Apple’s Proprietary Past Precedes Present Plans
Apple is often accused of using only closed standards. This was true 10 years ago, but a lot of things have changed since then. Unfortunately the closed nature of the iPod, iPhone, and iTunes music store have had a reverse halo effect on those who remember Apple’s past and aren’t looking at their present any further than their entertainment devices. While Apple computers have gotten easier to update since the transition to Intel, I’ll admit that the designs of some models make that somewhat difficult. Still, there’s much standardized love to be had in the Apple computer world such as:
- Apple has led the industry in the implementation of USB, Firewire, DVI, Bluetooth, and gigabit ethernet
- Every application in OS X can print to PDF
- OS X can host AFP, SMB/CIFS, web, SSH, and FTP services
- OS X reads everything above plus HFS(+), FAT(32), NTFS, NFS, WebDAV, ZFS (soon), and more
- All Cocoa-based OS X applications support Unicode
- OS X can connect to Active Directory, LDAP, and SLP
- Address Book exports to the vCard format
- Dashboard uses HTML, CSS, and Javascript
- iCal exports to the iCalendar format
- iChat supports the AIM and Jabber protocols
- iTunes rips to the MP3 format by default
- Mail uses plain text files (with some XML mixed in) to store messages
- Preference files in OS X are XML formatted
- Preview, OS X’s viewer, can read and save BMP, GIF, JPEG(2000), Photoshop, PICT, PNG, SGI, TGA, and TIFF
