappy with his switch from Mac to Wintel and was just trying to get confirmation from someone else that he should go back to Mac anyway.
But, damn, that felt weird.
Some of the other things I mentioned which have been impressing me very much with the Mac lately: Integrated bluetooth, and integrated device synchronization with all of the pervasive applications. Have a bluetooth-enabled cellphone and a PDA and whatever and everything just stays in sync. Enter a friend's phone number on the cellphone, and one iSync later it's replicated in your computer's and Palm's address books, ready to be at your fingertips wherever you go. (I'm quite looking forward to an iSync conduit for the Hiptop. Oh yeah, I've decided to stick with the Hiptop after all.)
iCal and Address Book and iSync and Mail.app and so on are all different apps, and yet they all work together in concert, giving a pervasive and intuitive interface to all your data, which even extends onto your other devices. It's like the good PIM functionality of the Hiptop only moreso (the part I hate about the Hiptop's PIM is the crappy calendar; everything else is simply amazing), and applied to all applications and all devices. And it doesn't even have to be limited to you, because of the inherent groupware stuff, because you can even export stuff to the web and subscribe to other peoples' exported stuff (I think that only applies to calendar stuff for now, though).
Conceptually speaking, Mac OS becomes just a hub on a pervasive emergent network of information, of a collective consciousness.
And at least some of that can still extend to other systems, because you can still use the primitive-by-comparison sync stuff further. So you have a Palm and a bluetooth cellphone. You edit something on the cellphone. Then you iSync on the Mac, and then it's updated on the Palm, and then the Palm becomes a carrier of the information to your Linux or Windows system.
iSync is basically the missing link which unifies everything.
If only the 12" AlBook had a DVI port!
Comments
Zealot.
:)
Traitor! RMS and ESR will do unspeakable things when they next come to Las Cruces!
;o)
Just out of curiosity, I'd like to see what a mac user thinks about kde's groupware functionality that's available now through the Kroupware project. Perhaps I'm missing something, but it seems that most everything you're talking about -- ical exporting, heavy integration of apps, and a mostly consistent style. Admittedly, sync support is not as good as it is with OS X, which isn't an issue with me because I've just got my trusty palm pilot. Even that's something that's in the process of being fixed with KDE's KitchenSync project, which makes the already good sync support for palm pilots more generic so that one can sync to any device, regardless of what it is.
Of course, this all boils down to your feelings on the KDE project. For me, though gnome seems to have put a decent amount of effort into making things seamless, such functionality is a lot better in KDE. I guess it just comes down to personal preferences; I like the fact that pretty much everything is changeable in Linux/KDE, and I can adjust layouts and the like to fit my mood and state of mind more readily than is possible than with OS X.
I don't particularly like KDE, and IMO all of its look-and-feel tweaks are really just look tweaks. I like OSX's feel better than KDE's.
Also, it always seems like KDE is really just playing catchup to OSX, which is fine and it's nice to have more choices out there, but I just don't see any reason to, say, run KDE under OSX, which just seems silly.
As a DE goes, KDE is pretty good, but I feel that OSX is better (especially since with OSX it's easier for me to ignore the DE part of stuff; application integration is good, but IMO the user interface should be separate from the file system), and no matter how good KDE is, it's still got all of the underlying problems with Linux (mostly due to hardware support and configuration issues and so on). Technically it'd be possible for KDE to offer the same amazing consistency which OSX does, and OSX does get helped out a lot by the whole single-hardware-vendor thing (and all third-party hardware these days coming in the form of things which are either USB/Firewire or designed explicitly for OSX), and if someone wants to run KDE, I definitely won't stop them. :)
Mostly I was evangelizing OSX vs. WinXP anyway. Like, there's no way I'm going to give up my Linux system for graphics development just yet, and Linux still makes a lot more sense for firewall purposes (more configurability, and much cheaper hardware - I wouldn't want to buy a G4 Tower or iMac to keep in my utility room!), and a big part of what I was getting at was that by simply having a Mac and iSync and so on, it would handle all of the annoying things which would make the information get replicated just fine on my Linux system anyway. :) (At least, it would if I could get this damn USB sync cable to work again...)
Gotcha. Like I said, I keep track of OS X, but at the same time, do spend much more time keeping track of Linux because of economic issues. For my needs, I can do with a $500 homebrew PC; even the $1000 eMac is much, much more overpriced than that.
