Oblomovka

2002-07-09»

Well, it's day four of messing around with Loaner - Cory's old 466 ibook he lent me on Independence Day. I was keen to poke around with the development side of MacOS X, so I bought me a copy of Garfinkel and Mahoney's Building Cocoa Applications on Saturday, and got to work. Inconclusive conclusions so far:

Things I like

• That the development tools and docs are gratis these days. Yay!
• The old Project Builder/Interface Builder stuff is great, in a weird mid-nineties timewarp kind of way. What all the NeXT addicts endlessly go on about is true: it's a breeze to get up to speed. I managed to get my first dumb application up and running by Sunday afternoon, and that's with no knowledge of Objective C, precious little remembrance of C, no clue about AppKit - and not too much blind clicking on buttons. Gads, I'm almost looking forward to grokking AppleScript.
• The built-in WebDAV support (in Finder's "Connect to Server") is cool. I can already see some applications for that.
• the fact I can run all this on a 466 256KB iBook without strain.
• Fink. Natch. What can I say? I'm a Debian boy at heart.

Things I'd do differently (given I'm such a darn free software wonk):

• I think there should be an officially supported "Source" folder in the app bundle. Apple's talked about encouraging open source, and having this as an option would make sharing source on the MacOS a breeze. You could stash the code for GPL'd or BSD'd software inside, and still be able to hand people a single application file. It'd turn app binaries into little Kinder Eggs of source. And somebody could sell a shareware utility called SuperAppCompressorDeluxe which deleted that directory from all your apps, and charge $14.95 for it.
• It's a damn shame that the NIB format is a proprietary binary affair. Having non-text bits of a development project is nasty - it makes archiving and oversight much harder, ties you down to one development environment, and scares the horses.

Things that, after all these years, remind me I'm back in Macland

• Dozens of open applications, before I remember command-Q
• Dreaming of a keyboard shortcut for "Hide Others"
• Took me five days, but I still found myself messing around with File and Creator Types. Thank goodness Quick Change kept up with the times.

And yes, you're right. This is a displacement activity :).

2002-07-06»

Incoming!

I've been lent a MacOS X iBook! This is great news, because I've been curious about this new OS for months - ever since I saw how many hackers were playing with it at Emerging Tech. Even better, the unspoken condition of the loan is that I do some open source hacking on the platform.

I'll be writing most of my experiences up on the Forwarding Address: OS X" blog, but I thought I'd dump these notes down here first, because they're a bit less technical and very unformed.

Much of the actual OS is gently familiar from my everyday Debian life. It's the social differences that are disorienting me most of all. I've been looking around for good Mac sites the past few days, and getting a lot of culture shock.

Rumour Sites

Despite what Slashdot might imply, I don't think it's possible to maintain rumours for very long in Free Software land. "A little birdy tells me that Alan Cox might be working on a new I2O implementation!". Either the object of the rumour comes along and grumpily puts everyone straight, or (if it's a more subjective piece of gossip), two gangs of fanatics come along and flamewar each other until no one cares what the truth is anymore. In MacOS land, the only person who appears to know what's really going on except Steve Jobs. And he's never on IRC. It's exciting!

"User-contributed tips"

Mac Websites have this quality of "I've been exploring and stumbled upon this cool (yet mysterious) trick! How endlessly curious is my strange friend!". Linux sites have much less of this idea of PC as mysterious black box. Tips tend to come with long explanations attached as to why they work, and why all other ways of doing it are Considered Dangerous.

Shareware

I'll say it: paying for software seems eery, old-fashioned, and frankly, a bit spiv-like. You'll share this with me, but won't give me the source code, and cripple it until I give you money? What definition of "share" is this? Let alone having to pay to see what the top shareware items even are. It seems so stingy. Oh, and yet, so tempting...

Not saying that any of this is bad - just that it will get some getting used to. Thank goodness for the homely familiarity of fink, hey?

Seth has done a great job at an objective explanation of what Palladium is (and congratulations to Microsoft for explaining it to the EFF without an NDA). It's reassured me on a couple of points - for instance, it's possible for a 386 Linux to take advantage of the Palladium's features, and the Palladium doesn't leak ID data about the machine.

I still think that it has strong monopolistic tendencies however. Given that anything in the Palladium can trash anything outside of it, but not vice-versa, there's a strong market pressure to move into the Palladium context for most uses. And now we have a situation where not only are specific applications OS-specific, but specific application's data files are OS-specific too. This is only as bad as, say, the Microsoft Word or SMB situation was a few years ago. But there'll be no reverse-engineered OpenOffice or SAMBA projects. It still encourages homogenuity, even while being on the face of it platform-agnostic.

2002-07-03»

The DTI has issued a report that says "compelling content will drive the next wave of broadband services according to the study" and recommends setting up a "Broadband Channel", "a Channel 4 for the broadband age".

This kind of out-and-out idiocy - that broadband adoption is being held up by a lack of movies to watch - seems to be widespread on both sides of the channel. So far, I've seen it mainly trotted out to back braindead bills like the CBDTPA, or to fleece gullible ISP's (who are talked into desperately teaming up with low-grade, low-budge "content providers"). This was @Home's business plan, and BT Interactive's too. Both roaring successes.

Broadband's not being held up by a lack of bloody content. Oh yeah, I get that all the time: "Oooh, I'd gladly fork out for a 2 meg connection, but you know, I just don't think there's enough on the Internet for me right now." Broadband's being held up by simple technical reasons, and the telcos reluctance to lose their monopoly on the last mile.

2002-07-02»

He was one of the original Class of '94 UK net entrepreneurs, and now runs another.com. That boy thinks too much.