On Saturday, September 7, 2002, at 12:48 AM, Jerry Yeager wrote: > In the same way that adding extensions to the older OSes (9, 8, 7, 6, > 5, etc) patched the system to allow your Mac to do things that Apple > had not gotten to yet (or may did not intend to do), 3rd party > developers will make subtle changes to the way Apple has set up UNIX > to run on the Mac. If these are done "highly correctly" then there is > no change to the file system, but "highly correctly" was hard to > achieve especially in 10.0 - 10.1.2. so 3rd party folks would > sometimes take shortcuts to get at what they wanted to do, which would > involve things like changing the ownership status of files and just > generally mucking around in places that they had to.
The reasons why developers muck with the innards of the system are sometimes the fault of Apple. For example, Apple puts those nice little icons in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. This is something a few utility developers would like to do. Apple documents a programming interface for this, but it doesn't give all the features of the Apple icons. This is because Apple uses its own set of "secret" interfaces to put up its own icons. Developers reverse-engineered Apple's method and started using it under X.1.n. In X.2, Apple has now put in routines to detect when third party developers are trying to use the "secret" interfaces and prevent them from doing so. All the older utility programs that use the "secret" routines will now fail. It seems to me that Apple ought to just publish the programming interfaces they use and let anyone else use them. After all, this is uncomfortably close to Microsoft's time-tested strategy of keeping certain Windows operating system routines secret so that, for example, Word, can outperform Word Perfect. -- Lee Larson, Mathematics Department, University of Louisville Phone: 502-852-6826 FAX: 502-852-7132 The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be September 24 For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
