Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

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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Thursday, September 26, 2002
22:28 - The geeks are won http://www.byte.com/documents/s=7620/byt1032475416823/0923_bar.html	(top)
According to this article in Byte, Mac OS X has the Linux desktop world thoroughly in rout-- and has just about captured the hearts and minds of anybody with an eye toward development, as well. I happened to install Mac OS X on a Mac Power8500 back in 1999. That was a pre-pre-pre-beta, and not much besides the installation worked. Aqua wasn't in that version yet, and so I quickly decided that Mac OS X was going to be a nonissue for me. Meanwhile, I continued to be generally unhappy with the Linux desktop environment. Recently I went to give a speech at a conference and was startled to see all these cool Mac iBook and PowerBook laptops. It being a Linux conference, I was convinced they all had Linux running on their notebooks. But then, a young geek of maybe 19 or 20 sitting next to me in a conference room opened up his iBook. I was immediately attracted by a very intriguing and pleasant desktop on the laptop's gorgeous screen. I looked closely and it wasn't anything I knew, certainly not Linux. The kid's wireless card worked flawlessly while Linux on my IBM Thinkpad insisted there was not enough signal where I was sitting. Then, I recognized the unmistakable dock bar of Mac OS X. I watched in jealous disgust as the guy next to me fired up a terminal window and ssh'ed to some server and ran a pine mail session. During the conference I saw maybe 20 or 25 people running Mac OS X. They outnumbered the few people usually coming to Linux conferences with FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD on their notebooks. That's it, I decided. I am going to get a Mac OS X laptop, too. That was a few weeks ago. Indeed. This guy goes on to explain how a true geek can, with a certain amount of hassle, download and compile the necessary tools to turn an OS X machine into a first-rate development platform. Though I must say, this guy "gets" the Mac about as well as Kim Komando does, which is to say not at all. He sneers at the GUI mindset and the concept of only using the Terminal when you have to, instead of spending all of your time in the Terminal and only resorting to the horrors of GUI-ness when you want to try watching a DVD or using the Web or some similarly obscure task. One thing he seems not to understand is that of most of the UNIX tools he describes obtaining, most don't have to be downloaded in source form, tweaked, supplemented with independently installed libraries, compiled, or anything. Pico, Pine, Python, Perl, and even all kinds of software that doesn't begin with P either exists by default in the OS, or can be downloaded in a packaged binary form. Even hard-core Linux and BSD types understand the convenience benefits of using packages where one can get away with it, and because the Mac is a self-contained and predictable platform (unlike Linux, which can be in any of about thirty-four thousand different distributions and OS layouts), it's a matter of downloading a disk image, opening it up, and running the installer. And even that, of course, is a whole lot uglier than the typical native Mac application, which you install by opening up the disk image and dragging the application to whatever folder in your hard disk you want to keep it in. (You can even run it from the disk image if you want.) He also gets a number of details wrong. His own TiBook's screen isn't 14.1 inches, it's 15.2. Jaguar isn't based on FreeBSD 3.4; it's been updated to the codebase of FreeBSD 4.4 and 4.5, as you can see from the excellent Timeline of UNIX History by �ric L�ven�z (if you're a UNIX geek and you don't have a copy of this printed out and strung across your wall, you're a L0oZ3r). And he doesn't appear to "get" any of what makes Cocoa applications so cool-- he shows the three lines of code needed to create a Cocoa list box, with proper marveling awe, but he quickly retreats to the comfort of his home-grown C/C++ projects and integrating QT and such into them (Fie! Pfaugh!). Ah well. One of these days, the hard-core geeks will all-- to one degree or another-- come to understand what having a consistent and predictable GUI with limited input options and attractive, efficient layout means to the user, even to the expert user with high demands on an OS. What I find encouraging about all this is that for over a year now, we haven't heard any grousing about "candy-like UI buttons" or "Fisher-Price kiddie toys" when it comes to OS X. We don't hear people refusing to give the Mac a second glance because "It only has one mouse button!" Instead, all we hear is the tappity-tappity of the keyboards of iBooks and TiBooks, stretching out AirPort fingers to each other, gleefully discovering iTunes and iDVD and .Mac, whispering a furtive eulogy for the traditional derision heaped upon Apple by anybody who knows how to use a command line. Now the only stumbling block that remains is all those Windows users...