Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

I just installed the Photoshop CS3 Beta, and there was something with the installer that made me curios. I checked the application bundle and found a Nib called “DHTMLAlert.nib”, which was a window filled with a WebView. In further inspection the “resources” directory which is on the install disk contains the interface, in HTML and JavaScript files. In essence, the installer is an Ajax application, at least the user interface.

I guess this is more common on the Windows platform, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. On the Mac, however, we don’t see this very often, and I hope it will stay that way. Web applications are ten years after their desktop counterparts when it comes to user interfaces, so doing what Adobe is doing isn’t a step forward, in my opinion. I don’t want every application to have it’s custom GUI style, and I don’t want hover effects on every control, it’s not in the intrest of good user interface design.

But that wasn’t really why I wrote this, the real reason is that I’m curious if this is an example of what Adobe’s soon-to-be-released Apollo can do? It looks and feels kind of sleek, so I’m impressed. For some applications I can see why using this kind of technology would be better than trying to do the same thing in .Net or Cocoa.

It’s actually a web application

The “four kinds of freedom”, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, tells us that users of free software have “the freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0)”. What an irony it is then, that most open source/free software applications I have installed on my Mac include a licence agreement step, like in these pictures:

The user cannot install the software without agreeing to the GPL, which I must say is a clear violation of “freedom to run the program, for any purpose”. And this is regardless of that the GPL, to the best of my knowledge, does not impose any restrictions on the user of a GPL’ed application*, so there isn’t really anything to accept.

Edit: The GPL FAQ actually mentions this.

* As far as I understand it (I really need to say that so that Stallman doesn’t put a fatwa on me), the GPL is concerned with distribution of software, not, for example, usage.