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At the risk of re-igniting that flame war, I posit that this is also a cathedral vs. bazaar issue. OS X is more or less centrally planned, by one company, Apple

At the risk of re-igniting that flame war, I posit that this is also a cathedral vs. bazaar issue. OS X is more or less centrally planned, by one company, Apple.

spiralpolitik 14y ago
There is nothing stopping people sourcing the parts from the bazaar and using them to build a cathedral. After all it's exactly what NeXT (and Apple) did.
- mbreese 14y ago
  Yeah, but you need an architect that people will listen to in order to build a cathedral. It has to be many people, united under a common vision. That's really hard to pull off in the Linux community.
  - misnome 14y ago
    This is a reason for poor design, not an excuse
tristan_juricek 14y ago
I would think so, but OS X has had several great or important applications within it's ecosystem, that break UI conventions. Twitter clients used to be a playground for new UI concepts, none of which came from Apple. The Sparrow mail client was a good example of something probably more influenced by Tweetie than anything else. Even Apple doesn't have a ton of consistency. iTunes continues to baffle me with random changes things like what resize does. The App Store app shifted the window management buttons. So I don't buy that the OS X ecosystem is a "cathedral" at all, just a bazaar with better taste. What's interesting is that I noticed the standards of design for Mac apps were significantly better than Windows apps when I "made the switch" several years ago; and these are for apps that were not coming out of Apple. I could never entirely figure out why; the ecosystem was just more attuned to details. I posit that Apple was helped by having the right people excited long enough to get a great ecosystem going. Linux didn't die because it's a bazaar; every modern app ecosystem (OS X, iOS, Android, the web) functions like a bazaar. Linux just made it absolutely painful to set up shop.

At the risk of re-igniting that flame war, I posit that this is also a cathedral vs. bazaar issue. OS X is more or less centrally planned, by one company, Apple.

spiralpolitik 14y ago

There is nothing stopping people sourcing the parts from the bazaar and using them to build a cathedral. After all it's exactly what NeXT (and Apple) did.

mbreese 14y ago
Yeah, but you need an architect that people will listen to in order to build a cathedral. It has to be many people, united under a common vision. That's really hard to pull off in the Linux community.
- misnome 14y ago
  This is a reason for poor design, not an excuse

tristan_juricek 14y ago

I would think so, but OS X has had several great or important applications within it's ecosystem, that break UI conventions. Twitter clients used to be a playground for new UI concepts, none of which came from Apple. The Sparrow mail client was a good example of something probably more influenced by Tweetie than anything else. Even Apple doesn't have a ton of consistency. iTunes continues to baffle me with random changes things like what resize does. The App Store app shifted the window management buttons. So I don't buy that the OS X ecosystem is a "cathedral" at all, just a bazaar with better taste. What's interesting is that I noticed the standards of design for Mac apps were significantly better than Windows apps when I "made the switch" several years ago; and these are for apps that were not coming out of Apple. I could never entirely figure out why; the ecosystem was just more attuned to details. I posit that Apple was helped by having the right people excited long enough to get a great ecosystem going. Linux didn't die because it's a bazaar; every modern app ecosystem (OS X, iOS, Android, the web) functions like a bazaar. Linux just made it absolutely painful to set up shop.