No sorry thats not right. Camino is part of the mozilla/Firefox project. Its a pure mac version, compiled with mac's compiling tools - Carbon, so that it fully integrates into the OSX environment. it is available on the mozilla project website. That said Safari is a good solid browser and is still my day to day browser, Again the mac integration between programs is the reason. the ability for the programs to work together is macs real strength. iLife is the best example, but I wont go into that here. Having unix underneath means it plays real nice with my linux stuff too. In fact I find it soo nice I have very little driving desire to put linux on them, unlike my other boxes. One of the new G5's is definitely on the shopping list, but I am watching for progress on OSX-4 Tiger. For those things I still cant do under Linux macs are a good choice. And nowadays they are not that much more in dollar terms than and equivalent Windows + Intel/AMD box. (and most of them look Much nicer IMHO) Gavin Denby wrote

If your a Firefox fan, Camino is a Firefox offshoot compiled with mac's native carbon, so its fully mac feel, but gecko engine and all the Firefox tools.

Matthew Browne (DSL HN) wrote:

Actually, its not as evil as it seems. I download from the apple OSX site the apple X11 package Once its installed, just add open office. The open office startup program loads X11 and then starts. As to why OO haven't compiled for OSX natively I am not sure, but then again, If I was working for apple, I would probably have developed a local port team and made it available anyway, but then I guess after so many years fighting to get MS to do a office for mac package, they have to keep a safe distance from OO. I keeping dropping notes on the OO website each time they ask me what features I want added, but in the meantime I run it without the integration. It works, and can open attachments automatically once you have it all set up. As for Linux notebooks have you considered the Compaq offering shipping with SUSE installed ? Oliver Jones wrote:

I've very impressed with the iBook I've gotten for my mother. I'm reluctant to hand it over... ;) At least I have my iPod to console myself with.

One downer has been the lack of a MacOS native port of OpenOffice.org. I think my mother will have to buy MS Office for Mac. Which isn't cheap. :( The bundled AppleWorks just doesn't look up to scratch for what she will want, OpenOffice would have sufficed though.

Regards

Actually I take my hat of to andreas on this one, Yoper is a good laptop choice, but stick to the kernel prior to the latest, it messes up networking, it looks like the firewire is configured as a networking card. (and there are some lilo issues too, but other than that It seems like a good choice) It does most of mine pretty well I have some of the ACPI working ok, but I am wrestling with wireless under NDIS wrapper, but if I plug the prism 2 in I can get it working most of the time, but for some reason it always seems to route via my onboard ethernet on boot, even after I changed the route options. And I am too lazy to track the bug down, so I just set it up in console on each boot. So apart from having to drop my 54Mbps for 11Mbps It does what I want. DSE purchased acer aspire 1350 (But it came with the Compulsory Windows Tax) On Monday, October 4, 2004, at 09:44 PM, Andreas Girardet wrote:

...

As for Linux notebooks have you considered the Compaq offering shipping with SUSE installed ?

I have heard also that the DSE laptop offerings work great running Yoper and I know from many users that they find Yoper to be the closest Linux to the MAC in Look and Feel and usability ...

Andreas

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Gavin Denby wrote:

Actually, its not as evil as it seems.

I download from the apple OSX site the apple X11 package

I might do that and see how things go..

The open office startup program loads X11 and then starts. As to why OO haven't compiled for OSX natively I am not sure, but then again, If I was working for apple, I would probably have developed a local port team and made it available anyway, but then I guess after so many years fighting to get MS to do a office for mac package, they have to keep a safe distance from OO.

I keeping dropping notes on the OO website each time they ask me what features I want added, but in the meantime I run it without the integration. It works, and can open attachments automatically once you have it all set up.

When I went looking on the OO site I found the MacOS X page but all the download links resulted in a 404. Where did you get it from?

As for Linux notebooks have you considered the Compaq offering shipping with SUSE installed ?

