'Til All Are One

In Janu­ary, dur­ing Steve Jobs’ Mac­world key­note speech announ­cing the new Intel Macin­toshes, Microsoft made a “com­mit­ment” to con­tinue to develop for and sup­port the Apple Macin­tosh plat­form. In true Microsoft style, they con­veni­ently didn’t explain how deeply that com­mit­ment went. Now we know.

Microsoft have decided to kill their Vir­tual PC product, remov­ing a vir­tu­al­isa­tion option from Mac OS at the same time that sim­ilar func­tion­al­ity is being fol­ded into Win­dows Vista. They are aware that vir­tu­al­isa­tion is quickly becom­ing a killer fea­ture, and they’ll be damned if they allow any­one else to have it. For­tu­nately (and prob­ably prefer­ably), VMware will be made avail­able for the Apple Intel plat­form. There’s also Par­al­lels, but they still do not have any server-​​oriented products.

In addi­tion, Microsoft will also be remov­ing Visual Basic sup­port from Office for Mac. If you can’t stop sup­port­ing some­thing, why not cripple it instead? Many busi­nesses are depend­ent upon VB script­ing, or exchange files with people/​organisations that make use of it, so this is a major blow indeed for Apple. Such a defi­ciency will be subtle: people will pur­chase Office for Mac expect­ing it to work with files cre­ated in its Win­dows coun­ter­part (or vice versa), and will be sorely dis­ap­poin­ted. This has already been occur­ring for a num­ber of years, but the prob­lem is becom­ing increas­ingly acute.

Ulti­mately, the best solu­tion is to remove our depend­ency on pro­pri­et­ary formats and lan­guages, for they are the root cause of this mess. Open​Of​fice​.org already does what most people require, and in some cases it does it bet­ter. It even has grow­ing sup­port for Visual Basic for Applic­a­tions. Open­Of­fice is truly look­ing like a bet­ter Office than MS Office. The Open­Of­fice file fil­ter­ing sup­port developers work hard to sup­port all the MS Office formats they can find (people have coun­ted over 20 dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the Word .DOC format alone), which is more than I can say about the MS Office pro­gram­mers, who are notori­ous for break­ing com­pat­ib­ilty with older ver­sions. Using the Open­Doc­u­ment formats (which are now an ISO stand­ard) assures that your data will be access­ible on many dif­fer­ent plat­forms for many years to come.

The main stum­bling block to Open­Of­fice adop­tion on Mac OS is the Windows-​​like inter­face and its reli­ance on X11 for dis­play. There is work being done on a nat­ive Aqua ver­sion, but in the mean­while there is NeoOf­fice.

Steve “Real­ity Dis­tor­tion Field” Jobs has delivered his key­note address to Apple’s World Wide Developer Con­fer­ence (WWDC). It’s amaz­ing what he would have us believe. Apple has appar­ently inven­ted vir­tual desktops. What does Microsoft have to say about it, given they applied for a pat­ent on the tech­no­logy in 2004 (com­plete with images ripped out of GNOME and KDE!)? Let’s just for­get that they have exis­ted since at least 1985, shall we?

That aside, I am heartened to see that OpenDar­win did not close their doors a couple of weeks ago in vain. Apple them­selves are spon­sor­ing Mac OS Forge, and in the pro­cess they have made read­ily avail­able the source code for Bon­jour, Col­lab­or­a­tion (Dar­win Cal­en­dar Server), Web­Kit (which is really just KHTML on ster­oids any­way), Launchd and even their XNU ker­nel (minus some essen­tial pro­pri­et­ary parts). They have even licensed some of these pro­jects under the Apache Licence 2.0. I pray that this sig­ni­fies the start of a new era of col­lab­or­a­tion between Apple and the FLOSS com­munity, and not just a cheap attempt to con­trib­ute the min­imum amount required to keep the bulk of the com­munity on-​​side.

So with Tiger being favour­ably com­pared to the forever-​​delayed Win­dows Vista, what does that make Leo­pard? Mac OS just gets bet­ter and bet­ter, while the Win­dows débâcle is far from over. With screw-​​ups such as this [video], it’s no won­der that Microsoft feels the need to prevent/​destroy all com­pet­i­tion.

Update (2006−08−13): Here is a much more sober eval­u­ation of the so-​​called ‘copy­ing’ going on between Mac OS and Win­dows. It puts everything into more per­spect­ive, show­ing that some of their killer fea­tures in fact ori­gin­ated else­where. It reminds me of a funny quo­ta­tion: “Mac OS, Win­dows, BeOS: they’re all just Xerox cop­ies.”

As much as Paul Thur­rott likes to claim that Spot­light is a copy of Win­dows Search, Apple had the same func­tion­al­ity in the mid-​​1990s with its Cop­land Pro­ject.

On the rare occa­sion, I find myself in front of a Macin­tosh. In its default state, the OS feels rather bar­ren. The default set of applic­a­tions is quite sparse, and you have to put some work into installing the soft­ware you need to get going. As a GNU/​Linux user, I’m accus­tomed to installing an oper­at­ing sys­tem and get­ting a full suite of applic­a­tions without put­ting in any extra work. Mind you, OS X is not nearly as bad as oper­at­ing sys­tems from a cer­tain other vendor.

Here is a list of soft­ware that I recom­mend to Mac users. Most of these apps are free soft­ware and also work on GNU/​Linux (or a suit­able ana­logue exists), so switch­ing between the two oper­at­ing sys­tems is easy.

Desktop nav­ig­a­tion:

• Quick­sil­ver
• Desktop Man­ager

Audio/​Video playback:

• VLC Media Player
• MPlayer OS X

Web brows­ing (like Safari or Inter­net Explorer):

• Fire­fox
• Cam­ino (which is based on Fire­fox; you can find exten­sions for Cam­ino here)

Office suite (like Microsoft Office):

• Open­Of­fice (get the Mac ver­sion here)
• NeoOf­fice (which is based on OpenOffice)

Desktop pub­lish­ing (like Adobe InDesign):

• Scribus

Draw­ing (like Adobe Illustrator):

• Ink­s­cape

Painting/​Photo edit­ing (like Adobe Photoshop):

• The GIMP (get the Mac ver­sion here)
• Sea­shore (which is based on The GIMP)

Printer drivers:

• Gimp-​​Print/​Gutenprint

Get more free applications:

• The Fink Project

Win­dows compatability:

• Boot Camp
• Par­al­lels