Probably the reason I do like KDE so much is the fact that as long as someone's built a handler for the protocol, every KDE application automatically can use that protocol. IE, KWord automatically can save to an FTP site without having to save a temporary file locally, and then use that file to send up to the server. I'm slowly trying to learn more and more bits and pieces of KDE, because dcop makes it so insanely easy to embed and integrate other applications into of yours. My biggest gripe is probably that the media players for KDE fucking suck; I use either xmms or zinf simply because the reliability of noatun is pretty nonexistant.
I really need to find a way to lock myself in the mountains for a month or so and develop a more consistent distro. I know what needs to be done, I just got to find some way to keep my microscopic attention span focused on developing the consistency I know is possible. Linux is great for me because I know how to tweak it in ways to make it more efficient for me, and do things that simply aren't possible in OS X, but I can definitely see places where it can be improved. Most of the consistency measures are things that some vocal portions of the Linux community hates, but I've grown to really appreciate, like using the same theme for both KDE and Gnome. Configurability is another major issue, though that's something that can probably be handled through setting up a Known Good configuration system, automatically backing up important config files regularly, and having a good frontend config program that doesn't make mincemeat out of user-readable text config files.
The XP issue definitely makes sense though. KDE vs. OS X's manner of integration is mostly a matter of personal preferences, it seems, whereas XP doesn't really seem to have any good solutions to the problems of an inconsistent UI. It's good if you know windows, but looking at it from a logical standpoint, decisions that were as to the layout made make no sense.
I really need to get MacOS one of these days. If only it didn't require pricey hardware. To be honest, I've never really liked Linux. I mean, it's good in theory, but the fucking thing is never done. It's like living in a house that's been remodelled. If you are a carpenter, that's fine, at least, when you fill like mucking about. But sometimes you want to live in a finished house.
Of course, Windows blows. That goes without saying. Until know, the only real reason I've never even considered the Mac was because it had no command-line.
I think MacOS is in some ways the worst thing that ever happened to open source because it has shown quite clearly that the open source "movement" just cannot create cohesive software, by its very nature. You can't create a cohesive system with a common interface by commitee. The reason that Apple was able to do this in a couple years while the open source guys have fumbled around for a decade isn't so much better design skills as it is that there is a guy at Apple who can say "do it this way".
Yeah, definitely. Actually, there are various loopholes which can make the hardware much cheaper (for example, getting an older system for cheap on eBay and refitting it with repair parts), but OSX is pretty heavily tied to the current hardware. Like, most of the stuff I love about OSX simply doesn't apply to older systems; as it is, the iBook I'm using right now is only borderline-functional with a lot of it (like Quartz; if I'd gotten the iBook one month later the entire UI would be hardware-accelerated since I'd have gotten a Radeon instead of an R128), and although there's a handful of non-USB systems which OSX will run on, all of the current stuff (like iSync and most of the multimedia support) basically relies on the presence of USB, and third-party adaptors aren't supported very well.
Apparently you can get G4 Cubes extremely cheaply now, though, and there's upgrade cards for it to bring it up to a GHz processor (though for a while the cubes came up to the original cube price on eBay because of those cards). I've actually been thinking of getting one of those, except that I wouldn't really have much need for it. I only need one OSX system, and I'd prefer it to be a laptop (since a lot of what I love so much about OSX applies to laptops, with the amazing wireless networking, incredible video editing capability and presentation software, and so on).
Hm, just checked cube prices... they're still overpriced from the GHz upgrade surge in interest. Cheapest one I see is around $600, for the processor equivalent of a $300 PC. :/ Though this one is a pretty good deal, and you won't have to get an ADC->VGA adaptor. Shipping would probably be painful though. (And I find it interesting that the person selling it thinks that the Trinitron retaining wire is a manufacturing defect or something; otherwise why would he bring it up? It's pretty common knowledge that the analog studio display is just a repackaged Trinitron with an ADC connector.)
Anyway. Your feelings about Linux have pretty much matched mine, too. When I first installed Linux back in 1994-ish, I thought, "Wow, cool! UNIX on my home system!" Then I got annoyed at how I couldn't actually do anything. Later on I came back to it when I finally outgrew DOS for all my l33t d3m0c0d1ng crap, mostly because for all its problems it was better than Win'95 (I was still holding out with WinWG 3.11 for my day-to-day computing)... and as much as I scoffed at Macs (or, more specifically, their users), I still missed how well-put-together a lot of it was. Except for the lack of a command line. :)
And man, like, these days, MacOS has everything anyone could want... a great native API, amazing X11 compatability (which is good for me, since I don't want to port Solace to Cocoa just yet, especially since it means writing a C wrapper around the ObjC API so that I can call it from a C++ class, ugh... unless there's a C++ Cocoa API that I just don't know about), and great Windows network compatability. The only thing MacOS is missing is commodity hardware. :D
I hope the iBox project (that guy who is going to build new "clone" systems from repair parts) comes to fruition, if only because it'll lower the cost for getting a MacOS system. Too bad Jobs would probably rather restructure the way repair parts are distributed than to allow anyone to encroach on the precious Mac hardware sales, never mind that Apple will still make about the same amount of money on the hardware (since they sell the repair parts) and software (since the user will still have to buy a copy of OSX).
