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| Friday, January 4, 2002 |
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Apple outside 
| | Chris Pirillo says rumors say Apple will announce running on Intel or something, at Macworld in a couple of days. There's a public lead on that one: look at the top guy in the list of Darwin Committers. Qualifier: nothing wrong with Darwin running on Intel. It is, after all, BSD, which is all over Intel already anyway. But still: why not add to the buzzflow? |
Sweet
| | Paul treats us to a raft of low-cost and no-cost improvements the shareware weenies are making to OS X. Most appreciated. I've implemented them all. No problem. Now I finally have Windowshade, and Classic-like Apple and application switcher menus (at either end of the menu bar) again. |
Yes
| | The Obvious: Sure "markets are conversations" but isn't everything? |
A practical definition
| | Want to know the difference between a journalist and a Journalist? Try to get a press badge at a trade show. |
| | Key words: commercialand media. |
| | I think it's a Good Thing that blogs are neither. |
Didn't know that
| | Tim Berners-Lee: At the time, the "X" close box was unique to NeXT, before Windows copied it. |
| | Another interesting thing: The Web was designed as something of a writing processor: |
| | The "Link" menu you can see. "Mark all" would remember the URI of where you were. "MArk selection" would make an anchor (link target) for the selected text, give it an ID, and remember the URI of that fragment. "Link to Marked" would make a link from the current selection to whatever URI you had last marked. So making a link involved browsing to somewhere interesting, hitting Command/M, going to the document you were writing and selecting some text, and hitting Command/L. "Link to new" would create a new window, prompt for a URI (ugh - it should have made one up!) and make a link from the selection to the new document. You never saw the URIs - you could of course always find documents by following the link to them. |
| | The "style" menu was interesting -- you could load a style sheet to define how you liked your documents rendered. You could also set the paragraph style to an HTML element's style - as lists didn't nest, the user could think of the process as styles (heading1, heading 2, list element, etc) and then this implied an HTML structure when the document was written back. |
OS ReduX
| | Private and public responses to my remarks about OS X (below) run straight to the poles. On the one hand, I've been pointed to a raft of mostly negative stuff: |
| | And on the other, I've been on the phone with several people who love the shit out of it. The most recent (just hung up a minute ago) is a Linux guy with a NeXT and Apple background who is positively gaga over the OS, including it's much-criticized UI (which turns out to be much more customizable than I had thought). |
| | Somewhere in there was another guy, a former Mac developer now working on Linux, who said there was no way, after getting screwed repeatedly by Apple in the 80s, that he'd ever go back again. |
| | Whatever. Anything that attracts this much opinion can't be all bad. |
Digging
| | ...when you substantiate opinion with proof, it begins to leave the realm of opinion and starts to enter the realm of fact. I am currently thinking that opinion and fact are on a continuum dependent on the degree of substantiation. |
| | My response: yes, but that's not the only continuum. We all have agendas. Degrees of honesty. Varying levels of skill and time. Also deadlines and editors with personalities. They all play. |
| | In his answer to Mike's latest question, Tom crafts an essay titled "Doc's paradox" (which derives from something I wrote here). |
| | It's deep shit, and real good, as Tom's shit tends to be. As I recall, Tom is well-educated on the matter of capital-J journalism, having graduated from Columbia's school of the same. Whether I have the facts right about that or not (and should it matter? I dunno), he hits the nail right through the board with this one: |
| | American Journalism acquires its passion, its drive, its standing and its professional credentials from its promise to overcome the problems inherent in Human Nature having to do with access to important matters of Reality and of Truth. Yet in its Hotspur-like impatience to get on with the quest, Journalism always seems to ignore the roots of the very difficulties that both complicate and fuel its practice. |
| | If this isn¹t a full blown ideology, I don¹t know what is. |
| | It's interesting to me that many of the people Tom points to, including the separate Cluetrain authors, are journalists of Sixties vintage (Weinberger a bit less so, but only chronologically). It was the Sixties that gave us Tom Wolfe's New Journalism — a term that he coined. Here's what he said about it in the Nineties: |
| | I was a journalist. I was reporting on a new scene. All of the Sixties were like that, really, one new experience after another. Had I become a part of all of the worlds that I covered at that time, there wouldn't have been much left of me by 1970. I never approached any of them with the idea of liking or disliking it, I felt more like Cortéz or somebody discovering them, discovering new lands. It was very exciting, and in terms of journalism and writing, it was pure gold. After all, the Sixties had ways of living that have shaped the rest of the century. |
| | That's how I felt about journalism at the time, though I had did much more standard and anonymous journalistic work than the stuff Wolfe was up to in publications like The New York Review of Books. He was the Michael Jordan of the business: the best at a game he redefined. I was a drone writing features and covering traffic accidents at a local paper in New Jeresy. |
| | And maybe that's why I get all hoary (and hell, whorey) about blogging. What you get here is all me, all fun, and no more Serious than laughing. It's the obverse of Journalism: something that doesn't take too much time, and you don't do for somebody else. |
| | By the way, Mike has some opnions of his own. |
How do you spell that again?
| | Peterme: Frankly, Doc's getting a little hoary in his unremitting blog love, but that's another story. |
OS Xcess
| | But both fail to credit (or, perhaps, care about) a deeper virtue of OS X: that at the level where the OS does its toughest work, it doesn't have or need a GUI at all. That's because OS X is a breed of Unix, with a command line interface no different than that of Linux, Solaris and BSD. This is a huge attraction to geeks for whom any operating system that won't let you open a command shell isn't an operating system. There is a significant market here, if not a massive one, and it bears watching. In fact, it's my job at Linux Journal to watch stuff like this. |
| | I got some help from a friend on the phone today. He was telling me about all the cool new hacks that were happening on OS X, and how some of the best were coming from the free software and open source camp. And this guy is not a Linux weenie, either. He's a writer, like me. Interesting. |
| | Anyway, while Apple and its critics focus on buzz around Aqua and all that slick UI stuff, weenies like the guys at the Fink Project are having fun adding functionality to Darwin and making OS X a better and better operating system every day. Just as significantly, their work is drawing back into Apple's camp those science and technical types that bolted when the company went to hell back in the 80s. |
| | I'm going to Macworld on Sunday, and look forward to seeing what all the buzz is about. But what I'm really interested in is what the developers are up to. |
| | Yes, it's nice that Microsoft has a native version of Office working on OS X. But the real energy going on around OS X is coming from independent developers of all kinds, all free of Microsoft's gravitational platform pull. Among other things, I think these are the guys who will make OS X fulfill the Linux desktop promise. And I'm not alone. |
| | If you have any news to report on that front (or projects you would like to point me toward), let me know. |
Ken Starr not a suspect
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