The point is, the package that gets delivered to end users, the way the Mac OS X operating system works, the philosophy and the metaphors that are built into the programming model, they're not UNIX-like at all. That's why I bring out iTunes as an example: it's a "good OS X app", which it probably is, good integration with the dragging and the dropping, lickable user interface, all that - but to call something that puts all that functionality into a single blob UNIX-like is just insane.

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I don't recall any other graphical UINX OS apps being much different. In fact I think OS X is na exception as it is closer to the UNIX ideal than many others, and this is boosted by a lot of developers making great 'one shot' apps anf Utilities.

Look at Apple's OS X Application collection. This *IS* a UNIX way of thinking, and as OS X develops it is becoming more prominent and more useful. Apple believe in an Application for each task, and binding them along a common framework to allow them to interact fully. Applescript and Automator are great for doing 'Mashups' in OS X where you can script applications together to make results. All this is like shell scripting together UNIX tools at the terminal, but on a macro scale, where whole tasks (or workflows if you will) are bound together by a common language and framework, rather than single operations are carried out per program unit. I've not met any other OS yet that makes this so easy or so powerful. For Apple's ideal it's still only just taking shape, but they have the right idea, and thought the scale is different, the concept is the same as UNIX's own 'large operations using small pieces', except here the possibility exists to perform colossal operations using multiple applications.

In OS X it ceased to stop at the 'good integration with drag and drop phase' when iLife came out with a common media library structure. Arguably it ceased to stop there in 1994/5 when Applescript was released in System 7.x, but back then not many apps supported it. TBH they still didn't when OS 9 was ditched in 2003. OS X has almost breathed new life in to it as a language and a structure. It's still a bit of a weird thing, and I personally find it hard to work with, but the results from those who can work with it are great.

What has happened is the scale of computing has grown as the power of computers has grown and the scale of technology has shrunk. Applications have come to express the 'unitary' task of computing, for better or worse, I guess it depends how good the apps are really. Eventually it'll be whole computers.

Currently the technology and usage in OS X is still at an early stage. Automator is a step in the right direction, making scripting Apps together more humanly possible, as good as Applescript is it still doesn't make sense to the average user. Applescript is, though, to Apps what shell scripts are to UNIX tools.