Entries Tagged 'OS X' ↓

I just installed OS X 10.5 Leopard on my aging workhorse iBook G4 14-inch. Here are my observations thus far: Continue reading →

Thinking about upgrading to OS X 10.5 Leopard? Well, yeah! Duh!
But,… WAIT!
Wait long enough to think about a few things first:

• Can your Mac handle it? Does the hardware meet the minimum specs? Enough RAM? Large enough HD? Graphics capabilities good enough?
• Do you have any software you NEED?! Stuff you USE DAILY? Photoshop? Illustrator? Quark Xpress? Whatever it is, before you even go out and buy Leopard, check to see if the software you need runs on Leopard!! If it doesn’t, you’ll be up the proverbial creek without a paddle in a really cool new boat.
• Have there been any issues with your particular Mac model? Check online. Check, check, check. It’s a new OS X version, there may be some bumps to drive over for some folks.
• Do you have time to run the upgrade or installation? It will take some time and shouldn’t be done unattended. Expect maybe an hour or less, but plan for 2 hours in case of trouble. (You never know…)
• Last on my list, and not least… BACKUP YOU STUFF BEFORE YOU UPGRADE OR INSTALL ANY NEW MAJOR OS VERSION! That means, go and buy an external FireWire Hard Disk and make a copy of your whole HD !!! Specifically, an external FireWire HD will allow you to boot from it into the old system if needed, not to mention you have a copy of it all intact. That way, if there are any unforeseeable bumps in the road, you have a safety net. If you have that critical app that you forgot you need desperately, you can always boot from that external drive!!

That’s it. Good luck and enjoy the new system.

Like everybody else and their dog in Austin, I went to the Apple Store in Austin, at the Domain, to see OS X 10.5 Leopard on its debut day. Well, of course the Domain is an ultra-American, artificial-as-possible, prefab shopping strip with the same stupid chain shops you find everywhere else in upper-middle-class-suburban-America. It’s hip, trendy, popular, and 100% devoid of any real culture or humanity. A perfect example of why people hate Americans.

Unfortunately, Apple Stores are all in similar places in the USA. Fortunately, I expected this, and it didn’t come between me and my mission to try out Leopard and resist the temptation to buy anything.

The sad thing is, Leopard was kind of disappointing. In much the same way that Tiger was disappointing: Panther got most of it right already. Every new thing since Panther (almost) has been toy eye-candy. That’s not true, but that’s how it feels. Panther really felt revolutionary. Tiger was indeed evolutionary. But this Leopard… I don’t know. Maybe it will grow on me. That is after I get a new Mac that comes with it. I just didn’t see anything compelling enough to get me to buy the OS or even to get me to buy a new Mac NOW.

The Dock?
Yep, it’s a downgrade that is harder to make out visually.

Spaces?
Uh, needs a little work to make it smoother, but I get it, this little piggy cried “K D E” all the way home.

Time Machine?
Oh, I’m sure it’s as good as advertised. I saw the original Steve Jobs intro a year ago. It was neato-lookin’ and all that. But backup is not so critically difficult to me, clone a drive or use RAID mirroring, with cycling out. It’s not new. It doesn’t matter how you implement it so much, until you need to recover something!

Other features…?
Nothing really WOWed me. Really.

Bad stuff?
Well the Dock for one. But the GUI in general, has taken an ugly turn with the sharper corner radius on the rounded top corners and the lack of rounded corners on the toolbar. It looks like something pretending to be a Mac, like some KDE or Gnome theme that comes close but gets it wrong.

I can wait for the polish up.

The only compelling features to me were all the dev tools!! But unfortunately, the Apple Store that I went to did not feel compelled to display any of the dev tools. Talk about lame.

XCode 3 is now available for download on the ADC site. It’s a huge download at 1.2 gigabytes! Unfortunately, it requires Leopard to install. Sad that they don’t bother to note that on the download page…

Ok, let’s put 2 and 2 together. Apple has created a truly working touch screen interface with the iPhone and iPod Touch. Pen tablets have been around a long time. Tablet PCs have started to make business inroads lately, meaning we’re probably in the midst of a quiet transition away from paper for many things. (but not completely. Not without nanopaper)

OS X comes with a darn good stylus/tablet capability rolled into it.

Some time over the next year we may well see a Mac that has a touch interface and a stylus for more precision. It will likely be a tablet computer maybe even a sub-notebook size. But it will probably have a screen around Letter size (or the more global standard A4)

But just imagine the sheer possibilities of reasonably priced iMac used as a programmable interface…! Goodbye crappy kiosks… Hello XCode Touch.

Objective-C 2.0 is coming this month and some of the most important features are Properties, Garbage Collection, and Iterators. Continue reading →

OS X 10.5 Leopard is coming on the 26th of this month. Yay! Many cool new and useful features. A good reason to invest in a new Mac to replace this workhorse iBook G4 that has treated me so well for so long. But there is one feature missing…
The missing feature of Leopard: Continue reading →

Wow. Xcode and Leopard are going to be better! Xcode now apparently does PHP and Ruby and Rails in addition to XHTML and CSS. Let’s just hope they stole a lot of keyboard shortcuts from TextMate… Can’t wait to get my hands on this cat.
And, unlike Microsoft and Windows, it’s all freely included in OS X 10.5 Leopard !
How can anybody say that Macs are more expensive, when all the dev tools are free !?
I know Windows dev tools are anything but free, and no way they’ve ever been this cool.

One thing I’ve always wanted: syntax highlighting that actually shows scope!

Looks like Objective-C 2.0 has borrowed a bit from Ruby! Those Apple engineers, they just kick ass at making good stuff with end-users in mind.

Learn more at:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/developer/

Oh, and let’s hope that the inclusion of PHP and Ruby and Rails means that those tools will be updated regularly (or at least update-able ). After all, web software changes rapidly, and with the impending releases of Ruby 2.0 and Rails 2.0 in the next few months to a year, we can’t just have a one-time installation. We will need the ability to update gems and such.

Now all we can ask for is that Apple gets into making it better for developers who want to make games for the Mac. Investing in some game libraries (cross-platform…?) or even say Nintendo (the two companies would be soooo beautiful together…)…?

Look, this isn’t a pride issue, but it is an issue of standardization! I don’t care if people use British or American spelling conventions in general. However, in programming, it is well established that everyone uses American English spellings for code. Not because it’s better or any other silly reason, but because it’s a de facto standard that simply prevents errors. Most of the world doesn’t use English every day, but in code they do. Even in Allegro’s Xcode template, which has a simple “hello world” I see centre. Any other time that would be great and fine and I wouldn’t care at all. But in code, it should be center. Especially in C!! Unless you have an alias for a method or function in code that provides for different languages, don’t do it. It’s just asking for error-ridden code by others. I’m not liking Allegro one bit so far.

SDL, I miss you already…

I’m interested in learning a bit about game programming. So I decided to pick up a book and work through it in either C or C++ as necessary to get the concepts down. I may have picked a lemon. I browsed the books today, and I think I chose wrong. I picked up Game Programming All In One. I never trust book titles, they’re unreliable because they’re usually determined by marketing jerks. Unfortunately publishers can’t be trusted either. I’ve only seen one publisher (pragmatic programmers) that consistently aims for quality, knowing that quality sells better than quantity. The others are all hit and miss, but mostly miss. Continue reading →