The Mac is dead! Long live the Mac!
What I find vexing is that I didn't set out to appease or irritate either of these contingents. Oh well.
There is more than one WWDC
The representatives from the Cocoa contingent turn out to be
comparable in their fervor to Amiga zealots, and it would seem that
my criticisms of Apple's incommunicative approach to WWDC were high
blasphemy indeed. Having received this feedback from the Cocoa crowd
by mid-week, I spent some more time talking with various developers
whose companies have been making Mac products for a while. So-called
revenue-generating products.
The result of my further inquiries resulted in conclusions that had more to do with relativism than technology. A rule of thumb emerged that those who'd shipped commercial products for the Mac platform in the past weren't entirely gruntled by Apple's information dispersal policy at WWDC, whereas the proponents of the New Cocoa Order were pleased as punch with how things were going. The nutshell commentary from the seasoned Mac developer demographic was that there wasn't enough detailed information for developers writing anything other than relatively high-level applications.
I know of Mac developers who are working on brand-new, OS X-only apps and are using Cocoa to reduce the time it takes to build the UIs. But those same developers are under no illusions that Cocoa has limitations. It's useful for what it's designed to do, but it's not omnipotent, and hardly worthy of idolatry.
And despite all the bad juju directed at me of late, I'm quite looking forward to learning more about Cocoa, since it looks like it might make it easier to put a decent UI on the occasional ad hoc odd hack.
"Mac" is not an absolute
Which brings me to another observation. Mac OS X is very clearly the
future of the Mac.
We Mac users have the choice of either sticking with Mac OS X or switching platforms. It's really that simple. I further suspect that Apple will start producing hardware within the next 12 months that won't boot 9.x, and I hope the software that I need to do my work is available in native form by then.
While I despair of OS X's many and varied shortcomings -- some of which are glaring -- it would be unfair to condemn it totally in its current state. Do I think Apple shipped it with far too many problems? Absolutely. Do I think it's Apple's responsibility to fix them, rather than that of "the community?" Most assuredly.
I consider it Apple's job to deliver a competitive -- both performance- and feature-wise -- OS. If the Darwin community wants to enhance it, so much the better. But I certainly don't buy into the idea that Apple abrogates any responsibility whatsoever because Darwin is open source.
Furthermore, claiming "it's a 1.0 product" isn't a valid defense. Perpetrators of this particular spin need to reacquaint themselves with a calendar. It's the naughties, folks, and the state of the art has advanced to a degree that a "1.0" OS today is measured against a higher standard than a "1.0" OS in, say, the late '60s. The lowest common denominator has moved upward considerably.
Why OS X rocks today
As you might imagine, I don't use OS X full time today. After all, I
have work to do, and I don't have nearly the software support I need
to do it exclusively under X. But a more interesting question at the
moment is: does OS X offer sufficiently powerful new tools that I
find myself booting into it with increasing frequency? It sure does.
While I'm having various and sundry unpleasant problems getting OS X to boot at all on my machine -- which isn't entirely vanilla hardware, seeing as it's a Rev B blue & white with a Radeon PCI card and a G4 ZIF processor upgrade -- I find myself making the effort. Why? Because some of my critical apps are already carbonated, and using them in conjunction with OS X beats the heck out of any alternative.
This week, for example, I had an acute need to perform data analysis on 2.4 gigabytes of compressed web server logs. Under 9.x, I would've had to decompress the lot and use up a ton of hard disk space. Under 10.0.3, I just download Compress::Zlib from CPAN, compile it, wrangle with 'make test' until I decide that the tests it's failing won't affect what I'm doing, and now I can crunch all that data with my Perl scripts while leaving it in its compressed form on disk. This is a huge benefit for me.
Not only that, but I can use Perl via Terminal as well as BBEdit and PCalc, all at the same time. Very cool indeed.
Why giving dev tools away is good
In the coming months I intend to look at some of the new -- and often
quite innovative -- software being released for OS X as a direct
result of Apple including development tools with OS X. I said it before, and I'll say it again: putting
development tools in the box was an excellent idea.
Some of this newly-developed software plugs functional gaps in today's OS X, others offer capabilities that weren't available under 9.x. My current favorite runs-on-X-but-isn't-available-on-9 app is Goban. Classic Mac OS has no credible Go apps, and the big names in Go software on the Windows side don't care about Mac support.
But thanks to Sen:te's Goban, I can now play Go against my Mac. While I'd quite like a 9x9 and a 13x13 mode (for those quick mental-cobweb-clearing melées), this still beats nothing at all.
Given that Apple devoted not one session to Mac OS 9 at WWDC -- the CarbonLib session was about as close as it got -- the writing for the venerable, mature, and familiar Classic Mac OS is on the wall. The software story on Mac OS X isn't great yet, incessant and strident railway metaphors notwithstanding. OS X has a long and hard way to go, but it's definitely showing promise.
The whole ipf fracas has not passed ZDNet columnist Stephan Somogyi by unnoticed. Look for his thoughts on this and related issues next week.