Developer Tools For MacOS X 288
Vizer writes: "Apple is shipping CDs with the development tools for MacOS X to its developers. Not only that, but the tools will be downloadable in mid-October. Details are on the Apple Developer Connection site. This jives well with what we've been told in the past by Apple, about how MacOS X will eventually ship as two CDs, one of which is just the basic user installation and the other CD full of developer tools.
And yes, developing for MacOS X is very familiar to anyone who has done some BSD programming, except that the paths are all different and HFS+ volumes are case-insensitive. Having the terminal window with access to various unix utilities is great, and nearly all of my un-ported apps run in the compatability environment without complaint. No OS crashes, no problems other than finding out where Apple hid all the preferences and utilities.
No, I don't want to go back."
OSX is really cool (Score:2)
So I am sitting here at home reading slashdot on my home machine and also logged into my osx machine at work via SSH. While it is only a terminal window I can still fork with anything on the machine I want too. I am currently learning where everything lives. Now I use the MacOS, Linux, Solaris, and NetBSD everyday and I know that it took time to figure out where each of them put things. OSX is same yet it makes much more sense. Now why didn't anyone think to put code libraries, preferences and the such in the System library before now. Things the need to be executed at startup in the startupItems. Wow that was hard to figure out. Applications in the applications folder. Ahh. And by the way they don't have to be in there. I have my personal apps in a folder in my home directory. If I put them in the Apps folder then if someone else logs in a the console the don't see them.
If people have a problem with a feature or interface gizmo get off your ass and fix it. That is why apple released this as a BETA.
I think after everything is said and done people will still hate it because they are predisposed to hating anything Apple makes. Kind of like people hating what Jon katz writes because of the fact he wrote it. But that is another story.
Re:Stupid and off-topic facts. (Score:2)
That is quite a lengthy pathname, but it is still only 128 characters. This CVS tree contains over 45000 files, so paths of this length are long enough to support a large document structure. I can't see how a 255-character path would be limiting in practice.
Re:For those of you who are interested... (Score:3)
I've worked as a PC technician off and on since the late 80's, so I think I know a thing or two about their hardware. You buy good quality stuff and you're not going to have problems, at least no more than you'll have with a Mac. I don't think I have to tell you that not all the Macs Apple made were of the best quality. Remember the performa line? Remember the powerbook 1400 series? Or the powerbook 5300's that could catch fire when you charged the battery? Apple has also made some very good quality products as well. PC products vary in quality too. Ever hear of PC-Chips? They make the most God awful cheap garbage motherboards ever to curse the world. Ever hear of Tyan or Asus? They make very high quality boards that I'd be proud to put in a system. This is how things usually go when consumers have a choice. The same holds true for other things such as TV's, stereos, shoes, automobiles, sheet rock, mayonaisse, etc etc.
So if you've been bitten by cheapy parts or systems in the past then I do feel sorry for you. But don't please don't jump to the conclusion that you got bit because it was a PC that did the biting.
Also Apple is going to have a harder time hitting that well defined target you speak of as time goes by.
Lee
Re:On Objective C (Score:3)
My feeling about this is that when builing a GUI app using some one elses application framework it's the design of the framework that's important, not the implementation language.
I had a NeXT for a few years, and the application builder was really good - way ahead of its time. There are very few comparable mainstream environments available today (and they didn't exist then) -Borland C++ Builder and Delphi: Delphi is Object Pascal, C++Builder uses the pascal GUI library and makes heavy use of the borland __closure extension. The Smalltalk environment would be another example. None of these use straight, portable(?) C++.
I don't think you can compare the NeXT/Apple application framework to QT, MFC, MOTIF etc (ie current C/C++ frameworks.) because of the dynamic / graphical nature of the NeXT/Apple GUI design environment
Besides, late binding (a significant feature of Objective C) can be good for GUIs.
Re:Why bother (Score:2)
Most of the people working on Darwin are Apple employees. If you really think that not being Open Source is a death knell, then you really don't understand how the market works or how common, non-techie users think at all.
Re:MacOS X is unfree (Score:2)
Time will tell if that money apple is charging for their OS will buy enough brain power to compete against windows. So far the open source developers have made a go with linux and BSD. My guess is that charging a few bucks for an OS is a loosing proposition when MS has a few billion to throw around. If SUN, netscape/aol, borland can't do it how do you think apple will?
Also remember that Bill G makes a couple of hundred dollars for every mac sold. Once people find out that by making improvements to darwin they are actually putting money in Bills pocket how much will they want to participate?
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
Re:Stupid and off-topic facts. (Score:2)
--
Re:On Objective C (Score:2)
2.Who says you have to use Cocoa? Carbon is perfectly legit and that carbondater [apple.com] is sure a neat little tool.
3. Sure, poop on java. It's a valid option for lightweight or network savvy apps... and it helps aleivate that tough-to-port-to/from-winders blues.
Re:Why bother (Score:2)
Also keep in mind that Bill Gates makes money of off evey mac sold. Once this little tidbit becomes better known I doubt Apple will attract many linux or bsd developers.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:2)
On, say, Linux, you create a file called FOO. Then you create a file called foo in the same directory. No problem. When you want the first one, you refer to it as FOO, and the second one as foo.
Now on MacOS, you create a file called FOO. Then you try to create a file called foo in the same directory. BZZT! That file already exists. Do you want to replace it?
So you see, the situation you outline can never happen. FOO and foo are actually the same file.
Re:Does everyone LOVE MacOS X? (Score:2)
>So?
Security comes to mind!
>>They have discarded way to many Unix conventions for my liking. They have come up with their own method of 'controlling' services.
>Good, it's better.
In what way is it better? How do you know it's better? Sounds like you haven't even used it.
Why case-insensitivity is better for a Mac (Score:2)
Case insensitivity creates ambiguity in file names. There is no functional reason why I should be able to create both 'MyReport.latex' and 'myreport.LaTeX'. Having both is a workflow problem in determining which is which. There can also be problems with accidentally creating new files when you meant to overwrite an existing one. A case-insensitive filesystem helps average users avoid getting themselves into such a mess.
