One of the things I love about Apple is the way they enhance Mac OS X with great features for other developers to leverage. Built-in spell-checking, incredibly rich edit controls, development environment and the recent Core frameworks are such additions. Core Image allows applications access to real-time hardware-accelerated graphic effects and is used within some of Apple’s own apps for various effects.

Pixelmator is the product of a two-man team that provides Photoshop like abilities for $59. Apple would not ship such a product for fear of further upsetting Adobe.

As you may have guessed I enjoy books and movies very much and so when I hear that a book I loved is getting the film treatment I’m filled with excitement and apprehension as to whether it will live up to the imagery in my head.

Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series were both spot on, Paycheck was very much off the mark.

My good friend Steve ‘Sinbad’ Streeting (founder of the impressive and popular Ogre 3D engine) will be giving a talk on Thursday 27th September at 6pm at the Guernsey Training Agency above the Post Office in Smith Street. The talk will cover cross-platform development, provisionally:

Steve also assures me he’ll be touching on some cross-platform libraries like the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) and wxWidgets UI library. As always the doors are open to all and the event is totally free so come along, learn something and make some contacts.

I started programming at 12 and have been fortunate to carve out a successful career in something I love to do. People find it strange when I talk with passion about IDEs, fonts, color schemes, mice and keyboards.

To me it seems perfectly natural when you consider a writer has strong preference and passion for pens and notebooks and photographers spend a small fortune on specific lenses and cameras to get the shot they want.

Everybody enjoys a good laugh and there are some fun simple things that can confuse your co-workers, family or friends for a few minutes.

Here’s a few tricks that may… or may not cause some amusement. Just make sure you step in before they need to call their IT support guy!

New colors. Zzzz.

iPod nano really is just a smaller version of the iPod now, full video and games (Vortex and two others included plus others available to buy) on a full metal stubby device that has a large 200ppi 2.0″ display. Now available in $149 4GB and $199 8GB models. Yummy.

The change to WordPress from Subtext went without major hitch. This was great considering I was tweaking the design and articles right up to going on holiday (I wouldn’t do this in a professional environment but my blog is a sandpit for such dare-devil risk taking ;-)

Here are my notes on the experience.

Microsoft’s Language INtegrated Query (LINQ) aims to provide a way of selecting objects with a common syntax independent of the data source.

By integrating query into the language instead strings parsed by an external provider at runtime we gain IntelliSense prompting for fields, members and table names and full compile-time syntax checking and a unified syntax.

Whilst installing the latest version of Skype on my Mac a few days ago I noticed something very unusual.

The text of the end user license agreement was editable.

I have been planning on moving my blog off my little Windows Shuttle PC at home onto a hosted service for some time and the latest flurry of activity followed by DSL line meltdown was enough to give me the nudge I needed to get the job done.

Rob Conery provided a useful .NET/Subsonic app to make the transition from Subtext about as painless as possible bar the obvious one of going with a PHP based solution when I know .NET is a better technology.