Archive for Apple tag
MacBook Pro two year check-in
It’s been an interesting couple of years with nothing but a maxed-out MacBook Pro 17″ as my only home machine.
Failures
The hard drive died but time machine held my hand. At ALT.NET Seattle 2009 my backpack took a dive that left a dent in one corner. The battery was replaced and I roped GrinGod into obtaining a replacement UK-style \ key from the UK after some frantic typing.
A friend cracked the display when his keyfob sprang from his Batbelt culminating in a visit of the Apple Store in Bellevue. Ten days and $700 later got that fixed and included a bonus disconnected thermal sensor, a couple of new scratches, an extra screw to rattle around inside and a line of grease around the Apple logo.
Sticking with it
When I find myself eying the unibody I wince at the glossy ‘matt finish’ screen, the multi-touch trackpad clicks that sound like Robocop is nearby and a US keyboard that requires my pinky to hit a single-height enter key. That little pink dog won’t learn any new tricks. I’ve tried.
Still the OpenCL benchmark show the 8600M outperforming the newer 9400M and it does everything I need and at least one thing I don’t (gets hot enough to bake bread on). Short of switching the hard disk out for an SSD – I’ve ordered twice and then recalled after a Twitter volley of “no, you don’t want THAT one” – it’s here to stay for at least another year.
Applications
One thing that is always changing is the bunch of installed applications as I search for a combination that deliver a nirvana between productivity and enjoyment. Apps that perform a set of focused useful tasks with a shiny, eminently lick-able user interface, score highly.
I’ve rounded up my favourite apps before but here’s the latest specials on the menu.
CleanMyMac
This great-looking app helps reclaim wasted space making it a pre-requisite for SSD switchers.
Combining the PowerPC and foreign language code-purging of XSlimmer & TrimTheFat is also adds cache & log purging in with application uninstalls ala AppZapper etc.
Despite using XSlimmer already on my machine it was able to reclaim another 1.8GB and V2 is out soon which I hope will remove & alias duplicates given we’re not getting ZFS which had this feature (how many copies of Sparkle.framework do I have on my machine….)
Coda
This year I rewrote my blog’s WordPress theme from scratch and given the PHP requirement I found myself looking for an alternate IDE to Visual Studio. I already own TextMate but the feel of a raw text editor with bundles of extra bits feel didn’t have the gloss and usability I wanted such as fast preview, remote FTP sync etc. with a minimal of setup fuss.
I briefly toyed with Espresso during the early development cycle but Coda won me over in the end with it’s sheer simplicity and elegance plus the addition of built-in documentation for PHP was very helpful when working offline.
BetterTouchTool
Yes, when the Magic Mouse hit the street I picked one up. The idea of a mouse with trackpad multi-touch technology was appealing but a few minutes of use and no amount of twiddling would make it track or let me configure it to take full advantage of what it should be able to do.
Until Apple sort this out BetterTouchTool is your friend letting you speed up the tracking of the Magic Mouse, or indeed your trackpad, and assign all sorts of interesting shortcuts and abilities to combinations of finger gestures.
Secrets
Mac apps tend to expose only the common options in their user interfaces but sometimes developers add some additional tweaks and settings behind the scenes that live in the Mac’s equivalent of the registry (known as “defaults“). While you can set these manually using the defaults command-line tool you still need to know the setting exists, it’s name and what options are available and so secrets exposes this.
Secrets is similar to Deeper and TinkerTool but the difference is that the secrets web site lets people add new options which then are automatically available within the installed preferences pane making them easily discoverable, searchable, applied… and occasionally undone.
Machinarium
This point-and-click adventure game will appeal to people who enjoyed Monkey Island although it feels more like the gorgeously submerging Beneath a Steel Sky.
The scenery is brilliantly imagined, stylistic and shows that very real lived-in cities can be beautiful especially when populated by cute robots capable of assembling themselves from their own body-parts (just like a triple 8 but infinitely cuter).
[)amien
From the vaults of Twitter
I don’t normally republish my Tweets but are my highlights.
damienguard:
Methods returning "this" is a hack for fluency. Let’s get ".." added to the C# compiler to operate on previous object. a.This()..That()lazycoder:
@damienguard I can’t decide if that’s genius or insanity. Should we add the "~" operator to refer back to the top of the inherit. chain? ;)
LostInTangent:
@damienguard I’ve started using Envy Code R for most of my applications (not just VS) and I have to say I’m loving it.damienguard:
@LostInTangent: Envy Code R PR8 soon – Greek chars, improved hinting and some glyph revisions subscript/fractions & *96 redone.
damienguard:
Statically typed languages are not flexible enough to develop dynamically linked libraries.
damienguard:
Renaming your wifi router StupidRouter does not alas shame it into being more reliable.
damienguard:
@command_tab: Am I the only one who finds paying for pretty UI’s to leverage free software that took much more effort to develop offensive?
damienguard:
Just took delivery on my Alps-switched keyboard… feels good so far… but let’s see if co-workers complain about the noise.Plip:
@damienguard I CAN’T HEAR MYSELF THINK FOR THAT INFERNAL CLICKING !damienguard:
@lancefisher The alps keyboard was from DSI USA… but don’t order one, terrible 2-key limits prevent fast typing.
damienguard:
Apple should add hobbyist to its OS X line-up. Make kernel easier to switch, remove the h/w lockdown and no support.
damienguard:
Standard windows font smoothing’s real problem is lack of scales. Convert a ClearType rendering to greyscale in Photoshop…
[)amien
Apple Store Vancouver opens tomorrow
Apple are opening an Apple Store here in Vancouver, BC tomorrow at 10:00am.
It is located in the upper level of the Pacific Center mall on the corner of West Georgia and Granville.
