“You can read about it for years, but until you’ve actually experienced it, you have no conception of what it’s really like.”

This ‘article’ (original here) is pretty typical of the new genre of Slashdot/O’Reilly/OSNews ‘jounalism’.

While this could be a great piece about Mac OS X application development with Steve’s opinion on the whole thing, it turns out to be a misinformed, short sighted piece that only has the merit of temporarily including an unauthorized email thread with our pal Steve Jobs.

If you ask “Can Apple do Better than Objective-C?”, please do mention viable alternatives (such as Mono, RealBasic, Python & Java Cocoa bindings), discuss the abandon of Java as a viable alternative to Objective-C and question Steve’s ludicrous assertions about .NET’s inherent slowness and the goodness of Objective C.

Interface Builder, XCode & Cocoa are solid tools and they are getting better with each release. However, today Mac OS X developers create great applications despite Objective-C but they don’t have much of a choice or at least don’t know of one.

They do

Update: Miguel elaborates on the merits of the Mono/CLI/.NET approach to solve some of Mac OS X’s shortcomings

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Thanks to Aperture, I’ve been able to unearth a few nice shots that I’ve never really shown anyone. I’d love your comments on them. Often, I find that the photos I took that people like are very different from the ones I like. Here’s the album, you can leave the comments in the gallery:

NeedComments

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but sometime you say silly things. How incredibly misinformed is your latest assertion: “The only reason OS/X is at all relevant right now has nothing to do with software- it has to do with the little white things in millions of people’s ears“. Sure, iPods did contribute hugely to the Apple brand current buzz but its newfound desktop relevance has little to do with the white earbuds.

I mean let’s face it, many desktops nowadays (including Gnome) are modeling their ease of use, UI guidelines mantra after what the Apple crews devised twenty years ago.
Many applications on Windows and Linux are trying to be as useful and easy to use as iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie HD, Garage Band and iDVD but also NetNewsWire, QuickSilver, Omnigraffle.

So much that in fact, a lot of the open source and Gnome developers I have had a chance to meet in the last few years are closet Mac OS X users (I won’t out them. Hi Dave). Not only that but most will testify that they get their wife an iBook, their mother an iMac. Go to O’Reilly’s OSCON and you’ll see that more than half of the audience is sporting Powerbooks. And while the funniest thing a SuSE engineer said to me was: “You know you can install SLES 9 on your powerbook” (Why in hell would I do that, so it stops working properly ?), none of those people (nor I) are running Gnome (or KDE for that matter) on their shiny Apple hardware.

So, while the iPod is a great vector for Apple’s adoption, its relevance is due to hardware and software working together, applications being easy to install, working well and being simple.

What’s amazing is that even though Cocoa/Objective C has become somewhat irrelevant as a development platform, Apple is able to churn out amazingly useful and well targeted applications not only at the low end but also mid-range (Pages, Keynote, Final Cut Express, Logic Express) and high-end (Motion, Shake, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro and Aperture). Independent Mac OS X and open source developers do the same and hopefully they’ll adopt Mono to do so, some of them already are today.

But I am losing focus and starting to sound like a zealot. I’ll tell you though, if I were to think along your lines, I’d blindly declare: “The only reason Linux is at all relevant right now has nothing to do with the desktop but with all those J2EE & PHP applications deployed worldwide on Linux servers“. And while that might not be the truth sitting down at Flaptop’s Johny, it certainly is in the world’s homes and corporations.

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I am doing some research for a project. Does anyone know of an open source softphone that implements SIP for Mac OS X ? I haven’t found much thus far. (Comments are open for responses)

Best question heard in an interview so far

- “What would make you leave this company after a month ?”

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I have tried a lot of different photo editing & photo management applications over the years. Photoshop is still very much the king when it comes to a full featured app to tweak or heavily modify your photos, a digital darkroom if you will. But my main problem over the last few years has been to manage my photo collection (tagging, sorting, organizing), keep my masters, create backups, …

Since I pretty much always shoot RAW (Why would I use only half of the color information I can get from my camera sensor ?), the tool needs to not only handle 16 bit formats (for my two cameras) but handle it well.

For many applications, I am perfectly happy with the open source alternative or a low-priced commercial solution. As far as photography goes, I am not and none of the tools I tried, from Capture One to f-spot did the trick. This week-end I had an opportunity to try Apple’s Aperture and I must say it is without doubt the most amazing piece of software I have seeen in a long time. If you don’t believe me, head out to your local Apple Store and try it out for yourself.

As soon as I get a job, Apple will get $450 of my money. I fanboy Aperture.

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