Perhaps. Got a link to that? Regards

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_downloads.html

Hmm. Same place I was looking before. Lots of the mirrors report 404 errors. I managed to get a copy from one of the mirrors in the end though. After installing X11 and OOo I fired it up and it's about as good as you could expect for a Unix app on a Mac. Ie, not very good. It would do for a geek like me. I could put up with it being completely different to everything else. But on reflection I think I need a more "MacOS" like app for my mother. So I downloaded the MS Office:Mac 30 day trial. I will give that a going over and see if it is worth the $700+ it costs.... Regards -- Oliver Jones » Director » oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited » +64 (7) 377 3328 » www.deeperdesign.com

I think its a correct and fair assessment. I wish it were not so, I guess I have just gotten use to living with it. We made a conscious decision to use Open Office and so we have it everywhere, and I dont think about it any more, but now that I am looking at it. .............. I feel your pain, Yes you are right. please give the feedback to the OO team. I think they really need to hear why mac users don't use OO as much as they could, Esp when they have worked so hard to make the development tools for mac OSX available free. And made Darwin open source too. Oliver Jones wrote:

...

/_http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_downloads.html_/

Hmm. Same place I was looking before. Lots of the mirrors report 404 errors. I managed to get a copy from one of the mirrors in the end though. After installing X11 and OOo I fired it up and it's about as good as you could expect for a Unix app on a Mac. Ie, not very good. It would do for a geek like me. I could put up with it being completely different to everything else. But on reflection I think I need a more "MacOS" like app for my mother. So I downloaded the MS Office:Mac 30 day trial. I will give that a going over and see if it is worth the $700+ it costs....

On 4/10/2004, at 6:49 PM, Oliver Jones wrote:

Yes there is that.  Safari is integrated into the whole OS (much like IE).  I ponder how well FireFox could "plug in" to MacOS.  One thing I noticed is that Safari doesn't block popups.

There is an option in Safari preferences to block popups. Michael

If your a Firefox fan, Camino is a Firefox offshoot compiled with mac's native carbon, so its fully mac feel, but gecko engine and all the Firefox tools.

Firefox looks and behaves just like every other MacOS X app I've seen. I don't see why one would want to use Camino. But then I've never used Camino. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Director » oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited » +64 (7) 377 3328 » www.deeperdesign.com

Many things that MacOS does strike me as "the way computers should be".

Maybe you should start a Mug = Mac User Group ;) On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, Oliver Jones wrote:

...

I think I'd rather they had used Gecko too, but Firefox wasn't anywhere near what it is like to day back when they started working on Safari. I think feature similarity is because both camps have been regularly taking ideas from each other.

Firefox 1.0RC1 (aka 0.10.1) is rather nice. Works sweet on MacOS.

Something else I really really like about MacOS is the way you install apps. Generally you download a Gzip compressed .dmg (Disk Image) file. Which is automatically decompressed and mounted by the Finder/Safari. DMG's can be fully customized like any MacOS folder to have a background graphic, custom icons, etc. They also remember their "Finder" window size. So when they mount they come up as a customized window in finder. So they look just as good as any "InstallShield" wizard I've seen. Generally you then have a ReadMe (RTF) and an application icon. To install the app you just drag it from the mounted disk image to the "Applications" tab in Finder.

I realise this is very similar to the way MacOS has worked for ages. It is in stark contrast to the way Windows works and even the way Linux works. Though, I don't see why an RPM/DEB installer app couldn't be made just as simple (or simpler). Integrated into Nautilus and Konqurer etc.

Many things that MacOS does strike me as "the way computers should be".

Regards

-- Oliver Jones » Director » oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 Deeper Design Limited » +64 (7) 377 3328 » www.deeperdesign.com

I realise this is very similar to the way MacOS has worked for ages. It is in stark contrast to the way Windows works and even the way Linux works. Though, I don't see why an RPM/DEB installer app couldn't be made just as simple (or simpler). Integrated into Nautilus and Konqurer etc.

Don't most distros let you click on a .deb or .rpm and have it popup a dialog asking for the root password, telling you it's going to install it? I think debian can also go off and grab any dependancies that the deb might require from whatever media you want. Part of it is that applications aren't "documents", and people often think of files == documents. Thus people don't often seem to realise that applications actually exist in the filesystem. (Speaking to people in the Windows/Linux world anyway).

