Every CRT monitor actually ships with a built-in dustcloth (or, in some higher-end models, a tiny man with a squeegee), but it's rendered unusable through trickery. Most monitor companies disable it by cutting a trace, while others disable it using firmware.
Firmware's trivial to bypass, but the cut traces... now that's tricky. What this software does is actually increase the speed of the electrons inside your monitor so they can jump the gap -- much like an Olympic long jumper -- and activate the cleaning circuitry.
If you take your monitor housing apart and turn out the lights in the room while running the software, you can actually watch this occur several times per second. It's fascinating to see.
USB won't work, but I have the answer!
on
USB Fundue Set
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· Score: 2, Funny
USB power is insufficient to create enough heat for deep frying, particularly after you put in room-temperature or colder food, dropping the temperature of the oil.
The obvious solution is to harness a heat source second only to the sun: Intel's Pentium 4.
Strap on a sexy custom-made heatsink attached to a vat of oil, and you've got yourself number-crunching, deep-frying electronic goodness! Yeah, baby, yeah!
Don't you read Scientific American? The eyeball most certainly was made by some kind of deity in some amount of time through some process. The Intelligent Design folks said so!
As long as my ISP and my registrar know who I am, you don't need to.
I agree completely. The government is being entirely stupid here -- there's no reason you shouldn't be able to register.us domains through a proxy. The registrars are supposed to verify you qualify for a.us already, and there's no reason thereafter that you shouldn't be able to keep your private information private.
One of my domains, which used to host my blog, is held by Domains By Proxy through GoDaddy. I commonly linked to and discussed current news stories, and at one point a crazy white supremacist found my discussion of his appearance in a news story and took it as a personal affront. Given he was an advocate of violently overthrowing the damn liberal Yankees, I decided to let the domain be held by proxy so interesting people like him didn't have immediate access the best place to kill me.
Result is no whackos who don't need my contact information can get it. And the proxy service provides a unique email address in my WHOIS that still goes directly to me so I'm reachable.
I fail to see the problem the government sees. They can still (a) contact me directly, and (b) subpoena the proxy service for my contact information if I ignore them.
I recognize that Ubuntu is based on Debian, which is why I mentioned it specifically. Debian and its tools do serve well as the basis for other distributions, but at the same time it's trying to act as a usable distribution of its own. On the desktop, it's not succeeding at that in the same way it used to.
Even parts of the distribution that have been bandied about as needing replacement for ages have been a long time coming, though (like the updated installer), and a few years ago it took Ian founding Progeny before fairly basic changes to the install and configuration process were made.
Perhaps much of the blame doesn't lie with Debian at all, but with the zealots who have kept trying to recommend Debian as an end-user, desktop distribution. A few years ago when I was a Debian user, I would have agreed with them -- it was easier to use apt and dpkg than the rather crummy RPM solutions of the time. But today there are much better, much more up-to-date solutions for that market, many of them based on Debian's framework.
Today the free/non-free argument may not matter as much to users of Debian proper, but at the time I moved on it was still heavily used for desktops and workstations, and the prospect of the software pool drying up and stagnating was a big deal.
I do admire Debian's dedication to their lofty goals, don't get me wrong, but from a pragmatic standpoint the constant looming threat of non-free disappearing made things rather unsuitable for end users.
Bully to Ubuntu et al (though their dancing people are a little strange) for filling a niche that needed filling. And it's good that Debian is forging ahead, however slowly it may be. It's just that between myself and the people I started using Linux with and because of, everyone has moved on for the same reasons, and once you've moved on there's little reason to vote.
It's not in the day-to-day maintenance of Debian packages that things suck, it's when you get into hairy packaging schemes where different versions conflict with each other, or you need to satisfy a tricky dependency using something you compiled yourself.
Portage's slot system, at least at the time I quit using apt, dealt with this much better, and also had a better way of dealing with self-compiled binaries than making up a fake dpkg using fakepackage.
Maybe things have improved since then. Maybe they haven't. Is apt better than RPM? Yes. Is it the end all, be all of package management? No. And neither are portage, or the BSD ports tree, or application bundles.
For my needs, it got to a point apt was too much work. I'm not alone in this, much as you're not alone in finding it perfectly usable.
Probably not. Usually, the "Up-to-Date Program" (how Apple offers upgrades when new software is announced) is only offered for systems purchased after or just before -- generally two weeks -- the product is announced for release.
Tiger's release still hasn't been finally announced by Apple, so unless they radically change their program, there's no way a system bought in February will qualify (as would also be the case if you bought a Dell and Longhorn was magically announced for release two weeks from now).
If you qualify for student, corporate, or government pricing, use it when Tiger is released and save yourself some cash.
Before even cracking a book, I'd probably start out with Apple's own "Getting Started" developer documentation. It's included with Xcode, and the introductory material is clear, fairly concise, and offers a lot of tutorials and code samples so you can easily see the concepts in action (this is particularly helpful if you haven't worked extensively with MVC development before).
If you intend on developing end-user stuff, be sure to check out the Human Interface Guidelines -- Mac users have expectations for how applications should "feel" and Apple has spent a lot of time and money developing and revising the HIG over the years. If it feels like a typical mediocre X11 app, it'll get torn to shreds by rabid users.
