Ölbaum’s Delirium

John Gruber linked [1, 2] to two articles by Paul Kim and Terrence Talbot about Java, following Steve Jobs’ remark about it not being worth building into the iPhone. I foolishly went to read them, not realising that I was being caught into a Fractal Linking Cascade, ending in my reading of five rather long articles on the subject. I don’t regret it, though, because they were really interesting.

Here they are in reverse chronological order:

1. John Gruber [1, 2] (linking to Paul Kim and Terrence Talbot)

2. Terrence Talbot (linking to Paul Kim):

   Imagine this: IFC looked a helluvalot like AppKit, in Java. No AWT. And it came with a friggin’ Interface Builder!

3. Paul Kim (linking to James Duncan Davidson and Jens Alfke):

   In the spirit of these articles, I’d like to tell a story, one that many have not heard and that, after all these years, should be told. It’s a story not only about what was, but about what might have been.

4. Jens Alfke:

   Me, I defected long ago. I’m another of those Apple Java engineers who dropped out. I spent five years as a raving Java fanboy, but I gave up after optimizing AWT, implementing drag and drop, and trying to make 1,200 pages of crappy APIs do the right thing on the Mac. Then I took a one-week Cocoa training course, and wrote the first prototype of iChat.

5. James Duncan Davidson (linking to Daniel H. Steinberg):

   Damn, that stings a bit, doesn’t it? If I were an executive at Apple and over the last 10 years I haven’t really seen a compelling end product come out of all that work on Java, not to mention haggling with Sun over licensing terms the whole time, I’d be casting a skeptical eye as well.

6. Daniel H. Steinberg:

   Over the years Sun has played hardball with Apple over Java. While Sun has built the runtime for Solaris, Windows, and Linux, Apple has had to build and tune the Java runtime for the Mac while paying a heavy licensing fee for the privilege of doing Sun’s work for them.

And here in my order of interest. I recommend you at least read Jens Alfke’s post.

1. Jens Alfke
2. James Duncan Davidson
3. Paul Kim
4. Daniel H. Steinberg
5. Terrence Talbot

# Posted by Ölbaum, late at night | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apple, Java, Mac OS X, Programming, iPhone

The Macalope points out that iPod sales are up by 50% this quarter (21 million units), but that growth is down from 60% compared to the same quarter last year. Then he adds:

But when the last people on the planet who still don’t have an iPod are either Amish or Jim Alchin, it starts getting a little difficult.

There are gems in the comments too:

Splashman about the Zune:

A friend of mine claimed that his cousin’s sister’s brother-in-law’s nephew had one. Then again, my friend is a fisherman, so he’s prone to exaggeration. Perhaps the nephew had only seen one.

Huxley on the same subject:

Steve Balmer said that they’ve captured 20-25% of the high-end music player market.

That’s crappy spin, I’d focus on the fact that MS has a de facto monopoly on the brownish-green high-end music player segment of the market.

# Posted by Ölbaum, lunch time | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apple, Zune, iPod

A very interesting video that demos ProcFS, RSSFS, DocsFS (Google Docs), SpotlightFS and PicasawebFS in MacFUSE.

→ Visit site

# Posted by Ölbaum, early afternoon | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Demo, Development, File System, Mac, Mac OS X, MacFUSE, OS, Open Source, Programming, Software, Video