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OSX - What I like

Matts on 2002-07-31T13:33:37

The best thing I like so far about OSX - how you install a new application...

The applications I've seen so far all seem to come as (gzipped) .dmg files. This is a disk image, that OSX natively supports mounting (via loopback fs). So you mount this and you get a new disk icon on the desktop. Open that and you get a readme.rtf and the application icon. Double click the icon and you can run it - play with it a while and if you like it, to install it all you do is drag and drop it into the Applications folder. That's it. The actual application is a directory containing all the resources it needs, but to the OS it just looks like an icon that runs when you double click it. If you want to delete the whole application you don't need "Control Panel, Add Remove Programs, Find Program, Click the button, ok, close Control Panel". You just delete the icon and the whole thing goes away. Nice. Clean. Simple.

For GUI apps this is definitely the way to go. And if you really need to, you can get to the actual binary - it's just in the .app directory somewhere.

Acorn again

koschei on 2002-07-31T13:54:22

Twice in 24 hours, I'm mentioning Acorn RISC OS on use.perl.

Acorn had a similar format for their applications. Any directory that had a name starting with ! (e.g. !Draw, !TechWrite, !Ovation) was an application. Double-click and it runs !Draw/!Run (although in Acorn parlance, the dirsep is period, so !Draw.!Run).

This is, of course, where ROX got its layout from. ROX, of course, borrows many other RISC OS ideas, since it's "Risc Os for X", more or less.

Similarly, image filing systems. RISC OS had a feature to let you treat a file as a directory. You didn't double click on something and have it mount, it just opened like a directory. SparkFS let you browse tar, zip, Spark etc. MacFS let you open a Mac file and see the data and resource forks. QuakeFS for PAK files. DOSFS for handling DOS discs. And so on. And this was back in, um, 92, 93[?].

Useful places to visit: Richard Atterer's summary of Acorn history and developments (but lacking in many dates), another history, but with more pictures (and still no date on the A5000 / RISC OS 3). Yeah. Google for more =)

I should stop using the past tense, since RISC OS and those various programs still exist, and RO at least is still developed, but it just feels like a dead platform =(

For reference, under my desk, still working, is a Sept 96 Acorn RiscPC 700 (with an ARM710 processor). I use it now and again (Zip2000 is the best infocom Z-machine around. Shits on every other one I've seen.)

cheers,

Re:Acorn again

Matts on 2002-07-31T14:35:50

It seems to me to be a combination of some of the best features of the Acorn and the Amiga (things like meta-data where the Amiga was very strong). It's nice to see those things making it into a very strong contender in the OS market.

Now if I can just shut up my whining co-workers who repeat ad-infinitum "Well it's all very pretty, but what can you *do* with it?". Argh - they are so damned annoying. I ask what can't you do with it, and they run off a list of lies (the best one so far being that you can't program on it), but still ignore me. Somewhere I read that if you have to argue, then you've lost already. So I couldn't convince them in 3 minutes so I gave up - it works for me, and I'm sure others will switch too.