As for books... Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is an excellent primer and my personal favorite. It's not cheap at US$44.99, but well worth it. The first few chapters are essentially a Cliffs Notes version of Apple's free introductory material, and from there the book tackles a little bit of everything -- Objective-C basics, bindings, custom views, localization... you name it.
O'Reilly's Learning Cocoa (aka Learning Cocoa with Objective-C in its second edition) by James Duncan Davidson isn't horrible, but isn't the best. It also isn't as up-to-date as the Hillegass book, but they'll both be dated pretty shortly with Tiger coming out in the next few months (or a couple weeks, if you believe the rumor sites).
Once you get out of the starting gate, there aren't a whole lot of applicable books (but Cocoa and Objective-C are fairly easy to pick up). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as Apple's mailing lists are a great resource and the developer and API documentation is quite good in most areas.
I'm sure you and I both will be modded as troll or flamebait, but that's pretty much the reason why I moved on to greener pastures. Even sid got to the point it was untolerably out of date, and combined with Debian growing seemingly more political and stodgy about their DFSG-only bent, I moved on.
I use the best tool for the job. If that means it's closed-source or not free enough for Debian, fine with me. If I wanted politics with my OS, I'd stick with Debian. Instead I moved on to Gentoo (where I found quickly portage to be a hell of a lot more flexible than apt, despite years of learning apt voodoo), on to FreeBSD, and finally on to Mac OS X.
There must be a reason newer Debian-based distributions are doing so well, and I'm willing to bet a large part of it is politics. Every time Debian talked about finally doing away with the non-free repository, I laughed. There's a ton of stuff in there -- fairly common stuff, even -- that there was no replacement for. When you stop serving the users, you start losing the users. It's that simple.
That younger distros like Ubuntu offer an easier take on the Linux desktop is just icing on the cake for many people, I'm sure.
I got two years out of mine before it became almost unusable. I thought I might be able to get in on the free DRE fix program, but alas, I've only managed to get a Disc Read Error message once. The rest of the time is just a waiting game.
Inexplicably, autoplay stopped working (drive doesn't even spin up until I hit the browser now) and my system stopped starting up in analog mode, too.
I know some people who've solved it by buying a new PS2 (which I'm sure Sony loves), while others have walked into GameStop, told them the unit doesn't work, and received nearly full trade-in credit for it anyway (and then walk out with a used one for $20 or so). The game stores obviously know something I don't.
Indeed. Sony's really gone down the crapper. Once they sell you the item, they're pretty much done with you.
I've got a Sony receiver. It works fine once you get it warmed up, and it actually has some nice features (not to mention a much better SNR vs. the competition), but it takes forever to start pumping audio out. There's a good 5 second delay before some relay audibly clicks on and the speakers get an audio feed. The inexpensive 1970-vintage Technics receiver it replaced and my dad's mid-range H/K receiver both work as soon as you turn them on. And it wasn't even particularly competitive at its price point for what it was capable of decoding.
Sony's Wega (inexplicably pronounced Vega, despite even Sony spelling it WEGA in text) CRT TVs, while I love them, have similarly stupid designs. On every TV I'd owned, all the way back to the hand-me-down rotary-dial monster my parents bestowed upon me when they upgraded, has let you change channels while the tube warms up. Then I picked up a Wega last year when multiple Philips models I'd wanted all had the same picture defect. 15 seconds for the tube to warm up enough to get a picture. Then it takes another 5 for the picture to color correct. And in that first 15 seconds, you can't change the channel. It's not unusual that I pop down the hallway to check on something and turn on the TV while I'm there. Does't work so well when the TV is stuck on the last channel you were watching, possibly causing you to miss some dramatic crescendo of plot.
I feel your pain over Star Wars: Galaxies, despite having never played it myself. I had the misfortune to be on a Sony Online Entertainment beta team a while back. Worst beta ever. Not only was there basically no structure to it, but they didn't even see fit to offer the testers anything for their time. Not a t-shirt, not a discount, not even a letter... Our "reward" -- according to the rep -- was that we got to play on the servers for the time it took to test the product. Mind you, you were lucky to see one other player online, and all the characters were purged at the end of beta. How noble of them not to charge us for the time we spent helping them debug their software for free.
Sony's still running on brand goodwill to most of the marketplace. They don't have to not suck, and they know it. Eventually, though, that pool of brand reputation is going to run out and their shit is going to hit the fan. You can't survive on specs alone, and some day Sony's going to have to realize it. At some point you have to satisfy the customer, not beat out the competitor's spec sheet.
If you're writing an new OS X app now, you'd be crazy not to use Core Data and Bindings -- they'll literally save you hundreds of hours.
I agree wholeheartedly with you, but it's worth pointing out you've got to know your target to make this determination. A lot of users, particularly in the academic arena, are hanging on to Jaguar or stuck (in the case of IT departments with no budget) with Jaguar.
One of the first feature requests I received was for Jaguar compatibility, and that was in December. Some of them are likely waiting for Tiger, but some of them will stick with Jaguar (and have said as much). And we'll see the same thing with Tiger -- some people will be all over it the first day, and some people will stick with or be stuck to Panther, leaving you without Core Data, depending on your target market.
