More on apps, shelf space 1051

It is not necessary to get this level of perfection to have a useful product!

snip- signing *everything*

Essentially correct. That is what IE6 on XP SP2 does.

Actually, as a bit of UI work it's quite clever. It will not do an automatic download; it displays a bar at the top of the window saying 'I just blocked a download'. You click that bar to tell it to go ahead and do it.

They could get a C2 security rating for it. :D

The idea is to have a standard policy, the user does not need to make this sort of decision. It then becomes the content providers problem to work within the limits.

Any content that did not do so, would just not work at all.

snip

These things are *not* obvious. What goes inApplications? what isLibrary-ScreenSavers or was it ~-Library-ScreenSavers?

The thing with Apple's current bundle technology is that they go.. anywhere. This means users don't need to understand the filesystem- at least on paper.

But then some *do* have to go to specific folders, so there you are.

The OS X filesystem structure is pretty similar to the one in Windows. It *is* confusing and inhospitable once you get into the cluttered bits.

Well, see if I don't!

snip- below

Yes. I know you can nest bundles.

Hmmm. Do you mean that stand alone spotlight plugins also go inApplications? I had not thought of that.

One way you could do this is to have aSoftware directory wth just every kind of software dumped in there, all as bundles, and all indexed. You then need some other way to provide an application launcher, but maybe this could be built on Spotlight also.

This sounds very much likeProgram Files actually. :D

But serious, I begin to think you are on to something; you could combine elements of Windows and elements of Mac OS X and get something better than either. You can take Apple's bundles and spotlight context indexing, and use them to implement a better registry, a better add-remove programs, and a better start menu.

"Better" of course means that you get Windows-like behavior, but it is much more robust since corrupted spotlight indexes can be rebuilt from scratch, and changes made by hand (rather than by installers) can be tracked and accomodated.

snip

I an talking about an improvement mechanism to do what the registry does. Mac OS X doesn't have this now.

... er, "Sharable software components" is what this is all about. It's what the registry enables.

It's very handy. So handy Apple keeps re-inventing it in various forms; spotlight plugins, automator actions, dashboard widgets, document-app buttociations, the services menu, the spell checking service...

All these represent "sharable software components" in one sense or another. But there's no reusable machanism to do this; Apple does a new one each time- often with arbitrary and annoying limitations.

snip

It is a hard problem; very hard.

But MS got where they are by doing things that are obviously impossible- like making ISA plug & play.

You will notice, I hope, that plug & play worked pretty poorly on the ISA bus. But that it worked at all, ever, was a big win and made Windows much more compelling than, say, OS-2, or Unix.

I expect, in the near term, we'll see solutions like that from Microsoft: they may not work *well*, but if they work at all, ever, that's something.