There has been a lot of well deserved attention going the way of "Mac OS X Tiger". Athe current time, a lot ofthis attention tends to focus on the consumer constituency comprised of Aunt Milly et al, designers, and new media aficionados. The
Daring Fireballposts an article titled:
Point,
Counterpoint: Mac OS X Is Great for Fortysomething Unix Hackers. This particularpost applies to OpenLink Software in generalacross a myriad of fronts, especially the essence of this excerpt:
On the surface, Grahamâs piece seems like a nice pat on the
back to the Mac platform. But thereâs an implication in his piece
that the worldâs most prodigiously talented programmers are only
now switching (or switching back) to the Mac, when in fact some of
them have been here all along. GUI programming is hard, and for GUI
programmers, the Mac has always been, in Brent
Simmonsâs words, âThe Showâ.
I.e. the idea that by the mid-â90s the Mac user base had been
whittled down to âgraphic designers and grandmasâ is
demonstrably false â someone must have been writing the software
the designers and grandmas were using, no? â but I donât think
itâs worth pressing the point, because I suspect it wasnât
really what Graham meant to imply. And the main thrust of his point
is true: there is a certain class of hackers â your prototypical
Unix nerds â who not only werenât using Macs a decade ago, but
whose antipathy toward Macs was downright hostile. And it is
remarkable that these hackers are now among Mac OS Xâs strongest
adherents.
Itâs another sign of Mac OS Xâs dual nature: from the
perspective of your typical user (and particularly long-time Mac
users), it is the Mac OS with a modern Unix architecture
encapsulated under the hood; from the perspective of the hackers
Graham writes of, it is Unix with a vastly superior GUI.
Read
on....