If the app in question was more complex, I'd probably release a final version for Jag and launch into using bindings -- writing glue code is boring, boring, boring. Key-value observation all the way, baby!
So for all the developers new to the Mac platform: put out feelers before you commit to one set of technologies. The new stuff is cool (I'm very excited about the changes in Tiger), but it's not going to get you any love (or cash) if 50 or 60 percent of your audience isn't using a compatible version of OS X. If you're targeting academia at any level, support backwards as far as you can without ripping your hair out.
And it's worth learning how to check the user's version of the OS and bail out gracefully if you're not supporting that version. Despite clearly stating the original system requirements as Panther, I had a dozen users contact me in the first week of release to tell me it didn't work when run on Jaguar. I have no idea where they got the impression it should work, but a dialog box could have saved me a lot of time.
Amen! As long as you stay away from the newer stuff, you're good.
I made the mistake a couple years ago of playing with a Power Mac G4 back when all I had was a 500MHz iBook G3. CompUSA offered a trade-in shortly thereafter (which, frighteningly enough, was nearly market value), and out the door I went with a new Power Mac.
I made the mistake recently of playing with an iMac G5. But I've got other things I need more, so I'm safe from the upgrade bug for the moment. If $1100 magically dropped in my lap, though... That said, the bigger part of my iMac experience was screen envy (I'm stuck at 1024x768 because my freakish eyes see flicker below 85Hz) -- the 20" is downright immersive and the 17" is plenty gorgeous and capacious.
So yes, if you go to the Apple Store, don't touch the computers unless you're shopping for one. Wander around the gadgets and the software and don't make eye contact with the systems. Just plug your ears and shout "la la la" when some customer gasps over how fast the G5 is or how big the display is.
am i the only one who's excited about finally (after how many versions of the premier general purpose graphics program) getting a WYSIWYG font selector?
Yup. I regularly turn that feature off in apps that support it. Many less mainstream typefaces aren't designed to be displayed that small, resulting in a font list full of useless gobbledygook.
Plus seeing the font in its own typeface doesn't necessarily portray how it will look in your use case (especially with Photoshop's smoothing thrown into the mix) -- I prefer to just give focus to the font name box and hit the down arrow to audition fonts in situ.
People wouldn't have been up in arms about MacTable if he had been reselling furniture.
What he was doing was presenting others' furniture as his own design, taking all the credit for it, and showboating about how long it took him to design this gorgeous hunk of desk.
Except he had no hand in designing it, he wasn't building it, and he wasn't even an authorized outlet for the furniture in question. Hell, he didn't even take the pictures -- he lifted them straight from the manufacturer.
The shady business practices continue to the present day, with rebranded OEM products (the desk was a premium name brand) heralded as his own design, and speakers which probably suck being marketed the Monster way: "They're super duper! So super duper we're not releasing technical specifications, because they're just so super you need to hear the difference to believe it and the crazy pricing scheme! Super! How many watts are the speakers? It doesn't matter -- they're SUPER!"
In the past he's repeatedly also created a whole cadre of imaginary friends to defend him when he's attacked on Mac message boards. Where Jack leads and is rousted out, a half dozen more new users suddenly appear to leap to his defense and plug his products. Mysteriously all from the same IP as him.
Symantec has everything to gain by trying to drum up sales of Norton Antivirus for Macintosh -- Apple's got a distribution deal with McAfee for Virex (prior to which it was impossible to get a single-seat license for Virex), so they're potentially losing sales for every.Mac subscription that's purchased.
Convince people that the big bad monster is coming, and maybe they'll buy your product on top of it. Or maybe the users who have no interest in.Mac will pick up your product, since they can't get Virex separately. And at what Symantec is charging for their Mac version...
It's reminiscent of the hullabaloo surrounding the "trojan" advisory Intego issued for OS X a couple years ago, arguably only to punch up sales of their VirusBarrier product.
Assuming he's right, then at least this time (apart from 'De Plume's "sources" who know a lot more about the cpu than CHUD tools would tell you), Apple only have themselves to blame regarding the release of 4-way dev tools...
To download the current CHUD tools, you have to have an Apple Developer Connection account, which requires you to be under NDA. In theory (purely theory, of course, as any ol' riff raff can sign up for an account at the free level and rebelliously blow off the NDA), nobody with access to the CHUD tools should be talking about the number of CPUs they support.
Now for the wild-assed guessing:
Having essentially four processors would be overkill for most desktop applications, and most organizations needing that kind of power probably won't want it on employees' desks. While everyone else is going batty about "OMG!!! New Power Mac G5s!", my guess is dual-core will show up in the Xserve line.
Apple's making inroads especially in high-performance computing using the Xserves, and this would only further boost the amount of power you could fit in a 1U box for prices lower than the competition.
Just think all they would really need to do is roll out a good, non-bloated version of Office for Macs and Linux...
Are they going to make hell freeze over, too?;)
What you and I see as bloat in Office some people strangely find completely necessary, and I doubt Microsoft is going to start ripping things out wholesale any time soon.
That said, Office 2004 already feels considerably less bloaty than its Windows counterpart (menus don't run off the end of the screen!), while still offering way too many features to count. It's not without its issues (speed and a couple chronic bugs come to mind), but I find it much nicer to use.
Now why doesn't the Office business unit make a version of Office for Windows as friendly as the Mac business unit made theirs? Beats me.
