Chimera development being dropped?

[Jacques]

I've gone back to Chimera from Safari - I just need it's extra features. This morning I read this (http://mozpink.blogspot.com/2003_01_01_mozpink_archive.html#87704137), it looks like the Chimera team may consider dropping it because of the Safari release!

I sure hope not, unless of course Safari starts to really pull it all together.

[Glanz]

This is too bad. In my not so humble opinion, Chimera is far, far superior to Safari.

There are some other articles around pointing out how Apple makes it very hard for developers to use the dev tools to port improvements on OS X-embedded stuff like iTunes etc.
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1549
Now all this makes me wonder whether or not Apple will give Fink a hard time via its Developer Tools. The lack of sharing of information during the upgrade to 10.2 which had the effect to leave Fink in limbo for a few months before the Fink developers found the way out of the maze. Now this leads me to believe that Apple is capable of doing a Dev Tool upgrade "trick" that will leave Fink in the dust by excluding the gcc version that Fink uses during the "upgrade"... That would be the sort of move I would expect from Monopolo$oft, and I am beginning to have my doubts about Apple. Note that Fink is nowhere mentioned on Apple's "Darwin" site. They link to other projects, but not to Fink.

[griffman]

If you read back to his Tuesday post, his attitude changed quite a bit over four days -- I wonder if he was using Safari to see just what he had to do?

Regarding incorporating tools, etc -- Apple is going to have a Safari SDK that shows people exactly how to incorporate the HTML rendering engine into their own products. OmniWeb is contemplating (according to the rumor mill) doing this for their 5.0 release, which would be awesome - the interface of OW with the speed of Safari ... hopefully one of the two will include tabbed browsing at some point! ;-)

Regarding fink, there's a ton of info on Apple's Developer Site about the project, scattered in various blurbs (search on fink on www.apple.com/developer). Here's a quote: Q: Will there be a BSD-style ports collection for Darwin / OS X?

A: This is certainly a hot topic for Mac users, and a number of projects, such as OpenPackages (www.openpackages.org), Fink (fink.sourceforge.net) and GNU-Darwin (www.gnu-darwin.org) have already made substantial progress in providing various 3rd-party applications for Darwin and OS X. We are following all of these projects quite closely and considering various ways of helping them to unify or accelerate their efforts. In the meantime, we recommend that you visit the various web sites and see what these projects have to offer. We will also be doing more to provide "pointers" to these various sites from our central Darwin information pages. That was found in this Ask the Darwin Team (http://developer.apple.com/darwin/news/qa20011004.html) note from 2001. In addition, Apple still has a fink page (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/fink.html) on their OS X downloads site.

There's nothing in Apple's best interest to take away a project that makes UNIX software available -- what do they have to gain? You can't sell it, you can't license it, you can't make money at it unless I'm missing something?

And back to Safari for a second. Yes, most of the other browsers have better features. Yes, I still use Chimera or Mozilla over Safari. But if it took Apple throwing down the gauntlet to show developers that you can have a fast Mac web browser, then I'm glad they did it. They've forced the Moz team to ask questions of themselves about some of their design directions (that's a good thing); they've probably inspired OmniWeb to switch to a faster engine (that's a good thing); and they've taken away one more reason to use a PC instead of a Mac (that's a good thing).

The thing that excites me most about the 'missing features' is that none of them should have a detrimental impact on browsing speed if/when they're added -- the things I want are all independent of rendering (tabs, auto-fill forms, etc). For a beta, I think Safari's not too shabby...

-rob.

[Jacques]

Great response, thanks.

I agree that one of the great reasons why Safari is so important is it's challenge the Gecko team (and now seemingly the OmniGroup team)! This beta has done quite a job considering the code-size, leaving it all open-source for others to check out.

I can't help but wonder if Safari final will make it back into the UNIX community..

[sao]

Glanz wrote:
Now all this makes me wonder whether or not Apple will give Fink a hard time via its Developer Tools.
That was a gcc bug, and besides Fink, everybody (All of the Linux distributions that use GCC) had the same problem moving from gcc2 to gcc3. Fink doesn't rely on Apple for anything other than having a base system and developer tools, and it's highly improbable that Apple would remove the Unix tools Fink depends on...

[Jacques]

I found this on Webster's website, a bit of a word study on Chimera (check out the second paragraph, the slaying of the Chimera!):

A friend who teaches a course on the politics of life and death in modern times came across a term from the ancients: chimera. Our professor-pal knew chimera as the term for "an individual, organ, or part consisting of tissues of diverse genetic constitution," but he didn't know the story behind the word.

According to the 9th-century Greek poet Hesiod, the Chimera was a fire-breathing she-monster constructed from the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. Hesiod told the tale of how the mighty Bellerophon, assisted by the winged Pegasus, "slew that fearful creature, great and swift of foot and strong / Whose breath was flame unquenchable."

The grotesque combination comprising the original Chimera inspired the application of that name to various other imaginary monsters, especially ones compounded from the parts of different animals, real or imaginary. By the late 16th century, such fantastic combinations had inspired the sense of chimera that names any wild or fanciful concept, especially a fabrication.

It took another few hundred years, until the 19th century, before chimera came to refer to "something considered to have a hybrid character." That's also the era when marine biologists borrowed the term to refer to certain members of the marine family chimaeridae, known more familiarly as rabbitfish and ratfish.

So when 20th-century botanists and geneticists needed a name for individuals, parts, or organs created from tissues of diverse genetic constitutions, it was natural for them to adopt the well-established chimera.

Jacques