OSNews

Hey Avi :-)

Here's what I sent to Scot, but I figured it'd be useful to post here too.

A few errors that I noticed:

- TinkerTool does not let you adjust the Finder's view font. You
mentioned this several times, but it's simply not true. If only it
were. It may be possible to do this by editing the 'txtr' (text
traits) resources inside the Finder, but I haven't tried. I used a
small 9 point font in OS 9 for my views, and it's really annoying to
have to make my windows gigantic.

- Terminal doesn't remember window sizes because you can create
multiple windows, each of which saves its position (and font, color,
etc.). The interface for this is less than optimal, which is why I'm
writing a replacement.

- The Mac supports the Open Scripting Architecture (OSA), which lets
you use other languages than AppleScript to command Mac applications.
The only currently available one for OS X is JavaScript, but under OS
9 versions of Perl, Python and Tcl, among others, were available; they
should eventually be ported.

JavaScript OSA: <http://www.latenightsw.com/freeware/JavaScriptOSA/>
Tcl OSA component: <http://www.louch.com/>
There are also a number of languages that have been ported to work
with the Objective-C runtime - not exactly scripting, but useful for
rapid application development and testing using Apple's Cocoa
frameworks. These include JavaScript and Tcl (via AAA+ Software's
Joy), AppleScript (with Apple's new AppleScript Studio), and a
Smalltalk derivative called F-Script.

<http://www.aaa-plus.com/>
<http://www.apple.com/applescript/macosx/ascript_studio/>
<http://www.fscript.org/>

- Picture clippings are certainly supported. Try dragging a selected
region out of almost any Mac graphics app (even a Classic one such as
Photoshop), you'll see a picture clipping on the desktop.

- You seem to be a bit confused about the creator code. It does
specify the "preferred app". While I'd like to see a richer method of
representing that application used, such as the bundle IDs that Mac OS
X already provides (e.g. 'com.barebones.bbedit' instead of 'R*ch'). I
don't understand what you mean about the creator being responsible for
'unexpected and undesirable behavior' - it's mainly the presence of
extensions in OS X that I've found responsible for such behavior. I'd
suggest you take a look at how OS 9 did things, with a limited amount
of metadata, and a centralized type database, as well as the
programming interfaces (in particular the Translation Manager). With
the single exception of OS X's ability to immediately present a list
of applications that can open a document, and the ability to override
the creator mapping on a global basis, OS 9's experience (actually, as
fully introduced in 8.5 and unchanged since) was much better. It did
provide a centralized file type panel, with support for mapping
extensions, type/creator, and even translation. It was especially
good in that it provided for plugin translators, which would be
queried if no application was able to open a file, and which could be
materialized as mini-translation applications, and the ability for
applications to specify what they can handle by the actual file
-content-, so the proper metadata could be assigned if it was missing,
instead of relying (as OS X does) on easily-broken name conventions.

Obviously, the BeOS filesystem-merged-with-database model and
extensible metadata is where everyone else is heading (see also
WebDAV), it's very useful, and I can't understand why Apple is going
in the other direction just to maintain an illusion of compatibility
with 30-year-old filesystem designs.