BTW, MacOS has always had a commandline since System 7.5 (namely AppleScript). It just wasn't a Bourne shell. :D
Oh, I don't know, ucblockhead. I don't think it's that the OSS movement can't create a cohesive environment; I think it's just that you've got several projects all going about it wrong, all going about it a slightly different way.
You'll never get the OSS people to agree that there's One True Toolkit, for one thing. Why, then, are there these projects (two of 'em, unless you count GNUStep, which I don't) that insist they're the One True Way to do things? Rather than providing guidelines to consistent ways of doing things, etc.
I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that it seems silly that, if I want to be able to go to Save As... in a dialogue and save my data to a remote FTP server transparently, I need to make sure to write a KDE app, because KDE allows such behavior. No, no; look-and-feel guidelines would be too easy. ;-D
While we're on the subject, why is it that people get the wildhaired notion that because they don't like something some particular distribution does, why is the logical conclusion that one needs to come up with a new Linux distribution? We don't see that happening amongst FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc. zealots; why are people so goddamned new-distribution happy?
Let's see someone do the hard thing and simply start coming up with a Free Desktop specification.
I use OS X at work because I have to, and Linux at home because I can. I get a little tired of mucking about in Linux, but then remember that, though I'm mucking about, my OS of choice is pretty forgiving of my mucking about. ;-D
To Fluffy:I knew about applescript. Interesting stuff, though like you said, it's not Bourne compatible. Still interesting syntax.
As you put it, I'd be more than willing to play with Apple's hardware and software if it were within my price range. I'm a tinkerer, first and foremost. I like looking at the internals, seeing if I can tweak them so they fit my needs better. Thus, I like to keep my hardware purchases under $700-$800. Yeah, it means I can't afford the biggest and best, but I can afford stuff that'll do anything I need to without breaking too much of a sweat.
To regeya: I agree wholeheartedly about the need to follow the style guidelines that have been put out. Makes things much more cohesive and nicer when everyone's on the same map when it comes to look and feel. Most of the stuff in KDE's core is pretty consistent, but once you start getting into third party apps, you start to see quirks that really shouldn't be there. It's also why I absolutely hate the state of media players, on practically every OS. Absolutely no one, it seems, can build a player that works with all the other software, but at the same time runs worth a crap.
I just threw out the FTP example because it is something that has proven useful to me in the past; I'll admit that it's not useful most of the time, but more about my like of KDE's pervasive networking. Though I guess it does show something that needs to be worked on between the gnome and the kde camps. More focus needs to be placed on getting the featuresets to mesh up, so that KDE and Gnome apps can be intermingled easily, with the only difference being in the language one prefers - KDE's QT tweaks to C++, or Gnome's tried-and-true C (just ignore the bindings to other languages both have here for the sake of simplifying this arguement). Work's progressing in this direction, but at the same time, work needs to be done to expediate the process. Which is why I commend the work of the freedesktop project (http://www.freedesktop.org), even though they seem more concerned about the mechanics than the usability at this point.
I guess my point on suggesting writing a distro was more to try to offer a demonstration project that such a thing could be done more than anything else. There are faults in every distro's implementation of "The Perfect Desktop", so I just figured that starting from scratch would be the best way of showing what could be done. Of course, I guess the hazard there is a temporary distro project turning permanent as people start to use it other than as a reference guide to one idea as to what the linux desktop should look like. There wouldn't be package management, installers, or anything, just a filesystem that someone can poke at. I'd leave real work up to my personal favorite of debian. Of course, there are a few tools I'd like to make to make the job easier, but I have neither the patience, nor the attention span to support a full-blown distro with users pounding on it for their day-to-day stuff.
OSX provides pervasive FTP support too, for what it's worth. 10.2 treats FTP like a network share. I'm not sure which level it happens at (haven't played with it much), but I do know that you can, at least in the GUI applications, load and save directly on FTP sites. It might be a filesystem driver.
FWIW, Linux used to have an FTP filesystem driver too, though it was always pretty clunky.