throAU said:
The desktop is good enough, has good commercial software support for multimedia, the hardware is nice and there's a whole raft of other cool stuff that the unix desktop just lacks - like applescript and automator.
ARexx, those were the days... <sing>
But getting something like that trough all those steering comitees these days would end in much wasted time, I think. But it would be nice, being able to do as we did on the good 'ol Amiga so many years before.
throAU said:
I doubt the free unix desktop will ever get those two either, as they require standardization and sticking with an API for a reasonable period of time - unix desktop developers are too busy reinventing the wheel every couple of years.
Sounds like Linux user land, not like unix developers. (scnr)
Would be great to add something to f.e. KDE that allows for a named pipe to be opened and then you can send command lines to the program, doing almost anything the program can do via command line and UI interfacing, then allow the developer to add their own hooks to that. I do not know how big that change might be on the toolkit, but I would like to see it. You might then use this interface from any language you want. Well, when I have some years to spare, maybe...
throAU said:
Could you do similar with the command line, command line tools and a shell script? Probably. You still can't integrate your script into the (GUI) shell so you can just drag/drop to a folder to activate it (or otherwise have the OS "watch" the folder for changes without messing with cron or similar)
There are systems to do that outside of OS-X, look at f.e. BeOS/Haiku. The mail application did simply outsource all the sorting/foldering/... work to the file system and threw all mails into one folder. New mail arrives, it got processed by the code registered in the file system layer without the app being involved, so even when your mail backend programm was not running at that time.
When I am forced to leave *BSD, that would be the way to go for me. Because, yes, I also want a desktop which 'simply works', but then again I also like to tinker with stuff, call it a hobby.
Icaza started Gnome, which was good. Then he got into Mono and drew heat for that. I do not know how much he had to do with Gnome3, which IMHO should be nuked from orbit.
Sometimes I suspect he was being paid from Microsoft for subtily p*ss*ng off users, which is something he also did. But without Gnome, we would not be where we are today, because even if we do not like it - in that case it was keeping you on your toes.
So, goodbye and peace be with you.