Yes. Most probably do. In writing this I was thinking I should probably have a play with the current state of Nautilus/RPM integration. Though if I remember rightly from the last time I tried it, Nautilus just popped up redhat-config-packages and tried to use that to install the RPM. Not quite what I was looking for. The RPM and DEB package management systems are designed around unattended installation. They don't plug into GUI's that well and they certainly don't provide ways of displaying a "readme". If I remember rightly it is specifically against policy for an RPM to issue any output _at all_. Overall I just thought the MacOS way "looked nice". Also, I like the Applications folder as start menu kinda thing. One huge EXE is the entire app etc... I think the ROX desktop uses a similar idea.

But it's not one big .EXE, it's a directory masquerading as a file :)

...

Part of it is that applications aren't "documents", and people often think of files == documents. Thus people don't often seem to realise that applications actually exist in the filesystem. (Speaking to people in the Windows/Linux world anyway).

This is true and begs the question do "files" for user documents make sense. Personally I'm starting to lean in the direction of databases for user data. Users shouldn't have to organize their data on their computer or even understand that one "document" is stored in a different file to another.

Yep, I'm less happy with this idea, mostly because I think I'm used to the ideas of files, and I'm not happy when I can't organise things in a heirarchy. I played around with a palm pilot for a while that allowed up to 15 categories. While I never used all 15 categories, it felt constraining. I guess I'm just used to having heaps of tiny files in lots of small directories.

They should also not have to explicitly "save" what they are working on. I use the IntelliJ Idea Java IDE and while it does have an explicit save option you don't need to use it. If you perform any function in the IDE that would need the data on disk to be in sync (compiling etc) it saves for you. It also saves the data when you switch windows or whatever. I've never lost any code for any reason, even when idea crashes (which it does rarely). If I need to revert to a previous copy or I don't want to retain some change I've made I can just use the history (kinda like local CVS) or undo.

See, this is something I like. The idea of integrating it with a version control system like arch could work well too :)

The whole separation of volatile (RAM) and non-volatile storage (disks now, was tapes) needs to go the way of the Dodo. It was born of an era when memory was extremely limited and insanely expensive.

Indeed. One of the things that amuses me is that memory is kept 100% in use all the time, (what's the point in buying all that extra ram if it's never used?) but disk space is encouraged to be kept as near empty as possible. It seems that I'm wasting a lot of disk space that I've paid for but has never been written to.

The whole idea of applications starting and quiting is also a bit old school. Something else I noticed with MacOS is that an app will quite happily continue to run if you close it's main window (this has been the case on Macs for eons). It can take some getting used to the application menu at the top of the screen all the time. I'm so used to windows having their own menus and toolbars and quiting when you click the little X on the last open window. One thing this causes you to do is forget to quit apps. To quit an app you have to press Apple-Q (or choose it from the menu) but I don't see why you should ever have to quit an app. I'm so used to doing it tho I find myself "cleaning up" my running apps every now and again on the Mac. Given enough ram and swap space it just shouldn't be required. Switching between apps should have same UI as 'starting' one (and with the MacOS dock it is). The computer can tell if an app is running or not and transparently to the user start it when they want to do something that requires it.

I quite agree, although I think apps need to learn to startup faster. Theres nothing more disconcerting than the "is it going to load or not? Oh, here it is" that large applications seem to have these days.

I have 1GB of Memory in my work PC. This is entirely affordable these days. Rarely even with huge Java apps like IDEA running do I exceed 60% usage. The rest is filled with disk cache and buffers.

Heh The kernel tries to keep the system at about 30% buffers/cache at a minimum :) I've seen some applications under linux decide that they will linger around for a minute before quitting incase the user clicks a file and loads the app again.

I don't see RAM getting more expensive and the exponential growth in memory capacity has not been met with an exponential growth in memory usage by applications. Database style 'document' management may change this but I don't think it will to an excessive extent.

Gnome Storage seems to be one approach which seems rather nifty, basically it's a database that stores all your files which you can access via a natural language search system, eg: movies before 2000 that have Mel Gibson in them. which seems to be a much better way to organise files. The thing with databases is that I've not seen a good way to group files together. Perhaps it's my thinking that needs to change, but at least when programming you have large numbers of files that go together to form a "project". You have media (images? sounds?) meta information about the project (Makefiles, Doxyfile etc), and intermediate files (.o) and source files. Perhaps we need to move to something closer to smalltalks "image" idea :)