Mountain Lion focuses on Cocoa, drops X11 and deprecates Carbon Core - Page 2

Consumers don't use X11, nor do businesses for that matter. I'm struggling to think what app other than Gimp uses X11 and frankly the Gimp developers have had long enough to port it properly to the Mac.

Apple are merely dropping stuff that most users don't need and don't care for.

Whether people like it or not, the Mac is becoming main stream and Apple don't need to pander to the likes of Java, X11 or Carbon developers any more. Either build for the Mac and OSX properly, or don't.

Currently I have to reinstall XQuartz everytime the system gets updated. This is a pain so an open source only solution would actually be better. Then you have the problem of third party software building against different X11 tracts. From the users standpoint this should be much better.

The only concern is that Apple stops supporting XQuartz with their employees.

Narrowly focused consumers maybe. But if you keep an open mind, you will find much in the way of useful X11 software.

Yes the ideal is Native Mac software but not everything is or will ever be native.

Inkscape. GIMP's drawing sibling. As Illustrator is to Photoshop. I use both GIMP and Inkscape regularly.

And this change won't bother me. Anyone nerdy enough to know what GIMP or Inkscape are, is nerdy enough to install XQuartz. If you know you need it, you can install it. Otherwise it doesn't take up space.

- Jasen.

POST of the WEEK

Bold steps to take leaps forward > legacy support.

If it was worth having then, its been remade for the now.

WireShark is all I ever used in terms of X11 stuff. Everything else that I desperately need I run in VMWare Fusion.

Wireshark...

Wine.. including Crossover and Wineskin... but they bundle their own X11 builds inside, but still rely on some of XQuartz being installed.



really? thats very short sighted. Java is a major software language that needs to be supported... X11 is also major on other *nix systems since it is THE windowing system on Linux, BSD, etc... it helps in easily making ports. Many current apps still using some Carbon, including stuff like MS Office 2011... hopefully they'll leave it as deprecated for a few versions before removing anything.

You thinking just cuz Apple is getting bigger that they can force the whole world to change to exactly what they want is very short sighted. Just because you have an idea of "proper" doesn't mean its right.

Beyond all that I'm sure some day all of Apple devices will become like iOS devices... slightly better than they are now.. much worse than Macs are now. While I do know ObjC/Cocoa well, and really do like it... as a computer user and not a Phone/Pad user for my main computing... I'm pretty sure in a few years I'll have to go back to Linux, or even use Windows more... Apple is trying to get out of the actual personal computer business and just wants to make an iPad-like focus.

This is the sort of gutsy move that has made Apple so successful. They are not afraid to alter the status quo significantly. And this behavior was there even when Apple was not such a massive success as it is today. Whether it is giving up on Floppy disks, moving to USB, deciding to stay away from Flash, stay away from Blu-ray, distributing the OS online, all of this points to a DNA that is very different from other companies out there.

Thankfully we have Apple around, otherwise our computers might still have punch card slots!

Maybe it's because I see AI as a social place as well as an Apple informational site. If you think I'm a waste of your time, don't read me. \ Besides it's not misinformation because there is or was a security hole in X11 and IMO that is probably why Apple has made it an optional install for sometime now. They don't really don't want it on their OS for those reasons.

True. But sometimes it's the only alternative. E.g. try to find a reasonable (does not convert everything to grainy pixel based images) and affordable SVG to PDF converter and the only one available is InkScape which requires X11.

Hmm ... unless things have really changed in the past month I think X11 is pretty important in the academic world. This seems like an odd move or perhaps Apple is giving up on that small group of users? It's far better for it to be part of the system.

philip

Actually, it's a "way back when": 2006.

.tsooJ

Any guess if the successor of Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) will have the version number OS X11 (rather than OS X10.9)?

Almost anybody who uses both OS X and some other *nix OS together, or wants to build and run open-source software not written for OS X, will want to have X11. If not to run X11 apps locally, it's invaluable to run remote X11 applications. I don't mind how it developed or distributed, as long as it doesn't mean X11 will break with every OS X update, and keeps up with modern OS X features to integrate with native Mac apps than plain xorg X11, for example.

Not being able to run X11 apps at all could be reason to ditch OS X altogether for me. Yes, it's that important for my use.

I'm guessing Apple will continue to iterate the "ten" schema (10.10, 10.11, etc.) until all devices go iOS-y.

Plus, we live in an era that even Linux distros are leaving X11 behind.

Check the Wayland ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland...erver_protocol) ) and Ubuntu, for example.

I use GIMP, not necessarily daily, but very frequently. I don't foresee a rewrite that'll run without X11. GIMP accomplishes some detail work not possible in, e.g., Pixelmator. And I'm not among the rich and famous who can afford to keep a copy of Photoshop hanging around in the shadows for detail work on *not only* photos but other graphics, for website maintenance. Unless I could find a realistic alternative to GIMP, I *depend* on X11!

The only time I have ever used X11 was for Gimp.

I used it once, a long time ago. I'll miss it like I miss PowerPC support.
Thank you, Apple for not bloating OS X after 10 years. This isn't Windows, after all.

The version odometer wraps at 256.

Deprecating Carbon also adds another list of good but older games that will also be deprecated. Unlike professional software that is maintained and upgraded every few years or so.

Games have a business model of build it, support for maybe 1-2 years and then move to the next game. Sometimes if we are lucky we get a game ported to work with OSX when Apple decides to change something, but considering many are windows ports and licensed for a set amount of years many games we play have a set expiration on them that is not seen on any other platform.