The main reason to have a case-sensitive filesystem is to support the generation of randomly named temp files, such as 'GBVhX88r' and 'gbVHx88R'. The names carry no semantic meaning, but having a case-insensitive filesystem complicates the hashing functions generally used to create such temp files. The only real reason to support filenames like that is when for when knowing the semantic meaning of a filename is unimportant.
This is good for server systems, but the advantage in simplifying the creation of such files is outweighed by the possible confusion and ambiguity for common user-oriented tasks. This is why most consumer OSes, such as the Mac and Windows use case-insensitive file semantics. Most server OSes, where the user is not as important, are case-sensitive.
Re:Does everyone LOVE MacOS X? (Score:2)
Those people WILL NEVER open a shell, go look for a config file and hack it with vi.
The people that will do that are the people that already know Unix. And remember the saying about Unix is that the learning curve is steep, but you only have to climb it once. OS X would make us climb it again . . .
And I'm not just complaining becasue it's different. I truly believe that somethings work, and changing them does not have a positive benefit. There is a certain amount of knowledge about Unix and they way things work. If you are going to tout the fact that it's built on top of Unix, etc, etc. Then do it the Unix way. Moving configuration and startup files to different directories doesn't accomplish anything. They're still shell scripts and flat files - leave them be.
I was really rooting for OS X to be a great OS. Apple could still fix a lot of these things, but I doubt if they will.
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:2)
Just saw Aqua... (Score:4)
To prove that OS X was not just a nifty a GUI, but an honest-to-god POSIX-compliant BSD-based distribution, he opened up a terminal window and proceeded to type in the following:
emacs foo.c
Then, in emacs:
#include
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
printf("Hello world!\n");
}
^X^C
Then back in the terminal:
make foo
./foo
I think when he did that, the amount of applause that filled the room was the most applause a terminal window has ever gotten
Reviews? (Score:2)
Details! I want details, before I go out and spend $400 on an ADC Select membership... I'm *REALLY* looking forward to the possible switch away from Win32 as my client OS to Mac OS X for everything
We just installed....... (Score:3)
Re:Does everyone LOVE MacOS X? (Score:5)
/bin,
/sbin,
/bin: stuff essential for system booting (can't be on
/usr/bin: normal binaries
/usr/local/bin: non-distribution binaries (aka non-RPM, non-DEB, etc etc)
/sbin: system binaries (not supposed to be on the average users path), needed for booting
/usr/sbin: system binaries (not supposed to be on the average users path)
/usr/local/sbin: system binaries, not installed via the package manager
--
Ian Peters
Re:How could they leave out bash? (Score:2)
You can get dev tools by following the instructions here [macaddict.com].
You can grab bash here [apple.com].
Do you know that the G4's are BETTER than your x86 (Score:2)
The G4 boxes (not the cubes) have come down in price. Just because they say "400 mhz" dosen't mean they suck. In fact, the G4's, at present speed, are very competetive on the modern market. Further, apple boxes cost more because they have more cool stuff in them. USB, Firewire, DVD RAM stuff is expensive, but apple makes them available for a reasonable price. Of course they overcharge for RAM, but hey no one is perfect.
You're just upset because you want something for your x86 box. Why? To avoid spending money? Fat chance of that working. To avoid losing linux maybe.. ok, I could see that being a concern. A false one, LinuxPPC is in great shape.
Apple can afford to bide a bit of time here, when everyone comes time to buy their next computer, they'll find for less than $300 more, they can get a far superior piece of hardware and monitor, with a terrific GeekMeetsTrendy OS. I don't see how they can go wrong NOT porting it.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
Re:For those of you who are interested... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Why case-insensitivity is better for a Mac (Score:2)
This is hardly a reason - simply lowercase all generated temp file names before creating the files, or don't create temp names with upper case letters.
Pronunciation (Score:2)
Re:For those of you who are interested... (Score:3)
Corrections (Score:2)
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Re:For those of you who are interested... (Score:2)
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:2)
> having all of their files in one case. If all of
> the files are in one case, then how can anyone
> complain?
It's not just the files that I create, though, is it? I don't create every file and program on my system. I get files from elsewhere - and there are a zillion programs that come with a Linux distribution that have mixed-case names for no good reason.
And the GUI argument doesn't make sense, either - if you wind up with a directory of stupidly-named files using case to differentiate them, it's going to take awhile even in a GUI to figure out what's what. There's no reason to have that feature other than to be obtuse, as far as I can figure out. Noone in this conversation has come up with an answer that's sufficient to put this kind of burden on the user. No wonder people hate the command line!
And if, as you say, we're all moving to the lowercase roman alphabet anyway in the future due to unicode, we might as well start altering the file system now, huh? That way we'll be unicode-ready that much sooner.
Re:As someone who used to be on ADC... (Score:2)
Unless you're Adobe or Intuit, Apple doesn't want to hear from you.
Well, Macromedia too, but that's beside the point.
At this year's WWDC, I spoke up in the developer feedback forum regarding the developer support. Documentation suffers a bit compared to other commercial platforms (yes, Windows). It's not exactly easy to get good basic docs from Apple if you're a first time developer. "Toolbox Essentials" and all do fine, but they still aren't anything like "Programming Windows", etc. on the Dark Side.
I do know that Apple's developer fees do get put to good use. The tools and support you get are top notch. OS betas and pre-release versions are available and shipped monthly. You can't ask for much more. As far as the price is concerned, well, those "steep hardware discounts" and all were during darker times at Apple. If you think about what the company makes money on, it doesn't make sense to give away your two core sources of income. If you could get hardware discounts by paying a $100/year developer fee, you'd suddenly have a flood of developers that thought C was just the third letter of the alphabet.
Don't get discouraged by Apple's developer program. The costs are on par with Microsoft's (only MS has a bit more software to offer for the Universal subscriber), the documentation is growing daily on their site (which is free at developer.apple.com [apple.com]) and you can provide good, solid feedback through their ADC-only e-mail lists. The WWDC is also a good place to provide feedback.
