Entries Tagged 'Software' ↓

The OS X 10.4.11 Update went smooth and seems to do what every Panther update did, fix bugs and make things peppier! And best of all, the Safari 3 inclusion is wonderful. It even improves on the beta. Big bookmarks menus are much more responsive than they’ve been in years. Finally!
Only thing missing is the magic widget button available in Leopard’s Safari 3…

Well, I gave Leopard a day; One whole day of mostly lost time trying to get things working for developing again. Granted, Continue reading →

Well, OS X now comes a lot closer to having a good Ruby and Rails, but I don’t like it.
What’s the deal with giving a default Rails DB configuration using SQLite3?!!
Lame. Sorry. Most folks doing Rails work use MySQL…

And as for the gems installed… uh where is Rmagick? Why isn’t Image Magick installed? X11 is now installed by default, so it only stands to reason…
Nice try guys, but unless this is Ruby and Rails for Apple’s internal use, there’s not much point. I expect to see a one-click replacement soon, but I’m going to go back and hook up my old installation the Hivelogic way. It just works better and corresponds better to what’s available on real-world hosting providers.

The gem choices are somewhat odd. Limited and odd. I’m dumping it and going with my own. Apple, (Laurent) I will leave yours in /usr/bin but I will not use it. Thanks anyway.

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.

So there is no GPhone as rumors have suggested. There is a new open mobile phone platform called Android, and supported by major players from across the wireless industry and across continents!! This is a great move. They finally realized they could stop reinventing the system engineering of the phones every 6 months (in Japan) and instead focus and doing cool things with them.

For what it’s worth, here are the Ruby Logo Contest designs I did:

I don’t believe I sent this one in at all.

This one was submitted, I believe.

This one was submitted, and is definitely inspired by the coinage in the Zelda games.

This one was not submitted, but you can see why. It’s less than inspired, I think.

Finally, a Ruby book on design patterns! Wow. Some languages never get a book like that.

At this rate, Ruby will be published into the mainstream. The number of Ruby books must surely outnumber Python books and soon outnumber Perl books.

Next up, RubyCocoa book?

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.

I’ll keep it short. Microsoft’s recent investment in Facebook certainly garnered attention. Makes sense, valuation made based on current and projected number of unique users who can be vectors and targets of advertising sales.

Microsoft has thus far failed in every web venture of their own, other than selling crappy web dev software solutions. They’ve been trying to do something since MSN first debuted to be an AOL and then kept trying to be Netscape, to be Yahoo!, to be Google, et. al. ad hominem. Now it’s their chance to get to the social networking yawn fest late in the game by trying to be myspace.

Much like their acquisition of Hotmail, you can expect eventual destruction of what people like about Facebook and a replacement of the current crop of users with a crowd of more clueless individuals (think Yahoo! Chat) and topped off with an infiltration of MS .net garbage openning the doors to malware galore.

Goodbye Facebook. I didn’t know you long, but I was never a big fan anyway.

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.