From fork-admin@xent.com Thu Oct 3 12:55:30 2002 Return-Path: Delivered-To: yyyy@localhost.example.com Received: from localhost (jalapeno [127.0.0.1]) by jmason.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C173C16F1A for ; Thu, 3 Oct 2002 12:53:41 +0100 (IST) Received: from jalapeno [127.0.0.1] by localhost with IMAP (fetchmail-5.9.0) for jm@localhost (single-drop); Thu, 03 Oct 2002 12:53:41 +0100 (IST) Received: from xent.com ([64.161.22.236]) by dogma.slashnull.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g92MXEK32150 for ; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 23:33:15 +0100 Received: from lair.xent.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 052ED29416D; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 15:33:02 -0700 (PDT) Delivered-To: fork@example.com Received: from crank.slack.net (slack.net [166.84.151.181]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0F5F429409C for ; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 15:32:42 -0700 (PDT) Received: by crank.slack.net (Postfix, from userid 596) id 03F8B3EDCD; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 18:37:29 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by crank.slack.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 025D63ED4E for ; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 18:37:28 -0400 (EDT) From: Tom To: fork@example.com Subject: Apple Sauced...again Message-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: fork-admin@xent.com Errors-To: fork-admin@xent.com X-Beenthere: fork@example.com X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.11 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Friends of Rohit Khare List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 18:37:28 -0400 (EDT) X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-11.6 required=5.0 tests=AWL,KNOWN_MAILING_LIST,USER_AGENT_PINE version=2.50-cvs X-Spam-Level: Over on Arstechnica (www.arstechnica.com) I saw mention of a Wired article that goes into the many wonderfull ways Apple is showing its love and respect for its users. http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,55395,00.html There is a good rundown of all the whys and whatfores over at http://arstechnica.com/reviews/02q3/macosx-10.2/macosx-10.2-5.html "True to form, industrious third party developers saw that they could gain a competitive advantage by supporting this more capable user interface in their applications. Apple's private menu extras APIs were reverse engineered and leveraged to great effect. The architecture was so popular that an application for managing predefined sets of menu extras (third party or otherwise) was in development. All of that changed with the release of Jaguar--but not because the private APIs had changed. If they had, third party developers would have updated their applications to work with the new APIs, as they have resigned themselves to doing by choosing to use private APIs in the first place. But what actually happened in Jaguar was that Apple added code to forcibly exclude all non-Apple menu extras. Other parts of the API did not change. But when a menu extra is loaded, it is compared to a hard-coded list of "known" menu extras from Apple. If the menu extra is not on that list, it is not allowed to load. It's easy to laugh at Steve Ballmer's sweat-soaked gyrations as he chants "developers, developers, developers!", but Microsoft clearly understands something that Apple is still struggling with. It is in a platform vendor's best interest to encourage development for its platform. In Apple's case, this doesn't mean that they have to bend over backwards to make every single system service and UI element "pluggable" via public APIs. That's clearly a lot of work, and not something that needs to be the number one priority for an OS in its infancy. And in the meantime, if third party developers want to sell into a market that requires the desired functionality to be added in "unsupported" ways, then they must be prepared for the maintenance consequences of their decisions. But for Apple to go out of its way--to actually expend developer effort--to stop these third party developers, while still failing to provide a supported alternative, is incredibly foolish. "