--
Greg Norz
Software Engineer - Enabling Technologies
Macromedia
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:2)
One of the naming conventions for a C++ source file is
When I want to turn something off in
Re:MacOS X is unfree (Score:2)
But I choose not to run their software, as I would rather be free.
I must further ask, if you like your friends why have you recommened slavery, subjugation and domination for them? Don't you want them to be free as well?
In case the above sarcasm doesn't make sense, let me put it another way. If I step into a small box and shut the lid, I have certainly lost some freedom. In terms of standing up and stretching, let alone walking to the refrigerator, I am most unfree. But I am still a free man, because I can get out of the box anytime I want to. Every choice we make limits our freedom in a very real sense. Likewise, with Apple software the user can choose not to use it at any time. But full moral and political liberty (free speech) still belongs to the user.
Your friends will be just as free as you in the moral sense whether the use Apple software or not.
Re:MacOS X is unfree (Score:2)
I never told the poster to quit his job. I've seen your type of posts on slashdot before. You types just can't grasp the notion of illustrating the absurd by being absurd.
Of course I am not an immoral person because I haven't given all my food away to the homeless and starved in their place! But this is the metaphorical equivalent of what the previous poster wanted Apple to do. He called them immoral because they haven't given away 100% of their software.
Re:MacOS X is unfree (Score:2)
To be fair, you really have to take all software: free and otherwise, and treat it with an equal hand. This includes comparisons between "good" and "not good" commercial software, as well as the occasional "good"/"not good" free software debacle (usually resulting when someone strays only slightly from GPL or other licenses).
If I was totally narrow-minded, I would have missed out on Windows 2000, which I think is one of the most robust platforms for hardware ever. I would have also missed out on Linux. Point is, saying a company is morally wrong for trying to make a buck off software is... well... wrong.
Particularly when some of us are or will be making our livelihoods on software sales (coming out of college soon, hardware simply isn't where it's at).
Re:Does everyone LOVE MacOS X? (Score:2)
/Applications
/System
/Preferences
as opposed to
/bin
/boot &
/etc
is it just that it's different that makes it wrong? Mac's aren't and won't be targetted at unix jockey's, they're computers for the rest of "us".
I still haven't managed to figure out what the differences are between:
/bin,
/sbin,
Apple's just trying to make sure that their users never have to deal with stuff like that.
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:2)
Just wanted to comment on this one part of your post (and don't take this as a flame)-- it's not a myth, case sensetive searches are faster than searches that ignore case. The simple reason is that in a search that ignores case, BOTH values must be converted to uppercase or lowercase before being compared using a REP CMPSB assembler statement. However, for searches that are case sensetive, you don't need to process uppercasing/lowercasing the values to be compared, you can just execute the comparison immediatly.
Also consider the implications of Unicode or multibyte character sets, and the fact that uppercasing or lowercasing a string isn't as simple as it used to be in 8-bit ASCII-days.
It may not be a huge performance hit, but it's definately slower at some point.
And how far can you p*ss? How niche is niche? (Score:2)
With the introduction of the PowerPC, in one year, Apple became the largest vendor of RISC machines on the planet.
With the introduction of OS X, Apple will become the largest vendor of Unix machines. Apple will ship more copies of OS X in the next twelve months than have shipped copies of Linux since day dot.
If its sheer numbers you want, their user base is some twenty-five million machines that are manufactured durably, reliably and usably.
Unlike a server farm where a lucky few (now there's a REAL niche for you,There ONLY seven or eight million sites running Unix & Linux) who sit over some impressive technology, each of those machines is attended to by a single person trying to do something else for a living.
If you want something really dreadful to ponder. The number of Web Servers on the planet will more than double in the coming year. All running on Macs.
Top (OS)X lists... (Score:2)
1) Aqua. I didn't like it at first, but it grows on a person. The Graphite variant was a welcome addition (distracting the eye during graphics work is a legitimate concern), though it would be a good idea to make the three window widgets of varying brightness in this mode (they actually are in standard Aqua already, but the colors are carefully chosen so you don't notice the difference unless you can't see the color). Could be more configurable though.
2) The Dock. Again, I hated this at first, and I still have my reservations, but it's growing on me. I do wish there were an option to make it vertical and glue it to the right edge of the screen, but there are already Dock replacements that can do that.
3) Directory names that make sense. Ditto for the new directory structure. Like Unix, but without the just plain wierdness of some of the names (/bin,
4) Not only the command-line, but the fact that the Terminal is only an option. I use it, but most users never need it, and by including it standard you would cause some developers to create OSX-specific apps that require it (this is still done on Win32, despite M$'s attempts to try and hide it). I'll get blasted for this one, I know, but command-lines aren't the Mac way of life, and to ever require an average user to work with one would be disastrous. But at the same time, totally denying anyone access to it would be bad for the Unix subsystem. This is a good compromise: it's there, but only if you want it to be. (NOTE: it's still standard in the betas, which makes sense, but if I remember right is being relegatd to an option in the final release).
5) The System Preferences app (analogous to the old Control Panel) is very nice; the layouts are much better than their old OS9 counterparts. A few things still need to make it in (like the monitor calibration assistant, the ability to configure multiple network interfaces, and more screensavers) but then again, this is beta, so it's expected that a few things will be missing.
6) Two-button mouse support, native. Don't believe me? Try using a multibutton mouse in any Cocoa app. Doesn't work in Carbon or Classic yet, though (see the next list).
7) Application Services. Too bad there aren't more of them yet (though I'm sure they will be), but if NeXTStep and even OSX Server are any indication, this has the potential for some seriously cool stuff.
8) QuickTime previewing for media files in Column view (or, for that matter, Column view itself). I hope this will be extensible to other types of files where appropriate.