I'm surprised developers release software on the mac, not only do we have a smaller market share, but Apple requires continuos support far beyond what one would need for windows. (Obviously they are making a profit.)

And I don't doubt in 3 or 4 years, some Cocoa library will become deprecated, or Apple will switch to ARM, etc.

You don't think we need the towers? Hell we'll need the towers to run vmware or virtual box on the metal and run OS 10.5, 10.6, 10.7... just so we have access to all our software. Who wants to rebuy everything, every 2 years? Or have a room filled with macs... with their hardware slowly dying.

Since M.Lion is only av as download. This would be another step to reduce the download size.

Force the whole world to change? They already did that with iOS - play with Apple's rules or don't.

500k apps and 24bn downloads later and I think Apple are quite valid in thinking that they can (and will) dictate how people develop software on their platform.

As for X11 - we've managed to name 3 applications that need it. As for Academia wanting/needing X11 - they can still download an open source. However, having a sister who just bought an MBP for university, I can assure you that any idea that X11 is needed across academia is misguided and dated. They are more interested in whether you run Word than X11.

But my point for X11 still stands - developers like GIMP have had plenty of time to get themselves onto the OSX platform properly. No one is stopping you downloading an open source, just Apple aren't going to support it themselves.

Does anyone (care to) remember OpenOffice and NeoOffice? Someone at Neo took the time and trouble to recode the OpenOffice interface to Apple APIs (and did a fine job as well), and now OpenOffice does it as standard. So why does GIMP continue to use X11?

And lets stop pretending X11 is some fantastic windowing platform. It's a total nightmare on the Mac - ala Gimp. None of the controls work properly (eg file manager), non of the keystrokes work the way you want or are use to. It's a pile of crap that should long have support OSX UI APIs.


As for Java, another crap platform. I have rarely met a Java application that I've liked, or felt was very stable. But I've met plenty on both the OSX and Windows platform that are total garbage - and from mainstream software developers (like HP, IBM and bunches of others). They are buggy as hell, inconsistent UI (because they are determined to draw their own buttons rather than call the OS), and so forth.

Lion didn't care much about that. Physical size is way less important than active resources used. If they could get it to sip RAM and CPU cycles, it can balloon to 8GB for all I care.

Nope. There are also people who really need this.

I use Crossover/Wine a lot and not having X11 would be very bad. However, it's not when it is downloadable.

Sometimes there actually are reasons to complain... today isn't one of them. :-)

You should be glad about this not angry. As a programmer I'm sure you'd want to be on feature parity with other developers which you aren't as it stands currently.

Is it just me or are developers not entirely objective in their approach to changes? Surely if something is going to make your life better and easier you'd want it wouldn't you?

No one is preventing you from running X11 though! Apple are just saying that you have to press a button to download if you need it, and that they are passing the role of support off onto the community that created it.



edit, apologies for quoting you, i've managed to quote the wrong person.

I prefer Pixelmator. Trounces Photoshop and GIMP in terms of speed and requirements, leverages OS X features (hence most of the speed), and is quite cheap.

This post is ridiculous. OS developers do this all the time INCLUDING Linux. They always give you options though and Apple is no different. Why does Apple have to do everything when others can do the job better? Why does Apple have to develop its own version of Java when Oracle can do it better? Why does Apple have to develop their version of X11 when X11 can provide a better version?

Apple is trimming the fat that isn't needed by the majority. Let me ask you this. What version of Windows comes with Java, Flash Player, and X11? NONE. There never has been a version with these features so why get upset when Apple makes that same decision?

It's far better that the developers do their own work rather than rely on Apple doing the dirty work for them. That way people can choose if they need it or not.

But when Apple does include something it can value they get accused from controlling too much. They can't win with some people.

But Lion was mostly a ground up rewrite so it needed to be larger in file size. If Mountain Lion can come in as a kind of delta upgrade then the file sizes will only need to be huge when reinstalling from scratch as you have to download an entire OS.

I couldn't agree more and this has been something I always admired about Apple vs other OS alternatives.

No, it wasn't. And it wasn't any larger or smaller than any other recent OS X release.

People get angry at apple but really they should get angry at the lazy developers who don't even take the time to adjust to simple changes like building a package installer vs drag n drop. We work with professional vendors for window platforms who are just now putting resources into moving their product to Win 7.

I was thinking in the sense that the whole thing was written for 64bit. Snow Leopard was still largely implementing 32bit. As such Lion required a full upgrade to a lot of system stuff to be 64bit.

With the underlying infrastructure being 64bit it now only needs to be stuff they've changed since which can in fact be done in a sort of delta-update fashion as opposed to a massive upgrade like what happened with Lion.

Not all of the Lion system stuff is 64-bit, that's for sure. Trust me on that one.

Snow Leopard was the re-write that brought you 64 bit Cocoa and legacied Carbon to 32 bit only.

Grand Central Dispatch, LLVM/Clang, OpenCL, CUPS, etc., all came with Snow Leopard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard

Inkscape is getting ported to GTK+ 3.x which has Compliant Interfaces to Cocoa.

When the port get's more volunteers to make this happen it will no longer need Xorg on OS X, period.

The same goes for GIMP.

Blender has a Cocoa port.

KDE utilizing Qt 4.8 and 5.x have Cocoa options to make their interfaces mesh with Cocoa.

The sooner they get build scripts for LLVM/Clang the sooner these ports will improve.

Blender already has work on it. There are plenty of Cmake examples inside LLVM/Clang to leverage.

All the system apps were 64-bit but I recall a lot of the processes were still showing up as 32-bit.