"Your assessment about designers betrays ignorance of both their craft and their intelligence."
Actually, its an opinion born of experience... but you werent to know that :P -----Original Message----- From: Howdy-Tzi [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 03 April 2002 17:56 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: <lingo-l> Silly Mac users At 20:24 -0600 04/02/2002, js33 wrote: >I have never learned anything of substance from a MAC user. I take it then none of my posts regarding such things as image manipulation, encipherment and so on have had any merit for you. That's too bad, because even if the specific topic of steganography is uninteresting to you, you have to admit the idea of using randomSeed to reliably reconstruct a "random" sequence of numbers is of interest to a programmer. And imaging Lingo is just fun to play with! At 09:36 +0100 04/03/2002, Peter King wrote: >Lets face it, the only people using Macs are designers, and thats >because the rest of the design industry does so they have to. Actually that's not entirely accurate. I use Linux at home because I like the stability of the nix subsystem. When X was released I was thrilled to at last have a UNIX running on a system that I also do my programming on. So while the hardware I use to do Director and other programming projects is Mac, the subsystem is Darwin -- which is Cupertino-flavored BSD. And while I do have some talent for visual design it was my publisher's belief in my ability to write about and teach programming that got me the deal, though perhaps my flippancy helped too. (The book was of course written on a Mac -- an iBook, as it happens.) The *real* reason designers tend to lean toward Macs is because that's what the hardware was engineered to do (along with the OS) from the beginning. Complex images, a GUI, mice and so on were not slapped in as afterthoughts ("Hey, look what they're doing... maybe we should figure out how to do it too..."). This means the machines have exceptional speed and stability when doing the kind of intensive image manipulation that graphics designers and artists require. The initial GUI concept was lifted from a prototype that Steve Jobs saw at Xerox PARC in California, yes -- but the final GUI for MacOS 1 had changed so much it wasn't the same thing at all any more. Furthermore several designers I know who are actually quite good at what they do aren't married to a platform. They can use Win, Mac or nix as long as their *toolset* is present (generally the Adobe suite). Your assessment about designers betrays ignorance of both their craft and their intelligence. Perhaps, too, you mistake elegance for lack of ability. Just because a six-year-old can operate a Mac like a professional does not mean the machines are for simple-minded dunces. Finally, don't forget that until version 4 Director was a Macintosh-only program. There were players for Windows, but all the programming happened on Mac. I don't think you're going to try to argue that Director itself was written by a bunch of know-nothing bumpkin ignorami. >So I ask you this... would you really take technical advice from a >mac designer whose combined technical knowledge amounts to file >formats, colour usage, corporate logos and a series of buzz words >such as multimedia? I wouldn't take tech advice from someone like that, no (of course if it was a question dealing with translating color values from one file format to another, hey...); but then you'd be unwise to ignore my tech advice on the subject of DOS, Win16, Win32, BSD, Linux (I started with Slackware but also hack Red Hat and Mandrake), XWindows *or* Mac. >Blame Howdy, it was his comments about PC users being stupid that >kicked this whole thing off. Actually I made sure to include little wry comments that implied I wasn't all that serious. Perhaps instead of "stupid" I should have implied that some PC users can be thin-skinned, unsubtle and literal-minded. To bring it back to Macromedia and Director: When o when will we have a 'nix release of Director? I don't know about anyone else but I have a serious hankering for the market that would open up. For starters UNIX programming can be pretty arcane. Even the "easy" means -- using script languages -- is difficult. Check out tcl sometime. For nix it's almost C++ or nothing at all. Well, I'm not sure it's defensible to require a person to have a degree in engineering before you let him write software. I'd think even die-hard Windows fanatics would agree with that; after all, Bill Gates never finished college. But more than that, UNIX is the planet's backbone. Desktop users, immersed as we are in a world of little standalone units, are generally unaware of what's happening on the other side of the net cable -- but if you get a look back there all you see is UNIX. The closest I have seen to a Directoresque language for nix is Python, which is another one of those command-prompt languages (initially). But it doesn't have the particular suite of graphic, sound and time manipulation tools Director owns which makes it such a distinctly usable critter. Director is really rather unique in that sense -- invented *after* GUIs became widely available, it is one of the few major programmer tools that doesn't more or less require you to start with ASCII and project files in text format. It incorporates the graphics from the start. I like that, and I think a lot of UNIX programmers would like it too. I honestly think there's a market for it (and have for years). I suppose the main reason we haven't seen a port yet is that it would be pretty damned tricky. I bring it up here because I like to tickle the folks at wish-director from time to time on the subject and hope others will want to stir the pot some too. -- Warren Ockrassa | http://www.nightwares.com/ Director help | Free files | Sample chapters | Freelance | Consulting Author | Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio: A Beginner's Guide Published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill http://www.osborne.com/indexes/beginners_guides.shtml [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!] [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