Simply because it's easier to get your hands on the retail version than the OEM version, a lot of people building computers for the first time just pay the retail price anyway and won't be affected.
But for people who have discovered stores offering the OEM packaging for Windows, yeah, this could get interesting depending on how MS handles it.
I think the real question is whether the companies like Small Dog and MacMall are really feeling a hit in their business. AFAIK, they're not part of these lawsuits.
Indeed. The fact that they're not involved may well be the answer in and of itself.
Even when you consider the plaintiffs (claimaints? whatever) alone, it's rather telling what's probably going on: MACAdam is almost universally known for how much they sucked, so it's no big surprise Apple "ran them out of business."
I also like the bit from TFA claiming Apple Stores were selling product to consumers at 8% under retail price. I don't know what alternate planet the owner of the also-infamous Elite Computers was shopping on, but I've been shopping at my local Apple Store since it opened in 2001 and they've always charged full price (unless you count the one day a year they offer a pittance of a discount on iPods).
Heck, I generally don't shop at the Apple Store for non-Apple goods simply because their prices aren't (and never have been) competitive. When I want something Apple makes, though, it's always a nice place to go play with it first without any pressure, and just shoot the breeze with the sales staff.
I don't shop at my local Mac reseller because my experiences with them have not been pleasant. They're either clueless or aloof or trying to cram products down your thoat. Assuming they even have what I want in stock. Therefore the Apple Store gets my business. If the local resellers would bother competing, I could be bothered to shop there. But as many people have mentioned repeatedly through the TellOnApple fiasco, there are a ton of awful independent resellers.
Imagine, the gall of Apple for opening their own retail stores and charging full price when a network of inept third parties were doing nothing positive for Apple's bottom line or brand.
Numerous reasons the US wireless telecom industry sucks.
The main reason for what you're seeing, though, is that unlike Europe, we have several competing standards. GSM is finally starting to spread, but additional standards are still common.
So 1: your phone has to match your network standard. If you're not using a GSM provider, you're pretty much left with nowhere but the provider (or an authorized reseller, which just sells the same phones anyway) to buy a phone. And even if you could buy a phone elsewhere for a non-GSM network, it would still have to be programmed by your provider to work.
1a: Not all GSM providers are using the same frequency. And in the case of Cingular, they're not even always using the same frequency across their entire service area.
2: Providers are all over exclusivity contracts. Cingular, for example, is the only provider that can offer the Motorola RAZR V3. When Cingular merged with AT&T, Sony-Ericsson phones mysteriously disappeared from the other providers. In some cases, the manufacturer is still able to offer the phone unlocked and without activation to the general public. But...
3: Unlocked phone prices are outrageous. The US providers heavily subsidize the phones they sell (and SIM lock them). Without activation, the RAZR V3 is $600. With activation, it's $260. Prices for other phones are similarly disparate. Nokia's N-Gage runs $200 unlocked. Up until recently, you could get it for between $0 and -$150 (you made $150 by buying the phone) if you shopped around and signed into a new contract. And all this is assuming you can find a handset that's offered unlocked and without a plan. Most models simply aren't available that way. (For reference, the cheapest handset Nokia offers here "handset only" is $130.)
You buy the phone, you pay for the service, and unless you want to hemorrhage at the wallet, you select from the phones offered by your provider.
I and many others wish the wireless here was more like it is in Europe, but we're damn well screwed in the mean time.
A nice effort, but I'll have to disagree with you on Apple ripping off Konfabulator's "look and feel." Remember, Konfabulator was designed to fit in with Mac OS X. Like so much else for OS X, it's glassy and shiny and colorful. It's only obvious that if Apple itself tackles desk accessories again, it's likely to be glassy and shiny and colorful.
Moreover, though, Konfabulator blatantly ripped off Apple. Perhaps you haven't been using Mac OS X long enough to remember this bit: Way back in 10.0, Apple was using docklings for battery and AirPort status instead of menu extras. The battery dockling was a clear battery filled with a green, bubbly liquid. Konfabulator's battery widget is... a clear battery filled with green, bubbly liquid. The Konfab AirPort widget is similarly "inspired" as well.
Somehow I don't think Apple was stealing Arlo Rose's ideas long before he unleashed them on the world two whole releases of Mac OS X later.
As far as scripting, Konfabulator is nothing new either. Microsoft was doing it with Active Desktop back in the 90s when IE 4.0 came out and began IE's reign of terror. If you wanted to code up an Active Desktop "widget," you did so with HTML, VBScript, and JavaScript. Several of the Windows "widget engines" also use scripting languages (including JavaScript), some of which predate Konfabulator.
Arlo and Perry are talented guys, but this whole Konfabulator stink is a bunch of BS. I get the impression you weren't hanging around the Konfabulator forums post-WWDC as Arlo started contradicting himself left and right, and then ultimately deleting posts by himself and others that weakened the notion of Konfab as the One True Widget Engine.
Slashdot Mirror
Every CRT monitor actually ships with a built-in dustcloth (or, in some higher-end models, a tiny man with a squeegee), but it's rendered unusable through trickery. Most monitor companies disable it by cutting a trace, while others disable it using firmware.