9) What list like this wouldn't be complete without mention of the multitasking and memory management? I do worry that programmers will use this as a safety net and not debug their programs properly, as has happened at least to some degree on every OS I've ever seen that has these features (the MacOS system may crash more often, but in my experience apps crash less frequently there than in any other OS I've worked with... except those that were direct MacOS ports, or that have ports to MacOS. And yes, studies have been run confirming this). However, these features are still important
X) Finally, gotta love the X. Though I do wish you'd stop with the "ten" stuff like this was the same MacOS we've been using for sixteen years. It isn't, so just make a clean break and pronounce it like a letter of the alphabet; give the name real differentiation. Besides which, it sounds much cooler. A minor gripe, perhaps, but one which should be considered at least for marketing purposes. Or is there a trademark out there that prevents the use of the x pronunciation? And yes, I apologize for the cheesiness in using X as a list number, though it does make the columns line up more nicely.
There's some room for improvement, though (good thing this is a beta, so there's still lots of time to improve)...
1) More security. At the absolute least, use password shadowing (is there any legitimate excuse not to do this anymore?) Preferably also better GUI control of daemons/"services" and processes, though this isn't as big a deal (I'll write the frontend myself if I have to).
2) Hardware compatibility. Nuff said. Particularly in the areas of SCSI and serial support; keep in mind that the G3Beige still had these ports, and it's supposed to be supported. At least support all its standard equipment.
3) Fix the themeing. Or take it out. I don't care which myself; if they leave it in, great, if they take it out then someone else will write software to do it (knock knock... Mr. Landweber? Hello?). But the current half-done implementation doesn't cut it (the NextStep theme hack, for example, only works for some windows).
4) Drive icons on the Desktop. Where they belong (on Macs anyway).
5) Internally, mount drives in a
6) Fix Carbon to allow it the same access to GUI functions as Cocoa (or at least similar access). Top priorities: get them on the same wavelength Appearance-wise, get two-button mouse working at least in Carbon (if not Classic also), and no resizing over the Dock (unless autohide is turned on). Try to do this for the other OS functions if feasible, but the interface at least is imperative.
7) Finish QuickTime 5.0. Again, nuff said.
8) For crying out loud, don't give the default user root acces! Let them create an Administrator password in the install, then have them create a separate user account for themselves (again, all still in the installer). And if they try to login as root, let them do it, but warn them of the dangers.
9) Drop shadows on the windows are really disorienting. Give the user the option to turn 'em off (or at least shrink the shadow), or better still only put them on the active window (where they do make some sense). Ditto for the fading windows and genie minimization (for the record I'd turn off the genie effect, shrink the window dropshadow and put it on the active window only, and leave the fading menu as is).
X) Stop requiring reboots for things like network config changes. This is Mach, and thanks to Mach's architecture this shouldn't be necessary. Even hardware drivers can load at runtime. Make it so the OS never needs to reboot (except when the machine itself must be powered down and a few other extraordinary circumstances, lke upgrading the Mach kernel itself) and you'll have a massive selling point, because none of the major desktop operating systems out there today can make that claim.
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case sensitivity (Score:5)
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:4)
Perhaps a more precise way to phrase your question would be: can anbody present an example of legitimate use of two files in the same directory named identically save for case? I indeed would be extremely interested in such an example, and have never seen one in my life.
There is perhaps nothing more frustrating in using computers than typing "vi makefile" and being presented with a screenfile of tildes instead of the contents of "Makefile". It is unfortunate that the computer is not smart enough to understand what I meant.
Being a VMS user, I like file names which are in all-caps, with one dot, and a version number. The all-caps look makes it look dry and technical (which I much prefer over Unix's cutesy, friendly use of lower case and mixed case)
Windows NT's filesystem with preservation is perhaps the best compromise for most users (and Windows 98's almost-but-not-quite case preservation is not).
Unfortunately, due to the pervasiveness of Unix (e.g. for web servers), most computer users, even extreme newbies, have been conditioned to believe that everything should be case sensitive. There is a myth that it is faster, but it is not: it would be if Unix used a sensible string format, but nul-terminated strings have to go a byte at a time anyways.
Re:We just installed....... (Score:3)
> should autohide like in windows.
Erm, it can.
Just go into the Dock preferences and
turn on autohide
I must say I (usually a Linux user) have just
tried out MacOS Xbeta on my iMac and am very
impressed. A solid UNIX underneath with a
GUI designed by people with human-interface
design skills.
I can't wait for the developer CD to arrive so
I can see how difficult it is to port software over...
Re:Does everyone LOVE MacOS X? (Score:2)
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
Stupid and off-topic facts. (Score:2)
When Windows 95 just came out, I heard about it having a 255-char limit on filenames. My friend in high school (that's where I was at the time, believe it or not) made a comment, which sounded something along the lines of the following. MacOS already provides 32 chars for a filename, and 255 seems like overkill. Is this a pissing contest?
Well, it turns out that the 255-char limit is for the full path of the file, including the drive letter, colon, backslash, path, and the filename. In MacOS (and probably every other decent operating system/file system) you can create a virtually unlimited tree of directories. In Windows, you can't. You're limited by 255 characters.
And one would think that since they were fudging the file system in NT5 (aka W2K) anyway, they might as well fix that limit. Nope. It's still there. I tested it myself. And 255 characters really isn't that much. I got an error on the fifth node of the tree, with slightly longer than average directory names.
--
LinuxPPC == Faster than OS X Server at Apache (Score:2)
We may not have the pretty interfaces, and definitely don't have Steve Jobs, but so far, we seem to have one thing they don't: speed.
Cheers,
Jason Haas, LinuxPPC Inc. [linuxppc.com]
Haaz: Co-founder, LinuxPPC Inc., making Linux for PowerPC since 1996.
Re:case sensitivity (Score:2)
Besides, do you really think that you'll maintain compatibility with a case-sensitive file system? I bet you there are plenty of Mac applications out there that reference the same file with different case. It's not unusual to create a file with a mixed-case filename, but then later open the file for reading using only lower-case letters.
OS/2's HPFS is like HFS. It remembers the case of the filename, but it's case-sensitive.
--
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:5)
With Unicode the mapping of upper to lowercase can be extremely complex, and potentially two file systems or programs would use different algorithims, resulting in very difficult to understand errors and potential security problems.
