First, I haven't seen Lion or heard of it yet, so more info is good. Second, multi-tasking -- doing two different things at once -- may be a bad idea.
But accomplishing a single task may require two tools Unix got to be great because your "apps" for a long time were chains of well behaved little tools. From what I'm hearing, it sounds like Apple is pushing everything to becoming a big huge monolithic "all-in-one". What do I use while writing a blog column? An editor, a web page preview, a spell checker, fact checking lookup, etc. Now, it happens that I can do all that today in a web browser, and even if the OS limits me to one window that browser does multi-tabs. But ... well, I can still remember ... vi for editing *roff for formatting (What was that name???) for bolding and positioning cleanup more (later less) for display preview spell (then ispell) for spell checking gopher for fact checking (wais never seemed to catch on) And of all that, only "gopher" would be considered a separate application. Heck, I could do most of that from inside the editor. Think of all the piplines you use today -- hidden inside shell scripts. Are you really saying that every app has to do everything itself? Lets go to the extreme -- you can't "F-11" to get back to the desktop and finder while running an app. Looking for a file? Fine -- ALL of your filesystem browsing needs to be replicated inside every app that wants to examine files. Would that catch on? Either there's something else going on with Lion, or this is a complete disaster. Multi-TASKing, even if a single app doing a dozen things: Bad (web browsers) Multi-APPing for a single task: Good. Oh: Has anyone noticed that web browsers are now as complex as operating systems? Process and sandbox model, window (script) isolation, tracking and killing runaway threads and script programs, tracking which windows use how much CPU and memory, higher priority to important scripts in important windows, "isolated" (site-specific) browsers for web-apps, greasemonkey and stylish for user-end patching, debuggers, etc. That's the ultimate in "All-in-one": the "goto" of modern apps. No wonder people say multi-tasking is bad. Yet I can multitask in one app, or use multiple apps for one task. _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
