I am proclaiming that Mac OS X 10.6 will be the last version of Mac OS X I use. Why? I don’t like iOS especially for my laptop, and Apple seems to be planning the end of Mac OS X, and is replacing it chunk by chunk with iOS. I’ve been using NeXTSTEP since 1994, and Mac OS X is really just the continuation of NeXTSTEP. More and more, the continuation of the ideas that make NeXTSTEP so great are happening outside of Apple, with projects like Étoilé and GNUstep.

One idea in Étoilé that blew me away with its awesomeness and inevitability was the idea of the OS providing the core frameworks for all document types, and that core framework keeps all revisions of the document permanently. Its time for File->Save to go away, disk space is cheap, the every app should save documents with the entire history of how they were created.

Apple, on the other hand, seems to be focused on people who want to have their nice big corporation do their thinking for them. So they are working hard to lock their users out of their own systems, forcing all applications to go through their review process, and other such things. NeXTSTEP always focused on making the power of the computer as available and easy to use as possible. Apple still do a lot of things much better than anyone else, but that is just too high a cost to pay.

The Pd-extended 0.43 release has been brewing an extra long time, about 18 months now, mostly because there are lots of big improvements, and we wanted to make sure we got it right, so your patches all work, but the improvements all shine. Its now solidly beta, so we’re looking for testers. Download a nightly build to try here:

http://autobuild.puredata.info/auto-build/latest/

First off, the pd-gui side of Pd has been re-written from scratch. When you run Pd, you are actually running two programs: pd is the core engine and pd-gui is the GUI. Since basically all computers now come with multiple CPU cores, this means that pd-gui will usually run on a separate CPU core than pd, so they don’t step on each other’s toes. pd can entirely take over its own core. If you want to make your patch use more CPU cores, then check out the [pd~] object introduced in the last release (0.42.5).

pd still handles some of the GUI stuff, but we are working on splitting that out for the 0.44 release. That is a big chunk of work but it will also bring big gains. In particular, it means that it will be possible for people to write their own GUIs for Pd, covering not just the display of the patch, but also the editing, and everything else. You like OpenFrameworks, python, iOS, JUCE, Qt, etc.? Write your own pd-gui using the toolkit of your choice. That’s the idea at least. That will take a solid chunk of work, so we are looking for people to join that effort.

There are so many ideas for making a better editing experience in Pd, this release makes big strides to address the editing experience. There are new features like Magic Glass, Autotips, Autopatch and Perf Mode, all available on the Edit menu.

• Magic Glass let’s you magically see the messages as they pass through the cords. Just turn it on and hover above a cord, and you’ll see the messages as they go by. You can even look at signal/audio cords.
• Autotips gives you tips about what an object does, what its inlet expects, and what comes out of the outlets.
• Autopatch mode automatically connects objects as you create them.
• Perf Mode, is a mode for performance that makes it harder to accidentally close windows that are part of your performance.

The Pd Window is also majorly overhauled. First of all, its fast. Much much faster than the old one. You can now print thousands of messages per second to the Pd Window and still edit your patch. No more will an accidental dump of info cause the GUI to freeze up (well, ok, maybe if you send 10,000 messages/second but that is a way too many). There are also now 5 levels of printing messages to the Pd Window: fatal, error, normal, debug, all. If you are only interested in fatal errors, switch the Pd Window to 0 – fatal, and you’ll only see the worst problems. You want to see every single message to debug? Switch to 4 – all, and you’ll get the whole firehose.

There is also the new log library, which lets you easily send messages for those different levels. And all messages logged with the objects from the log library are clickable: when you Ctrl-Click or Cmd-click (Mac OS X) on the line in the Pd Window, it’ll pop up the patch where the message came from, and highlight the specific object that printed it. That even works for many messages from other objects as well.

The Pd Window also includes very basic level meters for monitoring the input and output levels. And for those who want to play with the GUI in realtime, you can type Tcl code in the Tcl entry field, and directly modify and probe the running GUI.

One thing that you can do now is customize the GUI using GUI plugins. You can change all sorts of colors, some fonts, and many behaviors. Want to create a new object when you triple-click? Try the tripleclick example plugin Want to make the patch cords disappear when you leave Edit Mode? Check out the “only show cords in edit mode” example. Those are the simple ones. There is also Tab Completion, a search engine for the docs, a category browser for the right-click menu, a buttonbar for creating objects, and more.

You can find many GUI plugins in the new section of the downloads page as well as documentation for making your own. What kind of GUI plugin will write?

The central idea of the patent system is to encourage people to invest in the research necessary in order to create new, better processes. I don’t know a whole lot about patents outside of software, but it makes sense that if a company has to spend millions of dollars creating a new process, then the security of a 20 year patent would make a company feel a lot better about shelling out on a risky research project. For the past couple decades, patents are also applied to software. Software processes rarely take millions of dollars to create, and much of the innovation that happens in software is created small groups or even a single person working for some time, usually with no thoughts of patents in their mind at all. The Linux kernel was a huge innovation started by a college kid in his spare time, and now is a major source of economic activity. Bittorrent was invented by Bram Cohen while he was unemployed and couchsurfing, and now is something like 25% of internet traffic, give or take. Both Linux and Bittorrent not only forgoe patents, but even copyright, in effect, since they are both Free Software. The insanity of software patents is massively compounded by the fact that the USPTO issues patents on really trivial software features. For example, take this patent awarded to IBM (from Patently Absurd):

“To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.”

This is all very relevant now because of the wars over software patents related to mobile phones. Apple has been on the war path recently, doing things like trying to prevent non-Apple software from having things like “multi-touch gestures” (which didn’t even invent, they just bought a startup that create one set of ideas on that topic). Apple wants to prevent HTC from selling Android phones in the US altogether, they don’t even seem willing to license the patents to HTC, they just want to block them from the market. Microsoft is making fives times more money by suing companies shipping Android devices that they do selling their Windows Mobile software. A lot of the big software companies do this, this is not anything new. Then there are the software patent troll shell companies that exist purely to sue based on their patent portfolio. And the sad fact of the whole thing is that the big companies are really only using software patents to either defend against software patent lawsuits or bully other companies into paying them. Small companies doing innovative work are forced to patent their software so that they can survive patent lawsuits from big companies. But often a small companies patent portfolio is just too small to matter, like in this classic story of when IBM shook down Sun for money in the 80s.

The whole thing is becoming farcical, with companies like Google patenting lots of software even though Google has expressly and repeatedly come out against software patents altogether. They need them to survive the patent lawsuits with less damage.

And it is worst in the US, since the US allows far more software patents than anywhere else. Places like the European Union and New Zealand pulling back on software patents and many countries in the world never allowed software patents in the first place.

I like the Forbes guy’s way of putting it: “software patents are becoming a tax on innovation”.