And there is nothing "user friendly" about case insensitivity. The average user picks a file by clicking on them!
Another way to look at things... (Score:3)
Re:For those of you who are interested... (Score:3)
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Re:Incorrect, porting will be easy (Score:2)
In order to do C-ish things in Smalltalk, you have to do a bit of work. In order to do more Smalltalk-ish things in Objective C (e.g. adding methods are subclasses at run-time), you might have to do a bit of work. It's a trade-off and I think it's a very good one.
Personally, though, I'd choose Objective C over Smalltalk even if they were effectively the same, just because I hate Smalltalk syntax so much :)
Re:Why case-insensitivity is better for a Mac (Score:4)
Re:hfs+ volumes? (Score:4)
Actually, Apple seems to be dissing Obj C develope (Score:2)
Re:Tell Apple we want security (Score:2)
D
----
Cheap Tools (Score:2)
Re:MacOS X is unfree (Score:3)
You do not have the right to any non-GPL derivative, no matter how free and permissive you make it. You can't even create a public domain derivative of GPLd works. If RMS believes that software should not be owned, then why does he restrict me from creating unowned derivitives of the works he himself says he does not own?
As you yourself impied, if I give someone your software in such a way to violate your license, you still have your software.
If, after becoming familiar with what your opponent says...
What intellectual sophistry to assume that anyone disagreeing with you is ignorant of the topic! You're completely ignoring Locke, who has much to say on the nature of property. Just as a repeal of government trespass laws would not negate the existance of land property, neither would a repeal of the government copyright laws affect the ownership of software in any way. For a radical look at a world where software is owned in the absence of any government recognition of it, see Intellectual Property Rights Viewed As Contracts [freenation.org]. This paper also has some very good references coming off of it as well.
Re:MacOS X is unfree (Score:2)
Re:Does everyone LOVE MacOS X? (Score:2)
Its as if, because Apple used XML, their configuration files are somehow superior? Oh yeah, I just love typing this crap all day long:
....
Damn, I got tired of it anyways. Yes there are config tools, but that just makes it a pain in the ass to manually configure stuff if the tools fail or are unavailable.
My point is, XML is being horribly abused right now. It's really quite sickening the amount of wasted storage space being used for tags, when a few extra lines of code to parse a simple configuration file would do.
XML makes a lot of sense for passing data between apps that were developed independently, or are hosted on heterogenous systems and networks. But the use of XML as a config file grammar is just OVERKILL.
Developer tools (Score:2)
Another uninformed news article. Sigh.
Have you seen the developer tools? They are the NextStep ones that provide great UI modelling, seperation of UI code from business objects, enterprise level database design and the best framework I've ever seen.
No, you were probably thinking of emacs and gcc (which is used to do the actual compiling)
Come on Slashdot, do some research for christ sakes.
Re:You're correct but... (Score:2)
Lee
Re:For those of you who are interested... (Score:2)
Now I know that there are DVD recorders out there somewhere. I also know the cost about as much as a decent used car, so they're hardly an option for mainstream use.
Lee
Re:Does everyone LOVE MacOS X? (Score:2)
Go take a look at how GNUstep is progressing. We've made *tremendous* progress in the last year, and MOSX has heightened our visibility and brought more developers our way. We have alphas of ProjectCenter.app (our PB.app clone) and Gorm.app (our IB.app clone). We have those robust directory structures (/System, /Local, and /Network). We have the cool Application bundles implemented (with localization and cross-platform support). We have a fully structured makefile system. Applications and Objective C frameworks from NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, and MOSX are being ported. New applications are being written from scratch. In short, GNUstep is really beginning to snowball. Check it out!
Re:Do you know that the G4's are BETTER than your (Score:2)
Better doesn't mean squat if it isn't compatible with the existing standard. This is something that firms have had to learn the hard way over and over again.
Lee
Re:If you're typical of the thinking at MacroMedia (Score:2)
You won't. OPENSTEP is available for Windows. And if you want a Free solution, GNUstep is portable. All that needs to be done is a Win32 backend for the AppKit. Foundation works already.
Re:Stupid and off-topic facts. (Score:2)
C:\Documents and Settings\torrey.hoffman.DOMAIN\My Documents\mp3library\mp3\classical\W. A. Mozart (1756-1791) Mozart Complete Piano Concertos (45)\Mozart Complete Piano Concertos (45)\06 Piano Concerto #18 in B-flat major (3rd movement), K. 456.mp3
Some of them are worse, especially classical CD's where the composer, conductor, orchestra, symphony, and movement all get packed into the path and file names. So far this has only been a problem when trying to burn CDR's - I think the ISO cd rom filesystem has a lower limit than Windows 2000.
I think 1024 would be a reasonable upper limit for a complete path, if an upper limit is neccessary for technical reasons.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Re:LinuxPPC == Faster than OS X Server at Apache (Score:2)
Java API's? (Score:2)
if Apple has any plans of providing Java APIs
to programmers.
i'd love to write some 'native' MacOSX apps but
would like to program in my preferred language -
ie: Java.
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:2)
http://people.netscape.com/ftang/paper/unicode1
Complicated? Yes. Usable on small/underpowered hardware? Yes. (a 1k memory requirement is not excessive!). Performance wise? If we look at Western European languages, about 10% of chars are non-ascii, its about 4 times as slow. For non-European languages, its roughly *30* times as slow.
I would really really not thank anyone who made fopen 30 times slower (yes I know I'm assuming the comparison is the slow step here).
DNS has gone for the half-way house - the I18N version is case-sensitive for non-US-ASCII languages.
On Objective C (Score:3)
I'm not a Mac developer, however at work our Mac developers have no interest in porting their application to the new API in Objective C. I can't imagine it would be extremely easy to port and maintain Windows applications, most of which are written in C++ to it either. For developers who are just starting out, writing their software in Objective C makes it very difficult to port to Windows locking them into the OS.
Now Objective C might be the greatest language since latin, but the simple fact of the matter is that in GUI arenas, C++ currently dominates.
Just curious what the opinions of others are out there.
