🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <pvdh.0089@motship.xs4all.nl>,
Paul van der Heu <pvdh@motship.xs4all.nl> wrote:
>Lawson English (english@primenet.com) wrote:
>
>: : That, contrary to claims in this thread, Apple is not Gods chosen
>: : fount of technology.
>: 
>: IMNSHO, Apple IS on of the major players in bringing out new technology. 
>: NOt the only one, but one of the 2-3 most important (at least in the 
>: personal computer industry).
>
>What new technology did Apple bring to the public.. Let me tell you..
>
>NONE, NADA, ZIP, NOTHING ...
>
>They overhyped their products as if they were new ideas, but they
>'just' copied other peoples ideas in the progress. They have NEVER
>been a trendsetter nor have they done anything not done before.

One could argue, in similar breath, that Einstein did not "discover"
relativity by himself.  His work is based on the results that many
experimentalists had known for some time, on mathematical constructs
that he did not develop himself ...

True, Apple did not invent the GUI.  But Steve Jobs and others at
Apple had the foresight to see that this is the wave of the future,
and through the Lisa and the Mac, they created its *best*
implementation at the time.  It is still one of the best user
interface on the market, most would agree.  I'd contend, it takes just
as much innovation and work to create bring a nascent idea to its
fruition as to create a new idea.

In fact, I'd argue that Apple made an extremely important contribution
to the computer industry: they took the idea of system calls and API,
and developed it to the point that it created a unified computing
experience for the user like no other system has shown before.
Instead of having to either write your own stuff from scratch (like
you'd do for DOS porgrams), or link in yet another copy of the same
library that 50 trillion applications already has (like UNIX does, or
used to do), you just make an API call that works across all Macs in
the same way, across all applications, without having to duplicate too
much code.

The PICT file format, one of the things that make the Mac such a great
graphics/desktop publishing platform, is an embodiment of this idea.
For those who don't know, the PICT format is a vector graphics/bitmap
format that allows you to store arbitrary number of graphics objects
in a standard form, and that can be accessed from just about any
Macintosh graphics/word processing/desktop publication application.
The format is flexible enough to allow preservation of object
attributes, and the layering order, and other object-oriented graphics
features.  All this is made possible by a set of system API that
allows easy adoption and implementation by any Mac programmer.  There
is no other system wide support of a file format of such nature in any
other system that I know of.  (Maybe the SGI?)

The API, together with Apple's User Interface Guidelines (which one,
depending on one's philosophy, would either love or hate), serves to
provide a unified user experience that is still unmatched by most
other systems (exceptions to this would include NeXT and some such), IMHO.

And if you put all the technology that have been or are coming out
from Apple: QuickDraw 3D, QuickTime, QuickTime Music Architecture,
QuickTime VR, OpenDoc, ...  while non of these are completely new in
and of themselves, I believe Apple did make a genuine contribution to
the industry in each of these areas, and put together, provides a
pretty compelling picture of technology.

Just my $0.02.

Mike Kwong