Firmware's trivial to bypass, but the cut traces... now that's tricky. What this software does is actually increase the speed of the electrons inside your monitor so they can jump the gap -- much like an Olympic long jumper -- and activate the cleaning circuitry.
If you take your monitor housing apart and turn out the lights in the room while running the software, you can actually watch this occur several times per second. It's fascinating to see.
USB power is insufficient to create enough heat for deep frying, particularly after you put in room-temperature or colder food, dropping the temperature of the oil.
The obvious solution is to harness a heat source second only to the sun: Intel's Pentium 4.
Strap on a sexy custom-made heatsink attached to a vat of oil, and you've got yourself number-crunching, deep-frying electronic goodness! Yeah, baby, yeah!
Don't you read Scientific American? The eyeball most certainly was made by some kind of deity in some amount of time through some process. The Intelligent Design folks said so!
;)
Sheesh. "Evolved." Get with today's science.
As long as my ISP and my registrar know who I am, you don't need to.
.us domains through a proxy. The registrars are supposed to verify you qualify for a .us already, and there's no reason thereafter that you shouldn't be able to keep your private information private.
I agree completely. The government is being entirely stupid here -- there's no reason you shouldn't be able to register
One of my domains, which used to host my blog, is held by Domains By Proxy through GoDaddy. I commonly linked to and discussed current news stories, and at one point a crazy white supremacist found my discussion of his appearance in a news story and took it as a personal affront. Given he was an advocate of violently overthrowing the damn liberal Yankees, I decided to let the domain be held by proxy so interesting people like him didn't have immediate access the best place to kill me.
Result is no whackos who don't need my contact information can get it. And the proxy service provides a unique email address in my WHOIS that still goes directly to me so I'm reachable.
I fail to see the problem the government sees. They can still (a) contact me directly, and (b) subpoena the proxy service for my contact information if I ignore them.
I recognize that Ubuntu is based on Debian, which is why I mentioned it specifically. Debian and its tools do serve well as the basis for other distributions, but at the same time it's trying to act as a usable distribution of its own. On the desktop, it's not succeeding at that in the same way it used to.
Even parts of the distribution that have been bandied about as needing replacement for ages have been a long time coming, though (like the updated installer), and a few years ago it took Ian founding Progeny before fairly basic changes to the install and configuration process were made.
Perhaps much of the blame doesn't lie with Debian at all, but with the zealots who have kept trying to recommend Debian as an end-user, desktop distribution. A few years ago when I was a Debian user, I would have agreed with them -- it was easier to use apt and dpkg than the rather crummy RPM solutions of the time. But today there are much better, much more up-to-date solutions for that market, many of them based on Debian's framework.
Today the free/non-free argument may not matter as much to users of Debian proper, but at the time I moved on it was still heavily used for desktops and workstations, and the prospect of the software pool drying up and stagnating was a big deal.
I do admire Debian's dedication to their lofty goals, don't get me wrong, but from a pragmatic standpoint the constant looming threat of non-free disappearing made things rather unsuitable for end users.
Bully to Ubuntu et al (though their dancing people are a little strange) for filling a niche that needed filling. And it's good that Debian is forging ahead, however slowly it may be. It's just that between myself and the people I started using Linux with and because of, everyone has moved on for the same reasons, and once you've moved on there's little reason to vote.
It's not in the day-to-day maintenance of Debian packages that things suck, it's when you get into hairy packaging schemes where different versions conflict with each other, or you need to satisfy a tricky dependency using something you compiled yourself.
Portage's slot system, at least at the time I quit using apt, dealt with this much better, and also had a better way of dealing with self-compiled binaries than making up a fake dpkg using fakepackage.
Maybe things have improved since then. Maybe they haven't. Is apt better than RPM? Yes. Is it the end all, be all of package management? No. And neither are portage, or the BSD ports tree, or application bundles.
For my needs, it got to a point apt was too much work. I'm not alone in this, much as you're not alone in finding it perfectly usable.
Probably not. Usually, the "Up-to-Date Program" (how Apple offers upgrades when new software is announced) is only offered for systems purchased after or just before -- generally two weeks -- the product is announced for release.
Tiger's release still hasn't been finally announced by Apple, so unless they radically change their program, there's no way a system bought in February will qualify (as would also be the case if you bought a Dell and Longhorn was magically announced for release two weeks from now).
If you qualify for student, corporate, or government pricing, use it when Tiger is released and save yourself some cash.
Before even cracking a book, I'd probably start out with Apple's own "Getting Started" developer documentation. It's included with Xcode, and the introductory material is clear, fairly concise, and offers a lot of tutorials and code samples so you can easily see the concepts in action (this is particularly helpful if you haven't worked extensively with MVC development before).
If you intend on developing end-user stuff, be sure to check out the Human Interface Guidelines -- Mac users have expectations for how applications should "feel" and Apple has spent a lot of time and money developing and revising the HIG over the years. If it feels like a typical mediocre X11 app, it'll get torn to shreds by rabid users.
As for books...
Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is an excellent primer and my personal favorite. It's not cheap at US$44.99, but well worth it. The first few chapters are essentially a Cliffs Notes version of Apple's free introductory material, and from there the book tackles a little bit of everything -- Objective-C basics, bindings, custom views, localization... you name it.
