::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Paul Mison]

OK, I'm going to take the less travelled fork on this thread, perhaps.
And hopefully come up with something interesting. Grief knows if it'll
work. I think I wittered a bit too much. Ah well.

On Sat, Feb 02, 2002 at 10:43:59PM +0000, Alex Robinson wrote:

>  >>>> classic feel (if not look) <<<<
> Too right. And kudos to Apple: quite a few of the "hacks" I installed 
> have already been subsumed into the built-in prefs. (But let's hope they 
> pay off developers who pioneer great new functionality rather than just 
> rip off the idea - in this respect Apple has always seemed to lag behind 
> Microsoft's much better business sense)

This reflects (I think- damn mutt not being good at doing more than one
thing- GUIs with multiple windows for multiple documents good!) Celia's
question about things being bought by Apple to go into the interface,
once people have used them.

There are three distinct approaches Apple have seem to have shown here;

Pre system 6:

* We control the interface. Don't mess. Even if you turn up with good
  ideas, we don't care. (Think about who Apple's CEO was here. I'll be
  coming back to that.)

System 7 - about Mac OS 8.5:

* Oh, people are using MultiFinder, Superclock (it put a clock into the 
  menu bar- what a good idea, eh!), Windowshade (oh, things can be
  hidden away, a bit). We shall pay the authors to either come and work
  for us or sell their code to us. Sod the bloat.

Mac OS 8.5 - Mac OS 9

* People are using Popup Folders, alt-tab interfaces and so on. But
  instead of licensing them, we shall build our own that are subtly
  different (and potentially conflicting). We can barely find what's
  in the code these days, so we'd better get users somehow.

Now, what's the current model? Well, given the CEO above is Jobs, and
Steve Knows Best, I fear the likely model is 'sod the enhancements,
they're defiling the Great Work'. Of course, I could be wrong.

(Side note. Recently I've installed both KDE, Gnome and the pet desktop
component of our house, further [0]. KDE and Gnome both struck me as
horrible, but almost every complaint I raised with housemates was met by
'oh, that's an option'. Well, whoop do doo, but I don't have time to
navigate the insane amount of panels to actually fix stuff; it should do
something akin to Just Working. (The same housemate also pointed out
that a lot of these enviroments have all the candy switched on by
default- 'look, we're so l33t'. Well, great. But that just means I have
to switch it all off...

In the end I've stuck with further. Partly because it looks like the
stuff around the edge of the screen on Rez (ie it's pretty) and partly
because, for me, I find almost much everything under X is so close to
unusably bad, I might as well choose things that look nice, as nothing
works right. I know, I'm a bad man.)

Alex went on:

>  >>>> I want docks <<<<
> 
> And fully customisable at that
>      http://www.wpi.edu/~phoenix/macosx/dock.html

Interface Mafia's redesigned Dock Preferences is interesting. Arguably
it goes too close to Unix style 'here's *everything*', but I liked it.

http://www.interfacemafia.org/articles/200108/200108-ar0001.shtml

>  >>>> I don't want open/save dialogs <<<<
> 
> Well in an ideal world that would be lovely, making it all happen in the 
> finder
>     http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06594

I think there are two great lost GUIs of the 90s. one is BeOS (which
Alex mentions in passing). The other is Risc OS (is that right? I never
remember where the space goes).

In Risc OS, when you come to save a document, you get an iconic
representation of it to pop into a folder (interestingly, it enforced
the concept that you couldn't drop on a closed folder, which most modern
file managers allow). The really clever bit was that you could also drop
the icon onto running applications (as displayed in a rather nice dock
implementation, although I don't know what it was called) and it would
open there (if possible? Matt knows more about Risc OS than I do).
Pipelining for graphical apps- now *that's* an idea.

>  >>>> I want glue <<<<
>  >> The great white hope
> 
> AppleScript Studio looks like it's shaping up to be funky funky 
> functional. But a) while it's going to be great for writing apps it's a 
> bit too laborious for knocking out everyday run-o-the-mill scripts b) 
> Applescript support remains patchy in many (most?) apps and where it 
> exists does so in a sometimes truncated form and certainly wildly 
> diverging functions and keywords from app to app.

>From what I've heard about ASS (great acronym guys) it's not so
wonderful. Sure, it can talk Applescript. But in a great NIH style, it's
not properly OSA based, so you can't, say, drop in Javascript (or,
hypothetically, Perl) to do the things it can. (You can, however, get an
OSA Javascript for the older AppleScript editor (I forget the name now).

Alex is also right about OSA not ever getting as widespread as it should
have done. It could have been wonderful, if even a couple more apps had
been recordable a couple of years earlier. Sadly Photoshop's scripting
support still sucks rocks, and even BBEdit was only made recordable,
what, a year ago? 

> *cough*
> 
> [0] I've wanted this since 1996 when I encountered Apple's .mcf format - 
> the whizzygee fly-through mode was pants (and all those Brain/Fractal 
> Map style visualisations suck too), but the simple tree-style browsing 
> (lists, lists, lists) opened my eyes to how things could and should be 
> organised. I even toyed with learning Frontier to attempt to implement 
> my own system but (un)fortunately the learning curve at the time was 
> just too steep. As well as the fact that the task itself would have 
> been, er, still is, beyond my capabilities. And then sometime late last 
> year I read that piece about that BeOS guy's conversion to OSX - the 
> future has been and gone.

In case anyone has missed this, it should be required reading
(especially the way attributes enabled the Tracker to effectively do the
jobs that iTunes and, now, iPhoto (to some extent) do, without needing
those other apps to exist). There are other interesting bits in there
to.

http://www.birdhouse.org/macos/beos_osx/

[0] http://further.sf.net/ [1]
[1] recycled brainfart: when asked about a word, infobots should go
    to sf.net and see if it exists as a project there. a lot of things
    asked about on #london.pm turn out to be Sourceforge projects. [2]
[2] other brainfart (thanks veeg): a bot called brainfart to record
    silly ideas in the hope someone might implement them [3]
[3] see, going recursive now :)

-- 
:: paul
:: the future has been and gone