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Saturday, March 9, 2002
15:22 - Another Mac Conversion
http://www.gamerspress.com/article.php?sid=1709

(top) link
This one's getting Slashdotted like there's no tomorrow. It's the story of a recent convert from Linux (and Windows before that) to OS X; it's the UNIX stuff that he really likes, and he's got a few issues with the Mac UI quirks that he's not used to. Here's the e-mail I just wrote him:

Hi--

I'm sure you're getting plenty of mail already, considering how Slashdotted your article on your OS X conversion is at the moment. But there are a couple of things I wanted to mention about it.

First of all, your run through the platforms over the years pretty closely mirrors mine. I had an Apple //c+ way back when; then got a 386 for DOS (I always did like DOSSHELL better than Windows 3.1), then a series of Windows boxes while I used Macs at work and enjoyed the hell out of them. Then I discovered Linux, and what was more to my taste, FreeBSD-- and got to be as conversant with it as I really could be (just wrote FreeBSD Unleashed, in fact). But a couple of years ago, with dot-com stock bucks, I got myself a G4/450, and that's where my Mac conversion happened. I've been working with OS X since the Public Beta, sending in tons of feedback, and I helped stir up the grass-roots storm that got Apple to redesign their app-binding system in 10.1.

Type and Creator codes are one of those things that I always found so elegant about the classic Mac OS. Filenames should *not* be relied upon for app binding. They're mutable meta-data; the user should be completely free to change filenames without them losing their bindings to the apps they can and will open in. I like being able to name a file "My 2000 Taxes" without having to worry about tacking an ugly ".pdf" onto the end or else it'll stop working.

All apps have a four-letter Creator signature, and a list of file types they will accept. If a file has a Type code of "JPEG", you can drag it over Preview, PictureViewer, Photoshop, GraphicConverter-- anything that says it will accept JPEG files-- and it will darken to show that it will open the file. Similarly, you can set the Creator code on different JPEG files so that some will open in Preview, some in Photoshop, and still others in MSIE. This flexibility is crucial for graphic artists and anybody who works with files in several different apps-- and it's much, much more elegant than Windows' global single-app-per-extension model, where if you remove the extension the file becomes orphaned.

But OS X has been trying to incorporate extension-based mapping as well as Type and Creator codes. Extensions have a global mappings table (which as yet we don't have access to, but we should). This is ostensibly so we can use files that we get from the Internet without having to map Type and Creator codes onto them-- but that's what the Internet Control Panel did in the classic OS, and it worked fine. It was a layer on the file-creation subsystem that put standardized type/creator codes onto new files downloaded from the Net, based on extensions, just like the executable flag that gets set on applications and registers their Creator codes with the Desktop database whenever they're written onto disk during installation.

But this meant that files could now be orphaned if you dared to name them things like "My 2000 Taxes". Horror! So we laid the feedback bomb on Apple, and in 10.1 they made it so each file's extension was hideable on a per-file basis, and you could hide or unhide it manually or through the file-naming process. This way, files sent FROM an OS X machine would open properly under Windows or UNIX, and we'd have the freedom to name them as we see fit, at least on the presentation layer. Plus it protects against "picture.jpg.jpg" and "virus.gif.vbs" issues, which are a direct result of Windows' stupid global extension-hiding "feature".

Anyway... yeah, the Command+O thing for opening files is a little counterintuitive. But like most things in the Mac UI, it has a rationale. The thinking goes, if you're starting a program, you're using the mouse to get to it. But if you're using your keyboard, generally what you're doing is manipulating filenames. It comes from the same mindset that doesn't put keyboard/arrow-key shortcuts on menu items and dialog boxes; it means we don't have the total freedom from the mouse that Windows has, but it does have the benefit of limiting keyboard shortcuts to in-app functionality, which simplifies matters for less powerful users. After all, the Mac UI *is* designed primarily for a shallow learning curve, and so UI elements like contextual right-click menus and arrow-key navigation and launching apps from keystrokes are avoided. It's the one-button mouse philosophy-- it seems limiting, but it's all got rationale.

And finally, the thing about having to Command+Q to quit apps even if their windows are all closed... well, the issue is that on the Mac, the currently active application takes over the entire desktop context. In apps that in Windows would have that big ugly MDI interface (like Word and Photoshop), in the Mac the whole idea is that you could open the application and have it running even if there aren't any open files in it. it's a framework into which you can open files to work with. Some apps, though, *can't* really be useful without an open window, and so they do quit if you close that window. Most of the Utilities are like that, and iPhoto is too. Some aren't (like iTunes), and while in some cases it's because you can have multiple windows open (even if you don't usually), sometimes it would indeed be better to quit when the last window closes. IE is a good example of that.

Oh, and one more thing: Have you tried OmniWeb? You wanna see smooth text, you just gotta see web pages in OmniWeb. http://www.omnigroup.com

Thanks again for a great read! Power to the White Earbud Posse!

Brian


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