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:2)
The Perl makefile?
If that was fixed, I would switch to a case insensitve in a second. I also would like to see space insensitve as well so my mp3 collection is easier to deal with. It seems that even maodern xargs is broken with spaces.
As someone who used to be on ADC... (Score:5)
When I first got in with ADC, I was a starving college student who could barely pay the interest on his student loans, much less pay for the latest and greatest Apple hardware to test the software I was writing (some pretty sophisticated finance software, back before I started consulting in an unrelated field -- if anyone's interested, give me a holler). Here I was, struggling to develop software that Apple's platform desperately needed, and Apple recognized this and subsidized my hardware through ADC. If they hadn't, I can assure you I would've had to give up the ghost and quit my dream.
But what are young developers today to do? Unless you're Adobe or Intuit, Apple doesn't want to hear from you. If you have several thousands of dollars to throw at an upgraded ADC membership, then you're lucky. We're not all so fortunate.
Cheers,
Froid
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:2)
Even a descriptor based compare has the potential to be faster. This:
continue:
mov eax, dword ptr [esi]
xor eax, dword ptr [edi]
and eax, 20202020
jz difference
add esi, 4
add edi, 4
loop continue
is case insensitive, and MUCH faster than the fastest case sensitive compare for C strings:
continue:
mov al, byte ptr [esi]
cmp al, byte ptr [edi]
jne difference
cmp al, 0
inc esi
inc edi
jne continue
Because it loads dword's instead of byte's.
But if you're using a real (non-C) language, you can of course do it case sensitively REP CMPSD (which IS much faster than case insensitive). But if you're using C, there's no penalty for case sensitivity.
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:2)
Historically, Unix was case-sensitive to evade the overhead of having to convert cases to do lookups on file filesystem, which preserved cases in filenames. This differs in behavior from NTFS, which preserves case, yet is case insensitive when referring to a file (unless you're running in POSIX mode).
Re:MacOS X is unfree (Score:2)
But you and I will always have access to it no matter if we give back or not, or even if MegaCorp comes along and closes up their copy of it. The "protection" clauses in the GPL are completely unnecessary to protect the code so long as the license cannot be revoked. The simple MIT license or even public domain is sufficient to protect the rights of the user.
The purpose of copyleft is not to protect the software, because the software cannot be damaged. Rather the purpose of copyleft is to protect the sensibilities of the authors.
Without that pledge, I cannot contribute my time without fear that I will have to recontribute that time all over again when I next need to access that software.
Let's argue from the point of a Free but non-copylefted software. What could Apple possibly do to the FreeBSD code base that would ever limit your access to it? They cannot revoke the license from you because they are not the owner. An neither can BSDi revoke your license because they don't have a revocation clause in the license. In short, you have nothing to fear (but your sensibilities) for contributing to the non-copylefted FreeBSD.
as you do when you patent things
I was talking about copyright and source code, which are much different things than patents. I am wholly against patents applied to algorithms and formulae. Patents are the only area where an author can take away your genuine liberties with respect to free speech and the creation of software. Don't assume that because I disagree with you in one area that I must also disagree with you in all other areas. Leave that silly illogic to the political arena.
Re:Stupid and off-topic facts. (Score:2)
However, the implementation of 255, on Windows, is, as you say, screwed-up.
First of all, that is correct, the entire path limitation is 255, actually a few characters less, because that includes separators (\) and drive letter, and colon. DOS command lines are limited to a max lenght of 255 anyway, so specifying longer paths gets to be a pain in the keister, you have to DIR
How do I know this? I've worked for tech support for several backup software companies. And I've had to lobby and fight with developers, project managers and QA people over and over to get them to recognize this problem. Fortunately, the product I work on now DOES cover your ass on WIndows. Some folks think it's *silly* to have to support paths that the file-system browser doesn't support - but the real issue is, if a customer has data there, and if we're a backup program, we need to protect ALL of the customer's data.
If you admin any Windows systems, I STRONGLY suggest you test this out ASAP.
This is a good precedent. (Score:2)
This is a great precedent for a commercial OS vendor. Free (as in beer) development tools! Be did this and was wonderful. Now that a more mainstream OS is doing maybe some other vendors will do the same.
Re:Stupid and off-topic facts. (Score:2)
And if you DO stay with HFS+, can it support traditional Unix file permissions, or are you screwed, and if you DON'T have Unix file permissions, how do you secure your fs from intruders?
Re:Why bother (Score:2)
Where do you get off calling me an idiot when you define "successfully competing" as having 5 percent of the market. Right now linux has a bigger market share then the mac does. That's not me saying that go check the stats yourself.
Oh well I sould not be insulted when someone with so little grasp of reality calls me an idiot.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
Re:We just installed....... (Score:2)
Re:Why bother (Score:2)
Why don't you study the market a bit you may come across as more intelligent.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
Re:Sure, they will try to seduce developers (Score:3)
Shaun
Re:Your point misses the target (Score:2)
The reason Macs don't tend to have resource conflicts is there's never been much stuff available for them hardware wise to begin with that didn't plug into the SCSI or serial ports. How is that an advantage? The PCI based powermacs only worked with a relative handful of cards, ones which the makers were willing to write mac drivers for. IRQ conflicts can be a pain, and they still are even after PCI was supposed to have fixed them for PCs, but I'd rather go through that pain and have a wide selection of components to choose from than not be able to get something I want for my system.
Apple HAS made shoddy drivers. Remember the problems they had a few years ago with their drivers for IDE hard drives? OS8 shipped with bad drivers that made systems such as the 6500's unstable. Having a bad serial port driver is one thing, or even a video driver that isn't quite perfect. But having a bad disk driver is pretty bad. They did fix it very quickly, but not before several customers brought their systems back because they didn't work.
Lee
Re:For those of you who are interested... (Score:2)
Simply because there is a small percentage of users who go with something else does not mean x86 is any less the standard. There are still betamax VCR's out there that some people do use. You can still find them. Does that mean that VHS has some kind of valid competition? I don't think so.