I’ll be there tomorrow morning grabbing a DVI to Video Adapter so I can watch the small collection of English Region-2 DVD’s I brought with me on a decent sized TV.
Of course if it wasn’t for region coding I could use the DVD player already in the lounge… and buy a US Xbox 360 to play my 20+ existing games…
[)amien
What being open means to Apple & Microsoft
Apple
Former Apple engineer Jens Alfke believes Apple’s external image has been polished until featureless. The restrictive staff blogging policies, the veil of secrecy around future plans and a carefully orchestrated three-person spokes-team of Jobs, Schiller and Ive lead to a very impersonal closed business.
It certainly wasn’t always this way. The original Mac team appeared in Rolling Stone magazine with credit in about boxes, a practice that was continued at NeXT but abolished by Mac OS X Beta. Jobs makes regular comparisons between engineers and artists and touted individual thinking in the Think Different campaign and artists like recognition with signatures on art and credits on film.
Conversely Apple’s Mac OS X operating system is built on open software and standards. The kernel is derived from open elements bundled up as Darwin which Apple provides back along with compilers, debug tools, programming language, command line tools, Bonjour, device driver kit and a bunch of drivers. All are open.
The web rendering technology in Safari (WebKit based on KHTML) is also open and changes rolled back to the communities often reveal unannounced insights into Apple’s plans (e.g. Safari for Windows).
And yet how many engineers write or talk about Apple? Do you know the names of any product managers? Could you find any out with Google? (LinkedIn doesn’t count ;-)
These aren’t academic questions, what if you have a great idea for a feature you’d like to see added? How can you discuss how a product could evolve to fit your needs? What about a simple bug report or advanced access to technology? (The answers are “send it to feedback@apple.com and don’t hold your breath”, “you can’t” and “join the developer program”)
Heaven forbid you do actually find out what their plans might be – you could find yourself talking to their lawyers like the ill-fated ThinkSecret site that featured rumors, speculation and the occasional insider info.
Microsoft
Jens makes a passing mention to Microsoft’s relaxed blogging policies.
Microsoft is a company that rarely provides the source, never ships or builds upon existing free software and yet not only discusses plans and roadmaps but actively solicits feedback in the design process through conferences, user groups, forums, mailing lists and even on-site review teams. Employees such as Scott Guthrie and Brad Abrams have become quite well known within .NET communities often being the first to break announcements and provide quick feedback through their blogs.
The centre of this effort is engineering thanks to sites like Channel 9 providing regular interviews, Microsoft Research providing experiments to play with and CodePlex hosting open projects.
But they aren’t the only ones reaching out.
Microsoft’s HR & recruiting team and individuals are also putting up interesting insights and thoughts on how the company operates and head of the Xbox Live! is so active in this area that the name Major Nelson is known to any serious 360 owner.
Being open
How strange that Apple embraces open technologies yet keeps communication closed and Microsoft’s technologies are still quite closed yet communication is very much open.
What does it mean to be open and where will each company’s approach lead them?
[)amien
One week with a MacBook Pro 17″
It has been one week since I picked up my new MacBook Pro 17″ to replace my aging first-generation 15″ model.
My initial concern was that the size and weight would be unwieldy after 4 years of lugging around a 15″ MacBook Pro and a prior to that a Titanium PowerBook G4. The actual problem was that my trusty Samsonite Trunk & Co. backpack could not accommodate it and that I’d have to hope Santa would deliver something a little bigger. Being properly kitted up might reveal if the dimensions and weight are uncomfortable so expect an update once I’ve travelled with the beast.
The screen is fantastic, a little brighter, and provides me with a desktop-like experience in terms of real estate thanks to the combination of the increased size and the high-definition 1920×1200 option. I had examined the glossy finish in-store and found having my face and the rest of the store glaring back at me far too distracting for real work (it might be nice for watching DVD’s in the dark I guess) and so went with the matte finish. Surprisingly it is a little more reflective than the older MBP but not overly so and it does make removing unwelcome fingerprints easier.
One problem I had with m 15″ was that heavy use of Visual Studio within Parallels wasn’t always cutting it on performance. Compilation was faster than the cheap HP/Compaq desktop I’d been using but still wasn’t snappy enough to keep my attention tightly focused ;-)
I went with top options – a 2.6GHz processor coupled with 4GB of RAM and a 7200RPM 200GB drive – to ensure maximum performance. Mac OS X and native Vista did not disappoint and felt like a speedy desktop despite Vista being 32-bit and limited to 3GB of RAM until Apple ship a 64-bit ready Boot Camp drivers and tools.
My .NET development typically takes place inside a virtual machine – previously Parallels but now evaluating VMware Fusion with its enticing dual-core and 64-bit guest OS support. Both Parallels and Fusion had similar almost-native performance in the disk and processor department on my 15″ according to Vista’s performance index and I’ve yet to rerun those (stay tuned). Whichever gets Aero/DirectX 9Ex shader support first will be my home for a while.
Battery life was a big surprise offering over 3 hours and I certainly feel less conscious of where the next power feed is coming from although that is partly due to the poor battery on my old machine being rather tired and worn.
One big disappointment is the keyboard. Firstly it is the same size as the 15″ model which leaves the extra space to the speaker grille. Whilst the speakers do sound far superior – good enough to actually listen to music on – I couldn’t help but feel a wider enter key, a second ctrl and a little f-key spacing could have gone a long way. What is more concerning is that many keys do not register if hit off-centre even by a slight amount :(
There are still some things to try:
- Games under native Vista taking advantage of the Nvidia 8600M GT chip
- Time Machining my MyBook Pro external drive over FireWire 800 (800 Mb/s) instead of USB2 (400 Mb/s)
- Burning DVD performance
- Removing DVD drive (UJ-85J FBZ8) region protection (RPC) to play my DVD collection
[)amien