Apple is a harsh Mistress, but Lemmings prefer Bondage & Discipline
Ah, these sentiments are familiar to me. But the moanings of a few disgruntled developers are usually outweighed by the masses of developer lemmings, who cheerfully follow Apple's every move.
In this vein, a strong candidate for a title Apple Developer
Lemming of the Year 
in the category "holier-than-Apple-himself"
would be this
entry by [Anonymous] seen in the Apple Quartz developer list.
Yes, this is the Lemming inquisition running amok with enough foam
around the mouth to host big parties on Ibiza's beaches. It reads
thusly, in excerpts (the gray paragraphs, which have been slightly
rearranged for dramatic effect):
| It is hard to come up with enough adjectives for how unimaginably, hideously ghastly an idea this is. Making Cocoa classes to help people use undocumented APIs, when the Quartz engineering manager has on *three separate occasions* told you not to use them at all? It's not just a bad idea, it's damned irresponsible. |
| Now what is the unimaginably, hideously, ghastly, bad and
damn irresponsible idea ? Wade Tregaskis made
a very neat hack that allows to rotate and scale your
windows.
Although, in my opinion, the neatness of the hack equals its complete uselessness, this hack is a threat to Mac OS X! Since it's functionality has now been wrapped in nice little Cocoa categories for anyone to use, the dire consequences of this (in Lemming inquisition logic) are: |
 |
| If four shareware programs start using CGSGet/SetWindowTransform for some "feature," then the programmers at Adobe and Microsoft and Macromedia will start getting requests for it. Once *they* start using it, Haroon's team suddenly can't change their own internal routines without breaking third party programs. |
I don't remember the names of the fallacies from my philosophy courses too well anymore. But I can detect four fallacies in two sentences. Not bad.
|
Encouraging people to use
these private Quartz functions after all of Haroon's warnings is
the single dumbest idea I've heard this year - and I've heard
reporters ask Steve Jobs questions about their pet theories on the
future of digital music. Share your academic investigations at
MacHack, and stop encouraging people to do what Apple's OS managers
have said they should not do -- unless you just hate Mac OS X and
Quartz and want them to fail.
|
[Anonymous] obviously otherwise spends a serene and comfortable life, shielded from the unpleasantries of modern culture, if this is the single dumbest idea he has heard this year. Listen up rogue developer! Don't be touching Mac OS X's private parts there. Clearly if you move outside of the Lemming herd, you must be an Apple hater!
|
I really don't care if you
want to learn about Quartz and make academic explorations and turn
windows into OpenGL cubes on your own system to demonstrate it at
MacHack. When you start encouraging other people to use it, you've
crossed the line, and if you don't step back, people more
interested in system stability need to move you
back.
|
And if you resist, they will kill you. Do you hear me ? Kill you! KILL KILL KILL!!!