Red Hat Diaries/0013

What is an Application?

What is an application? Well, according to the people who created Unix, it's a tool. It's a file like cp or rm or vi. It's a program that runs.

Not so with Apple. In this brave old world, an application is a directory - and I don't know as I have ever seen anything so ridiculous in all my life. (Yes I have heard stories about how MacOS under the bonnet was a 'mess' but this is ridiculous.) The following pages will show exactly what is going on, using - hey why not - Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 as a prime example.

Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 for OS X is a walloping 76.6MB on disk.

Click here »