O'Reilly's Learning Cocoa (aka Learning Cocoa with Objective-C in its second edition) by James Duncan Davidson isn't horrible, but isn't the best. It also isn't as up-to-date as the Hillegass book, but they'll both be dated pretty shortly with Tiger coming out in the next few months (or a couple weeks, if you believe the rumor sites).
Once you get out of the starting gate, there aren't a whole lot of applicable books (but Cocoa and Objective-C are fairly easy to pick up). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as Apple's mailing lists are a great resource and the developer and API documentation is quite good in most areas.
Indeed.
I'm sure you and I both will be modded as troll or flamebait, but that's pretty much the reason why I moved on to greener pastures. Even sid got to the point it was untolerably out of date, and combined with Debian growing seemingly more political and stodgy about their DFSG-only bent, I moved on.
I use the best tool for the job. If that means it's closed-source or not free enough for Debian, fine with me. If I wanted politics with my OS, I'd stick with Debian. Instead I moved on to Gentoo (where I found quickly portage to be a hell of a lot more flexible than apt, despite years of learning apt voodoo), on to FreeBSD, and finally on to Mac OS X.
There must be a reason newer Debian-based distributions are doing so well, and I'm willing to bet a large part of it is politics. Every time Debian talked about finally doing away with the non-free repository, I laughed. There's a ton of stuff in there -- fairly common stuff, even -- that there was no replacement for. When you stop serving the users, you start losing the users. It's that simple.
That younger distros like Ubuntu offer an easier take on the Linux desktop is just icing on the cake for many people, I'm sure.
I got two years out of mine before it became almost unusable. I thought I might be able to get in on the free DRE fix program, but alas, I've only managed to get a Disc Read Error message once. The rest of the time is just a waiting game.
Inexplicably, autoplay stopped working (drive doesn't even spin up until I hit the browser now) and my system stopped starting up in analog mode, too.
I know some people who've solved it by buying a new PS2 (which I'm sure Sony loves), while others have walked into GameStop, told them the unit doesn't work, and received nearly full trade-in credit for it anyway (and then walk out with a used one for $20 or so). The game stores obviously know something I don't.
Indeed. Sony's really gone down the crapper. Once they sell you the item, they're pretty much done with you.
I've got a Sony receiver. It works fine once you get it warmed up, and it actually has some nice features (not to mention a much better SNR vs. the competition), but it takes forever to start pumping audio out. There's a good 5 second delay before some relay audibly clicks on and the speakers get an audio feed. The inexpensive 1970-vintage Technics receiver it replaced and my dad's mid-range H/K receiver both work as soon as you turn them on. And it wasn't even particularly competitive at its price point for what it was capable of decoding.
Sony's Wega (inexplicably pronounced Vega, despite even Sony spelling it WEGA in text) CRT TVs, while I love them, have similarly stupid designs. On every TV I'd owned, all the way back to the hand-me-down rotary-dial monster my parents bestowed upon me when they upgraded, has let you change channels while the tube warms up. Then I picked up a Wega last year when multiple Philips models I'd wanted all had the same picture defect. 15 seconds for the tube to warm up enough to get a picture. Then it takes another 5 for the picture to color correct. And in that first 15 seconds, you can't change the channel. It's not unusual that I pop down the hallway to check on something and turn on the TV while I'm there. Does't work so well when the TV is stuck on the last channel you were watching, possibly causing you to miss some dramatic crescendo of plot.
I feel your pain over Star Wars: Galaxies, despite having never played it myself. I had the misfortune to be on a Sony Online Entertainment beta team a while back. Worst beta ever. Not only was there basically no structure to it, but they didn't even see fit to offer the testers anything for their time. Not a t-shirt, not a discount, not even a letter... Our "reward" -- according to the rep -- was that we got to play on the servers for the time it took to test the product. Mind you, you were lucky to see one other player online, and all the characters were purged at the end of beta. How noble of them not to charge us for the time we spent helping them debug their software for free.
Sony's still running on brand goodwill to most of the marketplace. They don't have to not suck, and they know it. Eventually, though, that pool of brand reputation is going to run out and their shit is going to hit the fan. You can't survive on specs alone, and some day Sony's going to have to realize it. At some point you have to satisfy the customer, not beat out the competitor's spec sheet.
If you're writing an new OS X app now, you'd be crazy not to use Core Data and Bindings -- they'll literally save you hundreds of hours.
I agree wholeheartedly with you, but it's worth pointing out you've got to know your target to make this determination. A lot of users, particularly in the academic arena, are hanging on to Jaguar or stuck (in the case of IT departments with no budget) with Jaguar.
One of the first feature requests I received was for Jaguar compatibility, and that was in December. Some of them are likely waiting for Tiger, but some of them will stick with Jaguar (and have said as much). And we'll see the same thing with Tiger -- some people will be all over it the first day, and some people will stick with or be stuck to Panther, leaving you without Core Data, depending on your target market.
If the app in question was more complex, I'd probably release a final version for Jag and launch into using bindings -- writing glue code is boring, boring, boring. Key-value observation all the way, baby!
So for all the developers new to the Mac platform: put out feelers before you commit to one set of technologies. The new stuff is cool (I'm very excited about the changes in Tiger), but it's not going to get you any love (or cash) if 50 or 60 percent of your audience isn't using a compatible version of OS X. If you're targeting academia at any level, support backwards as far as you can without ripping your hair out.
