Aqua Mozilla OK with Apple

MikeMo writes: "Turns out Apple thinks an Aqua Mozilla is OK, after all. Eric Yang had a chat with them and they made up." This is an update to this story.

Re:So what exactly does Apple want?

[Skuggan]

"Mozilla's appearance is all defined at run-time, and everything including its own buttons, menus, scroll bars, is a Mozilla custom component, not part of the OS standard UI toolkit."

This was the worst design decision(?spelling?) with Mozilla. Big, bloated GUI, slowing down the good, fast rendering engine. Who wanted this? Had someone had an overdoze of Winamp skins?

Re:Might make Aqua better...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the point. Apple wants a consistent look and feel with their products. It's all part of the Apple experience.

But I say, "Nay nay."

[rice_burners_suck]

This upsets me a little. I understand where Apple is coming from on this issue of "look-and-feel" because I can wholeheartedly respect the amount of work that goes into a successful user interface. It is very difficult to get everything working correctly, seamlessly and most of all... I hate it when I forget words. The word I wanted to use means that something can be operated with little instruction, using only common sense. You get the picture.

IMO, the user interface is the most difficult part of the system to make. There are so many rules and exceptions to those rules, and components have to interact with each other in ways that really don't make any sense. Design from a user's perspective is difficult, especially if you're trying to be (I hate to use this cuss word) "innovative." Design from a programmer's perspective is hell. Implementation is nothing short of a nightmare.

So when they get upset over someone using Aqua on a system that isn't Mac OS, I can totally understand. However, on the other hand, if I understood this story correctly, the Aqua interface was implemented as a theme FOR Mac OS. Now what upsets me is this: yes, I respect the work they put into Aqua, but they, on the other hand, clearly do NOT respect the colossal amount of work the Mozilla folks put into their browser. Why should it matter to Apple what Mozilla does? If Mozilla was a commercial product, and source code was not available publically, would Apple ever know or care how it was implemented? They say they want to be a part of the open source community and stuff, but I say "nay nay."

As a side note, I honestly prefer a simple command line interface, because it's so much easier to make and use. Personally, I don't know why the Windows and MacOS interfaces are mimicked so widely as they're clearly far from optimal. Windows is good for nothing. MacOS (I've used versions 7.x through 9) is great for running graphical applications where 99% of the input comes from the mouse. Its keyboard interface, on the other hand, is terrible IMO--even if you know all the shortcut keys. I might give OS X a try someday, just because it's based on BSD (I swear by the BSDs). Personally, I like to use the keyboard for 99% of the input, and the mouse as a supplimentary input device for when it's more convenient to click. I remember shipping air freight through Delta. Up until six months ago or so, they had old computer terminals with keyboard-only interfaces and old-school textual displays. The folks who worked there frankly didn't care how the text screen looked as long as it got the job done. And it did. One day, I stroll in there with a few packages and their system was changed... to Windows. It was probably one of those glossy sales presentations that got those things in there. The employees weren't even told about it--they came to work that day and their system was different, and there were no instructions. I remember how the guy had to click on a hundred different things with the mouse, move to the keyboard and punch in a few things, move back to the mouse and click on another hundred or so pretty pictures... in short, what used to take a minute or two by pushing a few keys now took about ten minutes, with most of the time spent clicking on things and moving between the keyboard and the mouse. Not only did Delta spend Lord-knows how much money on that new "system" but they lost productivity too. For what?! To be "user friendly?" To be "easy?" (Like AOL.) Why not just use the alleged "unfriendly" system, and just teach new employees the keys before putting them in front of that thing. The point of this side note is that graphical systems were originally invented for doing graphical work. Nowadays, this graphical system is used in places where a text one would actually be a better choice.

Priorities

[daceaser]

What worries me most is Apple's sense of priorities. They seem quite happy for someone to re-implement QuickTime for Linux as a third-party, yet they sue someone who creates a skin that looks like Aqua.

Does Apple think that colourful buttons are more valuable intellectual property than their video layer which they've spent the last 10 years developing?

Not that I mind QT for Linux, but the point stands. They'd rather have people buy a Mac for the shiny interface than the powerful graphics tools, or other _real_ technological assets.

I'm an Apple fiend, but sometimes the bods at Apple really leave me wondering...

Re:They want to see Mozilla running on OS X

[mr100percent]

Yes, it RUNS on OS X, but has noting else in common. The menu bar is pretty bare, the widgets are ugly looking X-windows bareness. A menu is jammed in every open menu, giving it the worst aspect of XWindows and Windows, as global options aren't in the global taskbar.

My only concern is that the OS X version might be slower to be updated, as platform-specific features to use Aqua are added.

