Tuesday 24 April 2007

Useless discussion bait #1697

Apple invents Galago:
For example, Apple said the framework will allow developers to programatically determine through their own applications whether a specific instant message user is online[...].
We're well known for nicking ideas from Apple, and they also like to steal some from us, which isn't surprising given some of the cross-breeding among the communities that's happened over the years.

They still have a much better record at bringing those features to the users (Beagle vs. Spotlight, where the latter is integrated in many many more applications than Beagle is), and even better at advertising them (with pretty moving pictures).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Apple's IMF is much more than Galago, it provides applications the tools needed to provide multimedia data over IM (Jabber, Bonjour, AIM).

It is fully standarized in the OS, it is fully coded and will be readily available with Leopard. iChat comes standard with all Macs.

Galago in the other hand, is just vaporware, done by ChipX86 in his spare time. It ties in to Gaim (Pidgin, whatever), which is not standard, and not a part of GNOME.

Nothing is standard, all has to be installed, there is no guarantee that anything works, Dbus dependencies, application usage, Galgo works in GNOME, but not KDE, etc etc etc.

In the Mac it just works, and its there, and it exists.

Spotlight, IMF, etc.

Did Apple invent it? Some of it yes, some of it no.

Is it better and does it just work? Yes.

Maybe you should reconsider why so many OSS developers have switched to the true UNIX Desktop OS.

And why Os X has more users than thousands of Linux distributions.

Its beautiful, it just works.

Meanwhile, you can keep coding on all the nice projects, and ideas on FreeDesktop, GNOME.

But as Ronald Bultje said, ITS VAPO-PR-WARE.

Unknown said...

Anonymous, there is a huge difference between vaporware and software that people just haven't adopted and integrated with. Galago is far from vaporware. Every up-to-date Nokia 770 and every Nokia N800 uses Galago. It just never caught on in the desktop. I hope that someday we have the level of integration that Apple will surely have, though. That, however, is up to the community and contributors.

Please be careful with your wording, though, as it does more harm than good to call software with so many hours put into it "vaporware." Vaporware means it's promised but nothing exists or there's nothing to prove it exists. We have code, by your own admission.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps the original post should have had s/Galago/Telepathy/? Telepathy will be fully integrated into gnome and provides the means for collaboration using Abiword etc.

Anonymous said...

Anonymous, look at KIMProxy then. It is standard in KDE3, integrated for example with kopete and kontact. Both are belong to standard kdepim and kdenetwork modules. It worked for some time now (definitely for longer than Apple stuff). Looks like all your 'arguments' are invalid now :-)
I don't really understand your ranting about how 'there is no guarantee that anything works' - nobody gives you guarantee, even your beloved Apple. The only difference is that with free software you get it written in plain words instead of hidden in 30 pages of EULA written in weird legalese.
Rest of you rant about 'more users than thousands of Linux distributions' is of course irrelevant - typical drivel of rabid Apple fanboy.