Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] surprising MacOS X 10.3 features...

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Sat, 1 Nov 2003, Mike Miller wrote:

> On Sat, 1 Nov 2003, Jonathan King wrote:
> 
> > And then it has some mind-bogglingly useful new features.  A trivial one
> > is "Export:"  That allows you to (wait for it...) export a file or a
> > selection from a file into any reasonable format plus a few others just
> > for fun; this is *huge*).
> 
> You mean like MS Word or WordPerfect formats?  That is a nice feature.

No; actually it's only PDF and various graphics formats (and
oddities like QuickTime).  You could select text (from a single
column paper) and toss it into a Word document, of course. Exporting
MS Word from PDF would be a lot tougher (think 3 column papers with
figures and headers...).  PDF is nice for some things, but it is
hardly guaranteed to be structured enough for some things.  Yeah, it 
would be nice, though.
 
> > [snip, Preview finding]
>
> Cool - we need more of that.  I hope other programs pick up on it.  So I
> hope they haven't patented it!!

I'd think this is doubtful.  KWIC is prior art for one things, Emacs 
is prior art for incremental find, and I'm sure there's prior art 
for presenting a list of search results.  The slickness is in the 
execution.
 
> > I could go on, but I seriously suggest that anybody who hasn't played
> > with the new system go at least take a look, if only so you can see what
> > features should be stolen for use in Linux.
> 
> We are allowed to 'steal' them, right?  Patent law has gotten weird
> lately.  I hope it doesn't get in the way.

Stealing things like Exposé would be tricky if you didn't have a
nice imaging model.  If you already render everything in a window as
PDF, it's trivial to thumbnail the windows and find a "nice"
arrangement on the screen, pretty easy to generate the cutesie
animation that happens during the action, and probably slightly hard
to make it usably fast.  But if you don't have a pleasant graphics
model, life is tougher.  I have no idea what patents could get in 
your way.
 
> You're really making me want a Mac!!

It's definitely worth more than a look now that they have a real OS
and decent hardware at prices that are improved.  (The dual G5 is 
certainly competitive, the notebooks are quite competitive, and the 
boxes in between are good enough to be attractive if you like the 
software.

jking


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