Windows NT 4: A high point

Microsoft Windows NT 4 was a good system. It wasn’t a great system. It had plenty of flaws. But—at the time—it may have been the best in its class.

Apple was working on a system code-named Copland to replace the aging Mac OS as a transition to Gershwin, which would supposedly be a real modern, personal-computer OS. But it was a quagmire that would eventually be scrapped.

Linux wasn’t quite old enough...yet. Some people will say “Desktop Linux” is perpetually two years away, but it was good enough to serve as my primary system for the years between Windows NT and when I switched to Mac OS X.

(Apologies to the OS/2 fans, in particular. I never had much experience with it. And no doubt there are other contenders that I’m forgetting. But it was programming for Mac and Windows that was paying my bills. Linux was the only venture away from them I had time for.)

Windows NT 4 had the basic OS services—virtual memory, memory protection, and preëmptive multitasking—that personal computers were finally ready for and needed. It had a UI that borrowed some of the goodness of NeXTSTEP by way of Windows 95. It was sufficiently compatible with older DOS and 16-bit Windows software. (At least for my needs.) And, most importantly, I found myself more productive using it than I was on my Mac.

By the time Windows 2000 came out, I’d moved on to Linux. So, I can’t speak much to when things really started getting worse for Windows.

Sidebar: It seemed ironic how so many Mac people ended up on Linux during Apple’s dark years. On the face of it, at least, the two couldn’t seem to be farther apart. Completely open and customizable versus completely closed and curated. One that promises to let you do anything with it as long as you spend the time and effort; one that strives towards “it just works” provided that you want to do exactly what it wants you to do.

Microsoft today is so different. They’re no longer on top, and that means they’re doing some really great things. (And Apple is pulling Microsoft-style moves.) Yet they’re still doing a lot of silly things. And I wonder if Windows can ever again be even as good as it was with NT 4. Should I leave the Mac again, I can’t imagine it would be for a future version of Windows. Most likely it will be Linux again, if not some upstart that doesn’t exist yet.

Browser/OS stats for this blog

I was looking through the blog’s stats, and the browser and OS stats seemed kind of interesting.

• 63% Firefox
• 15% Chrome
• 10% Safari
• 8% Internet Explorer

• 40% Macintosh
• 37% Windows
• 16% Linux
• 2% iPad
• 2% iPhone
• < 1% Android
• < 1% Other Unix

Based on what I’ve been seeing from more generic reports, that seems atypical. I’m surprised that Chrome isn’t closer to or a bigger percentage than Firefox. I’d expect Safari and IE to be reversed, but they are pretty close. It seems that fewer of my visitors who use Macs use Safari than I would’ve thought.

For this blog, that’s pretty much just trivia. If you are someone who has to make decisions based off this kind of data, though, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to collect your own data rather than relying on what others report. e.g. When I was in the shrink-wrapped software business, Macs made up a lot more of my company’s market than the general marketshare they held at the time.

My dream text editor and word processor

There’s a discussion on Branch about Your Dream Text Editor / Word Processor. I submitted an answer, but it won’t show up unless I get approved to join the branch. In fact, there doesn’t even seem to be a way for me to see what I wrote until/unless I get added to the branch. Weird. (But then it took me a while just to figure out how to add the branch to my Branch “drawer”.) So, it goes here too.

My dream text editor would be mostly like Vim, but with Scheme underneath.

I’ve had to work on enough systems where vi was the only practical editor that I found it easier to use Vim on the systems where I could install something more powerful. I’ve really come to like it except for its ad hoc scripting language. I’d envy the Emacs people except that I think elisp would just annoy me by being almost Scheme. ^_^

My dream word processor would be something akin to Amaya or UX Write. I want the output to be clean HTML. I want to be able to do semantic formatting as I write without having to type raw HTML, LaTeX, or Markdown.

Plus I’d like a high quality HTML to PDF/print converter. HTML+CSS has features that ought to allow generating LaTeX quality print.

Linear

Here’s a tip for video/console/computer/iOS† game designers:

Free wandering doesn’t make linear gameplay non-linear.

Rather, adding free wandering to a linear game tends to be tedious at best and frustrating at worst.

†Is there a good general term to use here?

Open phone

What would an open phone be?

1. It would be one where I buy the phone from a hardware vendor. The hardware vendor wouldn’t care what I did with it.

2. It would be one where I install whatever software I want to on the phone. Most likely starting with an open-source system that I download for free.

3. It would be one where I pay for cellular data service. The service provider wouldn’t care what hardware I’m using, what software I’m using, or what bits I’m transmitting and receiving.

Without those three things, the word “open” shouldn’t be used without being highly qualified.

Ironically, I think the iPhone may be a key component in this ever happening. Because Apple and the iPhone have come the closest opening up the cellular service providers to being simply cellular service providers. They’re the ones succeeding as a hardware company that thinks of the end-user as the customer rather than the service provider being the customer.

