Women in Technology

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Article:		The Changing Mac Community
Subject:		MacOS X synergy
Date:		2002-03-06 20:33:10
From:		wfolta

If you're a MacOS X skeptic, go back to the article and read the comments by the UNIX geeks who are excited about MacOS X as a programming platform. A cool platform with free (and advanced) Internet/hacker/geek/UNIX tools plus a cool graphical front end is 100% the key to the continued life of the Mac! No programmers, no programs, dead OS. Excited programmers, free tools, cutting-edge tools and graphics, thriving platform. It's that simple. Remember the old days of the Mac where the coolest new (graphical, audio, artistic, educational) software came out first for the Mac? Remember when there were Mac-only killer apps that never made it to the PC? Those days were long gone with MacOS 9. You could count the number of Mac-first/Mac-only developers on one hand. Most of the remaining developers were not only Mac-second, but Mac-second-class. (Or Mac-never.) That's the way a platform dies. So get over the worship of the Perfect Interface, change some habits, and be darn thankful that geeks like MacOS X. (Speaking of the Perfect Interface, there are many cool products to improve Apple's interface including DragThing and SNAX. DragThing is a necessity. SNAX is a replacement for the Finder! Imagine trying to do something like that under MacOS 9.)

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

Open Source v.s. Proprietary
2002-03-07 20:04:04 gerald_shields [View]

Though I'm down with what you're saying, there more to it. These Mac-second developers were charging a premimum for these Mac-only applications and the Mac-never developers weren't bothering with Classic Mac OS because it either didn't or partially support modern OS features. With Mac OS X, those developers now have to deal with an array of open source software that was primary on Linux and BSD. Moveover, some Mac-never developers are now considering, developing or shipping Mac versions of their applications. That's great for users and consumers in the long run. Now, long time Mac developer must justify the cost of their applications versus open source alternatives, some of them having the same or better quality. For an example, Blue World Communications, Inc which developed a popular Mac program called Lasso,published of 56 page white paper report comparing Blue World Lasso Professional 5 to PHP 4.1.x.