Linked by Scot Hacker on Mon 17th Dec 2001 17:34 UTC
The story of how a BeOS refugee (and not just everyone, but the author of the 'BeOS Bible' book) lost faith in the future of computing, resigned himself to Windows but found himself bored silly, tore out half his hair at the helm of a Linux box, then rediscovered the joy of computing in MacOSX. Scot Hacker will describe his personal adventures with today's operating systems after he was set out to find an alternative to his beloved (but with no apparent future) BeOS. Update: Make sure you read the second part of the article, a rebutal, found here.
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* Hacker says that you have to learn AppleScript to automate OSX. Not exactly. AppleScript is a rich, robust system, and worth learning, but it's not the only path available to you. Apparently there are hooks for scripting aspects of the OS via good old Perl, and when those Aqua hooks fail you, it's possible to get pretty far down in the BSD layer with any of the old Unix languages that you'd care to use -- Perl, Python, Tcsh, Sh, Sed, Awk, whatever. Not all of these have high level access to applications like Office or Photoshop, but it looks like that's where things are going.
*Cmt+O opens applications from the Finder!? Wow! It drives me nuts that the Enter key renames (yes, that's a lousy decision), and I'd resigned myself to shuffling over to the mouse or, more often, just staying in the Terminal all the time and typing "open /Applications/Foo.app" all the time. Not as slick, but much faster than the mouse. I'll have to remember the Cmd+O thing, that'll save me a lot of time, thanks...
* I don't like it, but I'm betting that the HFS+ filename case respecting / insensitivity is an intractable issue. Apple has already had to patch the installed copy of Apache so that it wouldn't get tripped up by this, and people have had trouble with installations of Perl's LWP library installing a "HEAD" program that clobbered the installed "head" program. You can switch to UFS, but this raises other problems (like for example I guess you can't install Classic applications in that case). I really can't think of a good way forward here -- both UFS and HFS have big problems with OSX, and neither of them is as slick as BFS was. I almost wonder if, rather than keeping the old HFS or adopting the old UFS, if a new layout can be established that respects HFS requirements (forked files, for example), is case sensitive, maintains user/group level file controls, and ideally brings in something like Be's file attributes. That's probably a huge amount of work though, and getting it to be backwards compatible with everything (Classic applications, Carbon & Cocoa applications, and BSD programs) might ultimately be unworkable. Too bad if that's the case, and score another point for the late, great, BFS...