Entries Tagged 'Apple' ↓

Today after seeing the millionth headline about Boot Camp, I had a thought: “What if instead of rebooting you could just do a virtual session to do your Windows apps?” Apparently I’m not the only to think this. I read on Gus’ blog that Parallels is releasing a VM for the Intel-Macs.

I think this is a great idea. It will allow potential converts to do their windows based work while staying in the Mac environment (i.e. not rebooting). I think that is a win-win situation for everyone (well, except Microsoft in the long run). My next thought was “Wow, it would be cool if this came integrated into OS X.” Again, I wasn’t the first one to think this up.

In keeping with my car analogy in yesterday’s post, I think an application like this would be the equivalent of hanging fuzzy dice from the rear view mirror. Goofy, but it can be removed quickly.

Imagine this: You had the resources to out and buy a really expensive, stylish, and cool car like a Ferrari. You get it home, show it off to your friends who are green with envy. Then you rip out the engine and replace it with a lawn mower engine. Guess what, its still looks like a Ferrari, but it will never run like a Ferrari. And that would be sad.

That is how I feel about Boot Camp. Why would you buy a performance machine and then hobble it on purpose? Why not just but a cheap-o Windows machine? Why not cut the imaginary Windows umbilical cord and just use the Mac full time?

And most importantly: When did I become such a Mac snob? I think the answer is the day I realized that life doesn’t have to be complicated: you don’t have to work for your computer, the computer can work for you.

This is my Mac. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I’m probably behind the curve on this one, but I recently discovered in the last day or two how cool Voodoo Pad is. I’ve been using it to make to do lists (I’m trying to get back on the Getting Things Done wagon). I’m really impressed how smoothly the program runs. It doesn’t stand in the way of my data, it simply guides it and connects it auto-magically. That just amazes me, it makes me wish there was a port of this app for Windows so I can use it at work!

So, if you are interested in GTD and are running on a Mac, go get Voodoo Pad and try it out. It rocks.

I had the Petit DosBox from OS X up and running a while ago, but today when I went to run it I kept getting an error about libSDL not being found.

Last year I had an “incident” that basically required me to re-run the 10.4 installation. I think when I did that it must have wiped out the symbolic link I had made to get Petit to run. If you are finding yourself in this situation, here’s what I did to get it up and running (Mac Mini running OS X10.4.5):

WARNING: Only attempt this if you are confident of your computer skills *and* you have backups of your important data. This is a fairly safe thing I’m describing, but you are doing it at your own risk. I’m merely pointing out what I did and how it worked for me. Your mileage may vary. Proceed at your own risk.

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Type in cd /usr/local/lib and press return.
3. Type in ls and press return. Odds are there is nothing there.
4. If you don’t see anything that says SDL, type this in: sudo su and press return
5. Enter your system password. (Basically you are going to run as root for this next command)
6. Your prompt should now say “root”. Type in (or cut-n-paste) this line: ln -s /sw/lib/libSDL-1.2.0.dylib libSDL-1.2.0.dylib and press return.
7. Type in ls and press return. You should now see libSDL-1.2.0.dylib. At this point try running any Petit dos program. If it works, yaa! If not, you might be missing the SDL installation. I’m not sure if it comes with the Mac by default or ifI had installed it manually.

If you have success or failure with these instructions, please leave a message in the comments. I’ll try to help out if I can (but no guarantees).

Its out! If you are running a Mac, you need to run the Camino web browser. (Think of it as Firefox for the Mac.)

Go get it now!

As sort of a continuation of my musings about Camino and Firefox, I’ve been doing some research into Camino, specifically into the “bugs” that bug me the most. It turns out things are not quite what they seem! While looking through the bug database I came across some answers:

So that right there solves two of my biggest gripes! I had never thought to read through the bug reports of Camino before. I was looking at them today because I thought that perhaps instead of griping about things that aren’t there/don’t work, perhaps I should get in there and help out. I still think I will get the code and look around, its always good to have a project or two…

Bottom line: Camino rocks. And it just keeps getting better.

This post is about browsers on the Mac, you’ve been warned!

I’ve been using Camino for quite a while now. I just upgraded to the 1.0b2 build and didn’t really see any changes, but its been running pretty good for me.

On a whim I decided to try out Firefox (1.5) for the Mac and see what shape it was in. I’m pretty surprised, it still has some of the problems that made me switch to Camino in the first place (most noticeably the lack of fav icons in the bookmark list, and the buttons on web pages are ugly looking), but it has one major advantage over Camino: It seems to use a lot less memory.

Over the course of a day, Camino builds up a huge (over a gig) of virtual memory. In a side by side test of Firefox and Camino I’m seeing that Firefox uses about half the virtual memory, and that its “real” memory grows and shrinks nicely. Camino usually grows and grows.

What’s the point you ask? Well, for me I’m noticing that Firefox seems faster and more responsive. I’m guessing this is due to less swapping, but I’ll need to use it more to be sure. Plus with less memory usage, it allows other programs (Eclipse at the moment) to work smoother… And as a super-extra-special bonus, GMail recognizes Firefox and that allows much nicer editing/spell checking.

The Drunken Blog is always a good place to catch up on news. ther other day while reading the site I saw this article: The dirge of NeoOffice.

I’ve been trying to use OpenOffice on my Mac for the last few weeks (specifically to do spreadsheet work) and it has been just downright painful. Apparently my transition to the “Mac Side” is complete, the thought of cranking up the X11 package makes my skin crawl.

I was thinking that NeoOffice might be a solution to my Office needs and allow me to have the pride of using OpenOffice (which I do like on Linux and Windows). But after reading this article, it sounds like I might be better off getting the MS Office package for the Mac.

Overall I really like my Mac and OSX. Stable, easy to use, works, and visually pleasing are some of the words I would use to describe it.

But…every now and then I get really annoyed with it. When I click on the red X in the corner of a window, I expect that to stop the application and unload it from memory. Most Mac apps do not do this however, they kill off the window, but keep the process running in memory as witnessed in the Activity Monitor and the icon on the Dock. This of course means that there is that much less resources are available for other applications which means the system runs slower as it swaps out memory from disk.

And to further annoy me, not all Apple apps do this. Some (like the calculator) do actually exit when you click on the red X. That bugs me because it means that things are not being implemented consistently in the background (at Apple). If one app does something one way, why don’t all of the apps from that vendor do it that way?

Don’t even get me started on the “Maximize” button on the iTunes window and how it “minimizes” the app. Grrrr….

Over on Daring Fireball there’s an article talking about the life of an indie software developer. The article is geared towards the Mac side of things, but I think its a good read for all developers. Check it out: Daring Fireball: The Life

There’s some really good points in there about what your expectations should be if you decide to be become a indie developer. I had already thought about the monetary aspects of it (how not every program sells 10 million copies) and that might mean that your endeavor will be a side job not your main job.

But I had never considered the support side of the equation. Good software is not enough, you need a caring support team to shepard the software through its lifecycle. If you are the only person on this “support team” that means you are going to be busy or you are not going to be slinging code.

That was (and still is) quite a revelation for me. You never really think of “success” as having a downside, but in this case, if you want to spend all of your time coding, then this is a serious drawback. Personally I don’t mind supporting my users, but what if I had thousands of users? That is a lot of potential support.