 over on arstechnica www arstechnica com i saw mention of a wired article that goes into the many wonderfull ways apple is showing its love and respect for its users URL there is a good rundown of all the whys and whatfores over at URL true to form industrious third party developers saw that they could gain a competitive advantage by supporting this more capable user interface in their applications apple s private menu extras apis were reverse engineered and leveraged to great effect the architecture was so popular that an application for managing predefined sets of menu extras third party or otherwise was in development all of that changed with the release of jaguar but not because the private apis had changed if they had third party developers would have updated their applications to work with the new apis as they have resigned themselves to doing by choosing to use private apis in the first place but what actually happened in jaguar was that apple added code to forcibly exclude all non apple menu extras other parts of the api did not change but when a menu extra is loaded it is compared to a hard coded list of known menu extras from apple if the menu extra is not on that list it is not allowed to load it s easy to laugh at steve ballmer s sweat soaked gyrations as he chants developers developers developers but microsoft clearly understands something that apple is still struggling with it is in a platform vendor s best interest to encourage development for its platform in apple s case this doesn t mean that they have to bend over backwards to make every single system service and ui element pluggable via public apis that s clearly a lot of work and not something that needs to be the number one priority for an os in its infancy and in the meantime if third party developers want to sell into a market that requires the desired functionality to be added in unsupported ways then they must be prepared for the maintenance consequences of their decisions but for apple to go out of its way to actually expend developer effort to stop these third party developers while still failing to provide a supported alternative is incredibly foolish 