Comment Articles

The Mac is dead! Long live the Mac!

Tags:
Darwin,
Mac OS X,
WWDC,
Open Source

Stephan Somogyi AnchorDesk

Published: 04 Jun 2001 14:24 BST

The former group called me names and wanted to know why I was maligning Apple, the latter group thought I was either quite balanced or too nice.

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.

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 defence. 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.