Lee
Re:Reviews? (Score:2)
The dispatch is clean and direct. There are no ugly switch statements to write, no casting of message arguments, no constructors that do reams of "pOKButton = new TButton( pDialog, ID_MY_OK_BUTTON );" just to get pointers to your controls, etc. I don't know how close Delphi comes to this level of convenience, but the whole setup is very, very elegant. It's amazing how much tedious hand-coding it eliminates. Basically your UI code boils down to just what is needed to get things to behave the way you want them to.
This is *very* similar to the way Delphi does things, in fact I think there's a lot of similarity to these tools. Delphi takes all of Windows message-passing cruftiness and wraps it up in a nice event-driven model, tying events to various controls very easily. You need not maintain large case statements, do loads of the GUI yourself, etc - Delphi takes care of all of that.
Need to write some code for when the user hits a button? Just double click the button in the Delphi interface, and start writing your code - Delphi will take care of all the plumbing.
This also results in a very, very moderate performance hit - but as you said, this is totally neglible for most of the apps out there, and its my view that Delphi is the best kept Windows development secret out there. It's such an amazing platform, and if Kylix on Linux and IB on MacOSX are similar in scope and feel, then I'm looking forward to developing my apps on both of those platforms in the near future...
Hope to see you on macosx-dev!
Soon as I can afford the $400, and have gotten my G4 up and running with all the cool tools, I'll be over there! I'm seriously looking forward to moving to the G4/MacOSX from my existing Laptop/Win98 setup for all my email and general administrative software needs...
Re:On Objective C (Score:2)
really? are you sure it's not just some fancy-schmancy jit at runtime? If you're right and the bin version really is as fast as C or derivatives, Im there
Re:Does everyone LOVE MacOS X? (Score:2)
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:2)
Okay, lets see your BASIC version. Did you do all the ISO-8859-1 characters? How about the MicroSoft characters between 0x80 and 0xA0? How about alternative 8-bit character sets? How about the German double-s? OOPS!
What happens when we have a secure service that wants to check if a file will be overwritten and it's test does not exactly match what the file system uses to check for filename equality. What happens when it's test is done on two file systems, or on a local cache that accidentally has a different algorithim htna the remote disk? Guess what? Can you say SECURITY HOLE?
This has absolutely NOTHING to do with making user-friendly searches. There is nothing that prevents an application from searching for all possible case variations or using far more complex things like spelling correction to find files. Get it?
The average user does not care and would NEVER notice case-sensitivity. In fact the average user does not see anything wrong with having several files with the same name (possibly something that should be supported somehow). You are talking about convienence for a COMMAND.COM user, even Unix shells have filename completion nowadays making filename complexity irrelevant.
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:2)
It's like on (dare I say it) a Windows system, sorta. When you name a file, the case that appears to you maintains the case you originally specified. When you create or refer to a file, though, it's normalized to lower case.
Thus, case IS maintained, because it would still have all it's uppercase characters when doing a directory listing, etc. I'm not sure your 'indirect stability' is much of an argument.
As for flexibility - when doing searches, just like you should have in programs now, you'd have the option of case sensitive or case insensitive search, there would be no difference at ALL in searches, etc, because the code that would effect this would be in the file system - the normalization of allowed filenames in a given directory would determine what can and cannot be created, and when you're looking for something, the filesystem would match it correctly if you said "gimme foo", and there was only "FOO" in the directory - you'd get "FOO". When you edit FOO, foo is edited and updated correctly.
If you rename "FOO" to "foo", it would then appear as "foo" in directory listings.
So, case IS preserved, it's just how case is being used in the INTERFACE of the system that is being effected, and is what my entire point is all about.
It seems most people participating in this little subtopic seem to agree with me, others don't understand how it would work, and it _seems_ that the ones who understand yet still disagree are only worried about the programming complexity involved.
All I can say to that last point is - if Mac & Windows can do it, it can't be all _that_ terrible difficult, now can it?
If we want Linux and the BSDs to become acceptible to desktop users, this may become a BIG sticking point, IMO.
For those of you who are interested... (Score:5)
They should leverage the PC and gain a portion of its massive market instead of trying to hold on to their own separate market, which is tiny in comparison and progressively getting smaller.
A new OS isn't going to be enough to convince very many to replace their hardware. But offer that new OS for the hardware they already own and you'll have yourself some customers. Customers equal money and market share and Apple needs all it can get of both.
Lee
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:5)
Does anyone have a GOOD reason to have a case-sensitive file system? If so, please enlighten me...
Re:A few answers to questions posed here (Score:2)
We get them from Dell too. Apple sticks their label on them, Dell sticks their label on them, otherwise they are identical.
I will never buy OSX until I can build my own hardware for x86 prices to run it on. Then I will buy it immediately.
I wonder if that day will ever com e...
Does everyone LOVE MacOS X? (Score:5)
I installed it on a G3 PowerBook with 128M of RAM. I liked it at first. But the more I used it and the more I got into the details, the less I like it.
GUI:
The thing is not fast by any means.
Just minimizing a window into the Dock would use 75% of my CPU.
They got rid of 'window shading'.
The menus - formerly one of the most consistent aspects of the MacOS - lose much of their consistency.
I think the whole Aqua thing is too 'bubbly and sweet' - of course that's just aesthetic, so I won't hold that against them.
Underneath:
It defaults to running inetd, nfsiod, portmap, and a couple of other things. To exacerbate this problem there is no GUI method of turning off these services, and the only command line method is 'kill'. To get these services to not start at boot required hacking config files (after 30 minutes of searching to find them).
They have discarded way to many Unix conventions for my liking. They have come up with their own method of 'controlling' services. They discarded the standard rc format.
They have added all kinds of odd directories like
I could go on, but I think I made my point. I use Unix and Macs and like them both for different reasonse. OS X is not Mac enough nor Unix enough for me to like it at all.
I just don't think Apple get's it . . . hopefully they'll get a clue.