And it's worth learning how to check the user's version of the OS and bail out gracefully if you're not supporting that version. Despite clearly stating the original system requirements as Panther, I had a dozen users contact me in the first week of release to tell me it didn't work when run on Jaguar. I have no idea where they got the impression it should work, but a dialog box could have saved me a lot of time.
Amen! As long as you stay away from the newer stuff, you're good.
I made the mistake a couple years ago of playing with a Power Mac G4 back when all I had was a 500MHz iBook G3. CompUSA offered a trade-in shortly thereafter (which, frighteningly enough, was nearly market value), and out the door I went with a new Power Mac.
I made the mistake recently of playing with an iMac G5. But I've got other things I need more, so I'm safe from the upgrade bug for the moment. If $1100 magically dropped in my lap, though... That said, the bigger part of my iMac experience was screen envy (I'm stuck at 1024x768 because my freakish eyes see flicker below 85Hz) -- the 20" is downright immersive and the 17" is plenty gorgeous and capacious.
So yes, if you go to the Apple Store, don't touch the computers unless you're shopping for one. Wander around the gadgets and the software and don't make eye contact with the systems. Just plug your ears and shout "la la la" when some customer gasps over how fast the G5 is or how big the display is.
am i the only one who's excited about finally (after how many versions of the premier general purpose graphics program) getting a WYSIWYG font selector?
Yup. I regularly turn that feature off in apps that support it. Many less mainstream typefaces aren't designed to be displayed that small, resulting in a font list full of useless gobbledygook.
Plus seeing the font in its own typeface doesn't necessarily portray how it will look in your use case (especially with Photoshop's smoothing thrown into the mix) -- I prefer to just give focus to the font name box and hit the down arrow to audition fonts in situ.
Not the least of which was the "custom designed" laptop stand that was an off-the-shelf plate holder from Walmart. ;)
Ah, quality products.
People wouldn't have been up in arms about MacTable if he had been reselling furniture.
What he was doing was presenting others' furniture as his own design, taking all the credit for it, and showboating about how long it took him to design this gorgeous hunk of desk.
Except he had no hand in designing it, he wasn't building it, and he wasn't even an authorized outlet for the furniture in question. Hell, he didn't even take the pictures -- he lifted them straight from the manufacturer.
The shady business practices continue to the present day, with rebranded OEM products (the desk was a premium name brand) heralded as his own design, and speakers which probably suck being marketed the Monster way: "They're super duper! So super duper we're not releasing technical specifications, because they're just so super you need to hear the difference to believe it and the crazy pricing scheme! Super! How many watts are the speakers? It doesn't matter -- they're SUPER!"
In the past he's repeatedly also created a whole cadre of imaginary friends to defend him when he's attacked on Mac message boards. Where Jack leads and is rousted out, a half dozen more new users suddenly appear to leap to his defense and plug his products. Mysteriously all from the same IP as him.
Symantec has everything to gain by trying to drum up sales of Norton Antivirus for Macintosh -- Apple's got a distribution deal with McAfee for Virex (prior to which it was impossible to get a single-seat license for Virex), so they're potentially losing sales for every .Mac subscription that's purchased.
.Mac will pick up your product, since they can't get Virex separately. And at what Symantec is charging for their Mac version...
Convince people that the big bad monster is coming, and maybe they'll buy your product on top of it. Or maybe the users who have no interest in
It's reminiscent of the hullabaloo surrounding the "trojan" advisory Intego issued for OS X a couple years ago, arguably only to punch up sales of their VirusBarrier product.
what the differents between flickr.com and photos.yahoo.com ?
;)
Flickr isn't used almost exclusively to host members' amateur porn.
Assuming he's right, then at least this time (apart from 'De Plume's "sources" who know a lot more about the cpu than CHUD tools would tell you), Apple only have themselves to blame regarding the release of 4-way dev tools...
To download the current CHUD tools, you have to have an Apple Developer Connection account, which requires you to be under NDA. In theory (purely theory, of course, as any ol' riff raff can sign up for an account at the free level and rebelliously blow off the NDA), nobody with access to the CHUD tools should be talking about the number of CPUs they support.
Now for the wild-assed guessing:
Having essentially four processors would be overkill for most desktop applications, and most organizations needing that kind of power probably won't want it on employees' desks. While everyone else is going batty about "OMG!!! New Power Mac G5s!", my guess is dual-core will show up in the Xserve line.
Apple's making inroads especially in high-performance computing using the Xserves, and this would only further boost the amount of power you could fit in a 1U box for prices lower than the competition.
Xserve Extreme, anyone?
1993, 2004. 1993, 2004... Yep, I bet nothing at all has changed at Apple's campus in eleven years.
That's not to say you may not be right, but Apple's security is pretty tight these days, and your argument would be much stronger if it were 1994.
Eleven years is an eternity in the corporate world, particularly when it comes to policy.
Just think all they would really need to do is roll out a good, non-bloated version of Office for Macs and Linux...
;)
Are they going to make hell freeze over, too?
What you and I see as bloat in Office some people strangely find completely necessary, and I doubt Microsoft is going to start ripping things out wholesale any time soon.