I can’t say for sure that I’d choose such an open phone over the iPhone, but that’s the open phone I would consider. Less than that isn’t worth my time.

iMac apps vs. iPad apps

In a comment to I’ve Changed My Mind About The iPad, Joeflambe wrote:

yuck, an iPad, really?

not a real computer since there are no real apps that you use daily on your current computer.

This seems like an interesting exercise. Let’s look at the most used apps on my iMac and whether there is an iPad equivalent.

• Safari: Check

I have a Flash blocker installed on my iMac, so lack of Flash on the iPad isn’t much of a change for me.

• Mail: Check
• iChat: Check (AIM)
• iCal: Check
• Address Book: Check
• iTunes: Check
• iPhoto: Check
• GarageBand: Check (StudioTrack)
• Evernote: Check

Now, to be fair, the iPad equivalents of the above do not always have all the features of their Mac counterparts. The main functionality is there. The rest...well, the iPad isn’t even a year old yet.

• Preview (as PDF reader): Check

The iPad has PDF reading built in, but no specific app for it. I do most of my PDF reading/referencing in GoodReader.

• iWork: Check

Some people will say matter-of-factly that nobody is going to want to write a term paper or create a spreadsheet on an iPad. shrug

OK, Pages for iPad doesn’t have footnotes...yet. It can’t print directly from the iPad—though Jobs himself has allegedly acknowledged that printing is in the works. (Yes, I’ve seen the photocopier pic. I LOL’d...the first time.) With my Bluetooth keyboard, I can’t see why I wouldn’t write a lengthy document with Pages for iPad. Even if I currently have to move it to my iMac for the finishing touches.

The whole keyboard + iPad topic is fodder for its own post.

I’ve created a few spreadsheets on the iPad. No less complex than those I would have created on my iMac. Although, I’m not that much of a spreadsheet user.

The iPad actually seems like a fine platform for creating presentations. We’ll see how it goes when I next need to create one.

• GuitarPro: Strike

I recently bought this Mac app. In fact, I bought it—in part—to produce content for the excellent TabToolkit iPad/iPhone app. (The fact that I can’t use it for that at the moment could be another post.) This is another app—like Keynote—that might actually work as well, if not better, on the iPad.

• DrScheme: Strike

Unfortunately, Apple’s rules don’t allow for an equivalent to DrScheme.

What if? Well, if it were a fairly straight port, it probably wouldn’t work very well without a keyboard. (Which is OK; I have one.) I can imagine a visual/touch interface for editing Scheme source code, though. (I’m imagining something like what I imagine the Viaweb editor was like.)

I think you could do a “DrEcmaScript” within Apple’s rules, though. As either an app (if it used WebKit) or a web app. I suppose a Scheme interpreter written in Javascript would be allowed, though perhaps not practical.

So...only two strikes.

It might be interesting to look through my iPad apps and see which ones don’t have Mac equivalents...or those for which I wouldn’t want a Mac equivalent.

Is the iPad going to replace my iMac? No, I don’t think so. Not anytime soon. It can, I think, come astonishingly close, however. There is a lot of overlap between the Mac, iPad, and iPhone; but there’s also enough outside those overlaps to justify each. The overlaps mean more flexibility.

The iPad may not replace my iMac, but imagine an iPhone OS desktop device. That might. Of course, being a programmer, I might still want a Linux/FreeBSD system for tinkering. (One of the nice things—for me—about Mac OS X is that I can get to the BSD personality underneath it when I want to.) For getting things done, however, I’m happy to use “app consoles”.

D&D 3.5 = Linux

Now, I haven’t seen a lot of other systems, but from what I have seen, I suspect this problem looks worse than it really is. We started with D&D 3.5 and a lot of splats. Since it’s the only game we know, there’s an assumption that any system we replace it with would be similarly complex, and require a similar ramp-up time. My brief survey of alternative systems indicates that this isn’t so—but we have no way to know that. It’s as though we all started on Linux, so we naturally assume any system we switch to will have a similarly painful learning curve. Because, well, that’s all we know about computers.

—Drakona@ENWorld

Mac OS a better Linux than Linux?

From “Apple's Leopard Is Better ‘Linux’ Than Linux”...

On the down side, people with malicious intent can use this extensive archive to figure out ways to hack the Mac. The fact that this hasn’t happened—like I said above, Darwin has been available for years—is a testament to the integrity of the Apple community.

No, it means that it’s really true that openness leads to better security. In fact, Apple took a lot of their open source code from OpenBSD, a system known for its security focus.

So here are my observations: Mac OS X, and Apple’s development paradigm, is the anti-Linux. And it’s Steve Jobs’ big accomplishment that Apple has built a better (I should actually say “more successful”) Linux than Linus Torvalds has ever been able to do.

This seems to imply that Mac OS X and Linux (or Jobs and Torvalds) have the same goals, which clearly has never been the case.

Edit: It would seem I’m misremembering. It seems Apple leveraged FreeBSD more than OpenBSD. See the comments.