Code exists to do this in the mozilla tree

[lordpixel]

Mac OS will create a button for you, if you ask it, but, like most modern OSes it will also just "draw" a button without any of the logic behind it, there is an API for that sort of thing.

So you get the look of a button without any of the native widget.

I once spent some time with a guy at netscape implementing a new protocol which basically took advantage of that.

You wrote something like:

theme://button?title=OK

and it returned a GIF containing a perfect looking OK button in the present Mac OS theme, be that Platinum on OS 9 or Aqua on OS X.

The code to do this is here:
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/netwerk/prot ocol/theme/ [mozilla.org]

Finshing this work would allow very high quality Aqua themes, as it wouldn't be "as" emulated. The OS would be drawing all of the controls.

This would also satisfy Apple - they don't really care about Aqua themes so much as making sure those themes *only* work on Mac OS. As the theme: protocol needs native code to work, it will only run on Mac OS (9 or X)

The theme protocol might also be needed on Linux (window manager theme support) and to do Windows XP properly.

Re:What is OS X?

[NeMon'ess]

Your description sounds very interesting and I would like to play around with aqua while someone explained the features to me as well as you did. All of your descriptions led me to one conclusion however; aqua still isn't perfect for multitasking. Comparing Windoze to a desk, I would say it lets me get out plenty of items from the drawers, but the drawers remain open until the item goes back. Aqua lets me take out all the items but closes all the drawers until the items go back, so to put something back I open the drawer again then close it. I think I'm missing something though because that would be too cumbersome. I never really cared for the unified top bar because it seemed like it took more effort to switch apps or navigate instead of having everything laid out in front of me.

I'm assuming I can customize Aqua however so plenty of stuff stays out in front? Bottom line Windoze is for those whose real desk is a mess but they know where everything is, while Aqua is for neat-freaks.

Feedback?

Re:What is OS X?

[itachi]

I'm assuming I can customize Aqua however so plenty of stuff stays out in front? Bottom line Windoze is for those whose real desk is a mess but they know where everything is, while Aqua is for neat-freaks.

Oh, aqua is for both. The dock can be both the cluttered, every single windows represented (1). It can also be really really tidy. I'm almost to the point where I prefer it to NeXT/After/GNUstep, although it would need autoraise to really win me over completely. The parent post is right though, it's easy to tell what window is live, and the dock is much nicer than the start bar, once you get used to how to use it efficiently. It still needs work, though, and it is getting better with revisions. There is not a lot of customization available with 10-10.0.4. (2) 10.1 looks like it doubles the amount of customization that you can do from the GUI, and of course there have always been lots of 3rd party GUI toys for the Mac. It's really a nice GUI.

itachi

(1) - except, ironically enough, the window in front. Minimized windows live on the right side of the dock next to the trash, meanwhile applications that are running live on the right
(2) - not entirely true, there are some undocumented changes you can make through the CLI. Mostly picking between widget options, as far as I've seen, rather than turning widgets on and off, so tuning the GUI for speed vs. glitter is not quite an option yet.

Re:What is OS X?

[DavidRavenMoon]

I'm assuming I can customize Aqua however so plenty of stuff stays out in front? Bottom line Windoze is for those whose real desk is a mess but they know where everything is, while Aqua is for neat-freaks.

You can, if you want, have one window from five different apps open on the screen next to each other.

The way the classic Mac OS works, is if you click on a window in the background (since you can see them, as there is no patent window for the app) it would bring all the open windows from that app to the front, covering all the other open windows. To bring all the windows of one app to the front in OS X you click on that app's icon in the dock. You can also right click the icon to see and choose which window you want, or use the Window menu in the main menu bar.

In OS X clicking on a window in the background, brings only that window to the front, and not all the windows from that app.

You can hide an app and all it's windows, and it's icon in the dock gets grayed out, or you can minimize the individual windows from that app (and when you hide the app... they hop over to the apps icon...). Minimized windows show up as dock icons of the window. Moving the mouse over the icon tells you the name of the window.

I really enjoy Aqua. I use Mac OS 9.1 and NT 4 at work all day, but at home I mostly stay in OS X... can't wait to get the 10.1 update!

Subtle UI differences that make Macs easier

[yerricde]

you dont need a mac. you need tools to do your job a SUN or Intel box can do as well as any MAC and are used every day.

The Macintosh interface has subtle features that make things more efficient. For example, to access the menu bar on an interface patterned after that of the Mac OS (mac or kde2), I can just flick the mouse upward; the top of the screen keeps my mouse pointer in the menu bar. To access the menu bar on pretty much everything else (windows, gnome, irix, cde, etc.) where the menu falls inside the window, I have to aim for a tiny portion of the screen; aiming in two dimensions instead of one slows me down about 500 milliseconds per menu access, which adds up rapidly over a work day.