I take Jack’s point in Stolen Sheep about people getting all misty eyed about the consistency of the user interface on previous versions of MacOS.
I think he missed the mark slightly though, particularly by mentioning OS 9. I don’t know anything about Jack, so maybe he had an original Mac 128k, but I would never hold up OS 9 as a paragon of consistency, and people who do have obviously not been around that long!
The rot set in a lot earlier than that - for me it was around the time of Powertalk and Apple Guide. I would say that system 7 was pretty consistent though, and system 6 even more so.
Sheer complexity of the system is part of the problem I’m sure, but as I mentioned in Bring Back The User Interface Police I do think that Apple should keep a tighter overview, and at least conform to its own standards.
Blimey. The rumours were true then.
I’ve just noticed that the Learn3k website has sort of stuttered into life!
There’s a tiny bit more information on there now anyway :)
Michael McCracken mentions a nice idea for a foundation dedicated to soliciting and publicising open source bounties, originally proposed here by Nat Friedman.
The idea is to connect up people who are offering money for enhancements to open source software with programmers who have the time and the skills to do the work.
Nice idea - I’m quite tempted to try to set a rough version of the site using a wiki or cms and see how it evolves. The big problem that I can see is how to handle disputes. I can imagine at least 3:
- someone claims a bounty but there is a dispute about whether it is completed
- someone pledges, concedes that the task has been completed, but then fails to pay
- two or more people claim the bounty for different solutions
Here are the rules that Nat used for the bounty scheme that he organised.