A piece ‘a Me

via eWeek

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, calls on Linux developers to make the presentation layer of desktop Linux applications even more attractive to users than Apple’s Mac OS.

Yup. In short, this is what they need to do. Screw GNOME, KDE and the rest, we need something that looks stunning (even on relatively modest hardware), works stunning and is stunningly easy to develop beautiful and functional apps on. Like… well… OS X.

BUT… and this is a big but (no, not a big butt, that’d be crass and schoolboy-ish), it’s not going to happen on ‘Linux’ like Shuttleworth says. Why? Because the open source community that controls ‘Linux’ and all things attached to it has aptly demonstrated over the past few years that, try as they might, they are still incapable of producing something as tidy, elegant and good looking as Apple’s Aqua/Quartz model. Yeah we can have flashy rotating 3D crap everywhere, and window transforms that actually bring on nausea. Yes we can had a good development model. But like everything the product is ugly, over-complicated and ultimately unsatisfactory, no matter who does it.

The answer? One Linux distributor/author has to do an Apple, take a good basis from open source and build a world-beating layer above it that makes it the desktop everyone wants. Too many cooks. Shut out the extra cooks and make your own broth and it’ll turn out just like you want it.

Yeah tons of folk will deride me and call me a fan boy. I don’t care. It’s not Apple I like, I used them as an example because Shuttleworth did, and because they are a good example. The key is in the method. Because it works. Harness, control and regulate, while using open source as inspiration, testing stuff and developing new ideas, filtering and channelling that into the non-OSS final product. Works for Apple, Sun, Red Hat et al.

Linux won’t succeed without regulation. Linux isn’t a socialist community, its Anarchy. Anarchy isn’t a system, it’s an anti-system.

While looking for something totally different (Applescript Tutorials for idiots), I stumbled over this brilliant article. It’s basically a rant about how old skool OS 7-9 Mac users are ruining OS X’s stability and security by using bad hacks to do stuff instead of programming it properly, or accepting it cannot be done securely.

What the hell am I rambling about? Well lets put it simply. OS X is written on top of UNIX. UNIX has things in place that have been crafted carefully over decades to ensure stability and security. When Apple wrote OS X they carried these right on up to the user level, making the whole OS stable and secure. Yet still these morons insist on hacking it about, like they did OS 9 and earlier, to make stuff work the easy way. This compromises the integrity of what is otherwise a great OS.

Take ‘Unsanity’ (singled out right at the beginning of said article). They are the Kings of Beige Box Idoits™ in my opinion. Their most popular product, APE, is an open framework for bad and dirty hacks for OS X, basically. The fact it exists at all is a travesty. The fact it caused Apple huge headaches and bad press during the launch of OS X 10.5 Leopard is an apt and vivid illustration of just how bad it really is.

The article goes on to describe also a paper from a dev conference specifically detailing how and why overriding application behaviour is good. I’ll give you a clue IT ISN’T GOOD!

It’s clear this breed of Beige Box Idoits™ has no clue how a real Operating System is supposed to work. They probably belong to the same camp of half-assed developers that keep complaining that Windows Vista’s User Access Control has stopped their application from working.