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?