That said, Office 2004 already feels considerably less bloaty than its Windows counterpart (menus don't run off the end of the screen!), while still offering way too many features to count. It's not without its issues (speed and a couple chronic bugs come to mind), but I find it much nicer to use.
Now why doesn't the Office business unit make a version of Office for Windows as friendly as the Mac business unit made theirs? Beats me.
Simply because it's easier to get your hands on the retail version than the OEM version, a lot of people building computers for the first time just pay the retail price anyway and won't be affected.
But for people who have discovered stores offering the OEM packaging for Windows, yeah, this could get interesting depending on how MS handles it.
I think the real question is whether the companies like Small Dog and MacMall are really feeling a hit in their business. AFAIK, they're not part of these lawsuits.
Indeed. The fact that they're not involved may well be the answer in and of itself.
Even when you consider the plaintiffs (claimaints? whatever) alone, it's rather telling what's probably going on: MACAdam is almost universally known for how much they sucked, so it's no big surprise Apple "ran them out of business."
I also like the bit from TFA claiming Apple Stores were selling product to consumers at 8% under retail price. I don't know what alternate planet the owner of the also-infamous Elite Computers was shopping on, but I've been shopping at my local Apple Store since it opened in 2001 and they've always charged full price (unless you count the one day a year they offer a pittance of a discount on iPods).
Heck, I generally don't shop at the Apple Store for non-Apple goods simply because their prices aren't (and never have been) competitive. When I want something Apple makes, though, it's always a nice place to go play with it first without any pressure, and just shoot the breeze with the sales staff.
I don't shop at my local Mac reseller because my experiences with them have not been pleasant. They're either clueless or aloof or trying to cram products down your thoat. Assuming they even have what I want in stock. Therefore the Apple Store gets my business. If the local resellers would bother competing, I could be bothered to shop there. But as many people have mentioned repeatedly through the TellOnApple fiasco, there are a ton of awful independent resellers.
Imagine, the gall of Apple for opening their own retail stores and charging full price when a network of inept third parties were doing nothing positive for Apple's bottom line or brand.
Numerous reasons the US wireless telecom industry sucks.
The main reason for what you're seeing, though, is that unlike Europe, we have several competing standards. GSM is finally starting to spread, but additional standards are still common.
So 1: your phone has to match your network standard. If you're not using a GSM provider, you're pretty much left with nowhere but the provider (or an authorized reseller, which just sells the same phones anyway) to buy a phone. And even if you could buy a phone elsewhere for a non-GSM network, it would still have to be programmed by your provider to work.
1a: Not all GSM providers are using the same frequency. And in the case of Cingular, they're not even always using the same frequency across their entire service area.
2: Providers are all over exclusivity contracts. Cingular, for example, is the only provider that can offer the Motorola RAZR V3. When Cingular merged with AT&T, Sony-Ericsson phones mysteriously disappeared from the other providers. In some cases, the manufacturer is still able to offer the phone unlocked and without activation to the general public. But...
3: Unlocked phone prices are outrageous. The US providers heavily subsidize the phones they sell (and SIM lock them). Without activation, the RAZR V3 is $600. With activation, it's $260. Prices for other phones are similarly disparate. Nokia's N-Gage runs $200 unlocked. Up until recently, you could get it for between $0 and -$150 (you made $150 by buying the phone) if you shopped around and signed into a new contract. And all this is assuming you can find a handset that's offered unlocked and without a plan. Most models simply aren't available that way. (For reference, the cheapest handset Nokia offers here "handset only" is $130.)
You buy the phone, you pay for the service, and unless you want to hemorrhage at the wallet, you select from the phones offered by your provider.
I and many others wish the wireless here was more like it is in Europe, but we're damn well screwed in the mean time.
A nice effort, but I'll have to disagree with you on Apple ripping off Konfabulator's "look and feel." Remember, Konfabulator was designed to fit in with Mac OS X. Like so much else for OS X, it's glassy and shiny and colorful. It's only obvious that if Apple itself tackles desk accessories again, it's likely to be glassy and shiny and colorful.
Moreover, though, Konfabulator blatantly ripped off Apple. Perhaps you haven't been using Mac OS X long enough to remember this bit: Way back in 10.0, Apple was using docklings for battery and AirPort status instead of menu extras. The battery dockling was a clear battery filled with a green, bubbly liquid. Konfabulator's battery widget is... a clear battery filled with green, bubbly liquid. The Konfab AirPort widget is similarly "inspired" as well.
Somehow I don't think Apple was stealing Arlo Rose's ideas long before he unleashed them on the world two whole releases of Mac OS X later.
As far as scripting, Konfabulator is nothing new either. Microsoft was doing it with Active Desktop back in the 90s when IE 4.0 came out and began IE's reign of terror. If you wanted to code up an Active Desktop "widget," you did so with HTML, VBScript, and JavaScript. Several of the Windows "widget engines" also use scripting languages (including JavaScript), some of which predate Konfabulator.
Arlo and Perry are talented guys, but this whole Konfabulator stink is a bunch of BS. I get the impression you weren't hanging around the Konfabulator forums post-WWDC as Arlo started contradicting himself left and right, and then ultimately deleting posts by himself and others that weakened the notion of Konfab as the One True Widget Engine.