Apr 18 — 10
I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice this, but Apple chose its words very carefully when describing what to expect at WWDC 2006
Apr 15 — 8
After spending some time bouncing around various blogs, it looks like there are two prevailing opinions. The sensible one is that Boot Camp is Apple's way of addressing a single class of challenge that might prevent some people from buying a Mac, the "Windows is the New Classic" perspective
Apr 11 — 7
I finally squoze in some time with Oblivion, and it's an interesting beast. The world is cast in the classic fantasy RPG style, with warriors, mages, monsters, mythological creatures, and so on. The "big idea" behind this title is to give you a completely immersive environment
Apr 04 — 89
Matt Johnston sent around this jaw-dropping picture of a Powerbook. There's no way to describe the scene in words so you just have to look at the photo
Mar 27 — 4
Steve Lohr and John Markoff sensibly ask why Microsoft, with nearly infinite resources, has had such a hard time putting Longhorn/Vista on the shelves. The authors do a fairly good job of making sense of the situation, but ultimately blame the supernatural forces of backwards compatibility
Mar 25 — 6
I wrote out a few comments about the MacBook Pro display in my initial post, but I wanted to go into just little bit more detail and add a few updates. Before getting the MacBook Pro, I was using an early 2005 15" PowerBook G4
Mar 24 — 2
When I went in to pickup my MacBook Pro, I took a minute to stop and look at the iPod Hi-Fi unit. After the initial announcement, I didn't have any feeling about the device one way or another. There wasn't anything wrong with it, per say, but it just didn't seem like something
Mar 24 — 1
A trendsetter then, a trendsetter now. Five years of work have really paid off. The original press release
Mar 23 — 22
At least some of the MacBook Pros seems to have a persistent whining sounds when the machine is idle. Some people say they haven't heard anything, but the sound is very real on mine. I'm told my hearing is more sensitive than average, so some people might sit in front of the same machine and not be bothered by it
Mar 23 — 16
Maybe I was seduced by the eerie presence of of the Intel commercials that Apple ran, but something told me to get a MacBook Pro. I chose the higher-end stock model running at 2.0GHz with 1GB of RAM and 256MB video card. My point of reference for all comparisons here is the early 2005 15" PowerBook, which I bought nine months ago
Mar 22 — 6
These things really seem to pile up after a while. A little bit of something for everyone in this batch. Most Cocoa/Mac but a few game-related items as well. These mega posts get a little unmanageable, so I may be forced to shamelessly "borrow" the Linked List format
Mar 14 — 8
In response to a somewhat misleadingly-titled story, a number of digg comments bemoan the fact that Microsoft is treated differently than Apple. That is, the same people who criticize Microsoft for advancing their position in the market aren't as quick to judge Apple for doing the same
Mar 09 — 4
For the most part, I find Quartz to be very straightforward. The naming is consistent and things are mostly structured the way you'd expect. One exception to this is the gradient API. It's not bad by your typical graphics library standard, but this is Mac OS X, dude. We're supposed to optimize for the most common case and make the other cases accessible
Mar 07 — 4
Now that Apple has announced WWDC will be held in August this year, everyone wants to know why. One possible conclusion is that Leopard will not be far enough along to hand out to attendees by late June. This is a certainly the most plausible reason if you have to choose one, but there are a few other factors
Mar 06 — 9
In the current issue of DaringFireball, John Gruber talks about Joshua Marshall's interest and uncertainty about buying a Mac. John mainly talks about familiarity being a reason for staying with Windows, but also succinctly addresses the idea of "being tied to one company."
Mar 04 — 2
Looking back on the Macworld Boston 1997 keynote is like looking into a parallel universe. In that world, Microsoft reigned supreme and Apple was a minor bit player in a collapsed ecosystem. It sounds strange now, but at the time, hardly anyone outside of the existing Mac base really believed that Apple had
Mar 02 — 10
There's a lot of speculation bouncing around about what Apple might do for its 30th anniversary on April 1. I don't think it's a sure thing that we'll see something big happen. The Mac's 20th anniversary came and went without any special
Feb 28 — 17
Last week's dip into predictions didn't pan out for the most part. What we ended up with is an Intel-based Mac mini, an iPod speaker system and an Apple-branded leather case. Unfortunately, it looks like some people had unrealistic expectations for today's announcements
Feb 28 — 29
Apple has smartly decided to give public recognition to Mac OS X's preferred status in the Rails community and post an article on Rails basics at ADC. The side effect of this, though, is that WebObjects is pushed even further into obscurity. Whether intentional or not, the message here is that Ruby deserves a featured article and WebObjects does not
Feb 28 — 6
Occasionally, we change things up around these parts and talk games. I wasn't originally planning on getting an Xbox 360, but an opportunity presented itself so I picked it up. As far as I can tell, I'm not really the typical customer of this machine. I have a GameCube and PS2 but never saw a need to get an original Xbox. I've read various things that suggest that the 360 isn't that big
Feb 24 — 38
Memory is the oxygen of a C program. Doing anything constructive in C involves using memory. As we saw last time, memory for stack variables is cleaned up automatically. More advanced C programing requires using dynamic memory allocation, which you have to manage yourself
Feb 23 — 17
An article on Daemon News gives a personal perspective on working with the Darwin source base, specifically what it's like interacting with Apple engineers and the workflow. The end of the article points out that kernel source isn't provided for Darwin x86
Feb 22 — 11
Apple is holding a media event next Tuesday, Feb 28. The question is, what are they announcing? The analyst that CNET quotes suggests that it's either a 17" MacBook or an Intel-based iBook. I find both of these a bit unlikely
Feb 21 — 46
I wrote a C language tutorial for Cocoa Dev Central a ways back, but I didn't get into arrays or memory to keep the tutorial approachable. I'll write a formal follow-up soon, but I decided to post has some raw materials in the meantime, if just to get corrections in early. So here's a whirlwind tour of arrays and basic C memory
Feb 17 — 6
I didn't read all 181 comments, but the ones that I did read from this digg post say plenty. The internet collective is good at constructing business models for universes that we don't live in. Quite a few commenters say that they'd be willing to buy a copy of Mac OS X for generic Intel boxes if Apple would just release it, thus justifying the piracy
Follow your bliss.