Re:Reviews? (Score:2)
Just curious if you've ever had a chance to compare Interface Builder/OpenStep with something like Delphi? Delphi was a godsend for me, and the degree of power it gave me as a Windows developer was astounding - it sounds like something similar occurs with InterfaceBuilder.
If there's anyone that's used both Delphi and IB, and can give a fairly constructive comparison of the differences/similarities, I'd love to hear it. I've recently become a Delphi zealot, and avidly awate the arrival of Kylix on Linux...
I have NextStep 4.0 still, from the good old days, but I never had an opportunity to really explore the dev tools that came with it because the project I purchased it for moved over to Windows as the target platform
Re:Point of information (Score:2)
Keeping in mind that this only measures new license shipments (AKA boxes sold) it should be safe to presume that each box shipped is probably installed on multiple server and of course there are the uncounted downloads to consider too. My guess is that linux probably has around 10% of the desktop market.
IDC goes on to say IDC expects Microsoft's and Linux's shares of COE [client operating systems] shipments to grow by several points during the next five years and Apple to retain its current share, although its new COE (a public beta release is expected this fall) could pull up Apple if users approve of it.
Even if this research is full of crap and you have better numbers from some independent entity (please post the url) do you still maintain that having 7% of the desktop (your number) and 0% of the server market is "competing successfully" with MS?
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
Re:case sensitivity - why is this a good thing? (Score:2)
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Re:On Objective C (Score:2)
The thing that worries me is that Apple seems to be pushing people to use Java to develop under Cocoa. Now that is not something that I am looking forward too and I would worry about to what extent they are going to support Objective C going forward. One of the negatives about Apple is that no matter what they say you never know where they are going be in two years.
Tools *are* available via Darwin (Score:5)
Re:On Objective C (Score:2)
That said, I believe the full API is available in Java form, too. Why anyone would want to use that instead of the already existing Java API is beyond me, but there you go.
Re:Does everyone LOVE MacOS X? (Score:2)
This actually might turn out to be a Very Good Thing. The OS X config files system appears to be actually more consistent and uses XML extensively. See the excellent series of articles on the DP releases [arstechnica.com] by John Siracusa over at Ars.
I feel that there is certainly the potential in OS X for considerably reducing the time it takes to tweak configuration settings over typical Unices.I strongly urge all wise aged Linux veterans to try to look at OS X with a different pair of lenses; I actually hope that some of these "under the hood" ideas in OS X will find their way into a Linux distribution in the near future.
Re:MacOS X is unfree (Score:5)
what a terribly small world you must live in when your morality depends on giving away 100% of your property. Out here in reality I can give a meal to a homeless person and not be decried evil because I didn't give him my refrigerator, and I can give a hundred buck to the MDA and not be accused of immorality for not handing them my bank account. Does the homeless person feel dirty because I only gave him a sandwich? Does the MDA feel dirty because I haven't quit my job and volunteered full time? Of course not!
Apple giving back to the FreeBSD community isn't good enough for you types. Opening up (also known as freeing) other of their own code isn't good enough. It seems you want all or nothing. Well that's not how the world works. If you don't like it, then don't use it. But don't call them immoral or their users dirty. The real immorality is your self-righteousness. Listen, there is a lot more to morality then your petty licensing issues.
It's not the ownership of their software that concerns you, because every software except public domain is owned. Even the FSF copyrights their own software. It's not that, it's just that you haven't been given the number of permissions to use the code that you would like. There's nothing wrong with that, it's just a price that you (and I) don't want to pay. But don't call it a case of morality. That's just bogus.
How did I know that was coming?
Re:For those of you who are interested... (Score:3)
What do you think is going to happen 12 months from now when both AMD and Intel have chips running at or damned year 2 Ghz? When Via, ALI, Intel, AMD, and even Sis are all creating powerful motherboard chipsets for these CPUs? When Nvidia, 3dfx, Matrox, and ALI are marketing amazing video cards/chipsets and fighting tooth and toe-nail for a bigger piece of the video card market? What do you think will happen?
The real reason why the Macs are stuck at 500Mhz is that Apple screwed IBM and Motorola on CHRP and now neither of those companies is willing to spend money to help Apple out. Don't believe me, do a little research on it. The original plan was for CHRP systems to replace Macs and for both IBM and Motorola to produce them as well as Apple. The idea was to create a new type of open standard PC. This was what Apple originally agreed to do. But in classic Cupertino style they did an about face and screwed the entire deal. So now if Apple wants a high Mhz cpu, they're going to have to pay dearly for it. Between being the black widow of the computer industry and shooting themselves in the foot, its a wonder Apple is even in business.
As for Be, where would they be if they were still trying to sell BeBoxes? Out of business because they weren't selling. This is exactly what I was talking about when I said people wouldn't be willing to buy new or extra hardware just to use a different OS.
Long gone are the days when there was room for multiple architechtures in mass market computers. This is something that both Steve Jobs and Jean Louis Gasseee learned the hard way at Next and Be. For better or worse the x86 architecture is the standard. Why? Because it is an open standard fueled by heated competition. Look at any catagory of component in a PC. For each there are multiple firms competing for customers. That competition breeds innovation. As the market for computers grows, which it has been doing at near exponential rates for many years as the internet has become popular, that competition will increase accordingly.
If Apple expects to compete in this market they need to realize they aren't going to be able to do it with oddball hardware, even if that hardware is theoretically better. The only way Apple is going to survive and prosper in the long run is by leveraging the PC's vast market share to promote their own products, namely OSX. Will life for them be the financial miracle of old? No, but at least they'll still be in the game and at this point that will be a miracle in and of itself.
Lee
Re:Does everyone LOVE MacOS X? (Score:3)
I am hoping the people at Apple have made provisions for that. If they are targeting their OS at end users and as a desktop operating system then fine redesign the current file tree it makes good sense to simplify it. OTOH if they are targeting the enterprise they are going to need robust ways to manage multiple machines and users.
Say what you want about X (a lot of people gripe about it) but I would sorely miss being able to throw the graphical output of my applications to different machines.
Do you know if the MAC GUI is remotable like X is? It would be super cool if they built a PDF based remote viewing system.
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.