Re: Web citizens trying to kill Internet Explorer 6

On Sun, 9 Aug 2009 22:35:25 -0700, Sandman wrote
(in article <mr-A77EC5.07352510082009@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

In article <0001HW.C6A4B773001BDA47F01846D8@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Fa-groon <fa-groon@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Yes it has. We should be much further along in the development of
personal
computers than we are. Apple can't move us very far because the Mac
depends
upon third-party developers whose primary market is Windows. These
developers
don't develop for the Mac, they PORT applications developed for Windows
TO
the Mac.

This hasn't been true for a long long time.

I disagree. I know people who work for Adobe and they say that the Mac
versions of Adobe apps are merely ports of the Windows code.

This just isn't true. The Mac adobe apps are currently in the process
of being moved to Xcode, a Mac-only development environment. And in
the case of Adobe apps, they have never been ported to the Mac from
the PC versions.

translating an app to Xcode from C++(or whatever) doesn't mean that it's not
a port.

A decade or so ago when Apple tried to introduce a document-centric
paradigm shift called OpebDoc to the platform, the developer community
balked. They told Apple in no uncertain terms that they would not be
developing for OpenDoc because it would require separate versions of
their
apps to be developed for the Mac, and that they wouldn't do that.

This had nothing to do with it. OpenDoc was competing with Microsofts
OLE, which did pretty much the same thing but not as open. OpenDoc was
slow and memory-hungry and the idea (that developers could build just
a tiny part of a larger functionality) just didn't work out as a
concept since the larger functionality always was to compete with
Microsoft Office - the better product in this comparison.

That's part of it of course, but the main reason is that Apple didn't have
a
large enough market to force third-party developers to go that route. Now,
I
MS had com up with it, OTOH...

MS *did* come up with it, that's the entire point. It hasn't caught on
there either, since the concept just isn't a very user or developer
friendly concept.

Sigh. I'm not going to argue this into the ground. OLE is NOT the same thing
as a "document centric" environment.

So OpenDoc tried to compete with MS Office + OLE, and failed. And
rightfully so, it was a kludge and as time went, it became more and
more a mess.

Actually, I used it.

As did I.

I bought the one integrated software package that some
forgotten developer came up with and it was elegant and efficient and very
productive. True, OpenDoc had problems, but all new technologies start out
being resource hogs, slower than they should be, etc. but with development,
those things would have been conquered.

Prhaps, but staying a kludge for so long didn't really help OpenDoc
adoption, in the developer community and the user community.

Actually it was just around a few months before Apple canned the project. I
think that what happened to OpenDoc with regard to third party developers was
Apple's wake-up call. After that, they seemed to redouble their efforts to
rid the Mac of proprietary interfaces and conventions in order to play in a
more mainstream arena with Microsoft and the PC makers. Things like ADB,
Nubus and other Mac proprietary technologies went out the window and were
replaced with PCI, USB,and other platform agnostic technologies.

Now, if
Microsoft had introduced a document-centric scheme like OpenDoc or a
"Knowledge Navigator" type of interactive interface, we'd all be there
now,

They call it OLE and is pretty much exactly that. I means that you can
embed Excel data in Word and edit it as if you were running Excel.
It's obviously not as open as OpenDoc, but the concept is similar
enough.

Only in a very limited way. Open Linking and Embedding is NOT document
centric in execution, and only in a very narrow context in results.

Well, "document centric" is just a buzzword, the end functionality is
very much the same though. The fact that you had to open one of the
OLE apps to start a document is of little concern.

NO it isn't. You can't edit a photo (I don't believe) placed in a Word
document without opening it in an entire photo editing application. You can't
edit a CAD drawing embedded in an Excel document without opening that drawing
AutoCAD or whatever.

Again, OpenDoc had nothing to do with porting, really. OpenDoc was a
document centric system, where the user would choose what
functionality he or she needed for the document, calling upon external
frameworks for that functionality, which could be interchangeable. So
if I wrote a letter and wanted a picture in it, I'd embed an image
object and I could use any given image object handlers for that.

Actually, you could not only merely embed that picture in the document, you
could edit it in that document by calling up the photo touchup tools -
without leaving the document to go to another application like PhotoShop.

Yes, that was my point, sorry if I wasn't clear about it.

Again, OSX has continued to evolve as an operating system, adding
gamechanging functionality like spotlight and expos? without being
hindered by Windows at all. And even low-level changes like
CoreAnimation and CoreImage are big steps for an operating systems.

Sigh. Improvements to the current paradigm is not the kind of evolution
about
which I'm speaking. We're stuck in 1985 and it's mostly Microsoft's fault.
OpenDoc was merely an illustration to that point.

OpenDoc was a step *back* since it stuck its user in a non-compatible
kludge.

Still, you manage to miss the point.

Plus, OpenDoc had nothing to do with the operating system anyway, so
I'm not even sure why it was brought up.

Because if it had caught on, the entire Mac OS would have been built around
it. Document centric computing would have been what Mac OS would have been
all about. It would be the user interface of the future. But I digress.
OpenDoc was merely an illustration of how Microsoft's stranglehold on the
computer industry stifles innovation and progress.


.

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