Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Wednesday, May 22, 2002

11:10 - Y'know, this is getting kinda monotonous.
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2865139,00.html

(top)

It's getting so the articles on ZDNet are now a pleasure to read, rather than something I avoid like the plague. This time it's a Coursey column on photo-manipulation software, namely After Shot from Jasc (the Paint Shop Pro people); and while he likes the software, he has two problems with it:

The photo-manipulation software that's built into Windows XP obviates the need for 90% of After Shot's features
He's spoiled from using iPhoto, and by comparison both After Shot and the built-in XP stuff blow monkey chunks.

It's already gotten to the point where whenever there's a tech-press article about MP3 players, you're guaranteed to see the iPod mentioned at least once; if the article is about DV editing, it won't be able to avoid mentioning iMovie, even if it's a PC-centric article. iTunes has similar mindshare among music organizers. There hasn't been an article about new-PC design in months that hasn't mentioned the new iMac. (Hell, the Chrysler Crossfire concept car which showed at Geneva recently was touted as having translucent gauges and a sleek interior design that are "iMac-inspired"-- though I suppose that means they're still inspired by the old one). And now, even though Coursey is trying to review a piece of photo-editing software for Windows, and speaking to a Windows audience, he can't resist throwing in a dig about iPhoto. Nothing blatant, nothing confrontational, just the kind of "You know-- all this would be so much easier if you just got a Mac" line that PC users hate so much to hear from smug Mac people.

Welcome to the Dark Side, David.

Speaking of PC people, though-- it's a ZDNet article, which means (yes, you guessed it) TalkBack Morons!

"Apple has DEVELOPED their entire platform - the OS MacOS X is just a part of that platform."

And I'm really tired of all those naysayers arguing that the GUI was really invented by Xerox's PARC and that Apple just stole it faster than M$.

This is the company run by his highness SJ and I think one of Steve's ancestors was the one that invented the wheel.

Come on, Apple has been around forever and has invented evverything related to computers. If you go to a computer museum you can even see a little Apple logo on the back of ENIACs behind all those tubes. Hell, Apple invented the vacuum tube itself!

Oooooh, he's trying sarcasm now! Doug and Dinsdale Piranha would be so proud. Look at 'im, he's using dramatic irony, metaphor, pathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire. He's vicious.

As (fortunately) this person's respondents sternly note, this whole "Apple stole the GUI from Xerox PARC" blood-libel is yet another urban legend from the late 80s that people just won't let go. To use a term that's been popular in the blogosphere lately, these people ascribe moral equivalence to Microsoft's whole-cloth theft of Apple's GUI and to Apple's having incorporated some ideas from a non-profit corporate think-tank whose purpose was to develop ideas to be incorporated into commercial products.

First of all: Apple was already working on their GUI before they ever visited PARC. They'd already developed menus and icons and a mouse-driven UI, and when they saw the SmallTalk demo at PARC, they were inspired (by the sight of such a thing in action) to develop it still more fully. They then paid Xerox for the intellectual property and hired PARC engineers such as Jef Raskin and Bruce Horn to head the UI development team at Apple. PARC would never have considered developing their SmallTalk system into a product for themselves or for Xerox-- their purpose in existence was to generate ideas to be further developed by other commercial entities.

So then, Apple licensed an Application Suite (which included a large part of the Mac UI) to Microsoft so that they could develop apps like Word and Excel (or their immediate precursors) for the PC; this licensing was done under duress, as Bill Gates had threatened to pull those applications from the Mac unless Apple gave them the code which would allow them to use the same kind of cool windowing stuff on DOS. Then Microsoft took this Application Suite, reverse-engineered it, massaged it, and out came Windows 1.0. (That's why the function names in Windows were the same as in the Mac codebase-- as those who recall the early Apple-vs-Microsoft lawsuits will remember.)

This whole story is told by the people who were directly involved in it, namely Raskin and Horn, over at MacKiDo.

Anyone wanting anti-Apple myths and slogans to chant will need to invent new ones, because I'm sick of hearing this one.