Gimlé

One of the reasons why I ‘blog less these days is that it just isn’t part of my routine anymore.

On the GNU/Linux side of my computer I, first of all, have a lot of very nice, free text editors to work in.

And second of all, I just got into the habit of always working on a weblog post in the background that I could work on when I felt that I needed mental space from my task at hand.

But the date when I switched to Mac OS X on my laptop coincides almost exactly with the date when my weblogging hiatus began.

I just fell out of the habit for a while.

The text editor situation is also a bit annoying. I know that I can get all of the same text editors I was using on GNU/Linux to run on OS X under Apple’s X Windows server, but I tend to prefer using native applications on whatever platform I’m running.

And most of the good text editors on the Mac (or ftp programs, for that matter) are proprietary apps that cost money.

They’re good apps, I’m sure, but paying for a usable ftp program and a usable text editor is like having to pay extra rent to have running water in your flat.

Stuff like that aren’t perks or extras. They’re basic features that every single operating system should support natively, and not in the ugly and unusable way that Apple has implemented ftp support in the Finder (OS X’s file browser).

And a simplistic rich text editor like TextEdit doesn’t count either.

Well in one case Free Software comes to the rescue, as it always does on the other Unixes.

Luckily for me, since most of the ftp servers I need to work with support sftp, I could switch to fugu for the ftp support.

Fugu’s a very nice user interface for SFTP, SCP and SSH available under the BSD license from the University of Michigan and has deservedly won an Apple Design award.

The text editor situation isn’t that clear. I’m writing this in a fairly nice free as in beer text editor called mi, while most of my other work is either in Project Builder (nicer than I expected) or Alpha (a pale shadow of it’s old Mac Classic self).

OS X is an interesting beast in many other ways. Feels a lot slower than the GNU/Linux system, which is mostly due to OS X not supporting Quartz Extreme on my laptop, as well as it’s monstrously excessive memory use.

And the overzealous unhinted anti-aliasing, probably all nice, sweet and pretty on larger, higher resolution screens, makes this small screen look as if it has been smeared with vaseline.

About as nice as trying to read a newspapers through a thick mud of multicoloured sugar. Which makes you wonder why the colour schemes in Windows XP and OS X seem to have been chosen by a bunch of overactive five year olds high on chocolate, sugar cereals and ritalin.

Sheesh.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

I’ve been watching the fallout from Steve Jobs’ keynote yesterday with interest.

Most of the discussion on the web has centred on Apple’s new webbrowser called Safari.

I’m not going to talk about that as I’m working on a separate article on Safari with an intent to focus on issues which others haven’t discussed yet (namely, everything except for webpage rendering bugs and the bookmarking features).

This keynote is Apple’s most interesting keynote in a long while, even more interesting than the introduction of the new iMac (a phrase which unfortunately has similiar connotations as “New Coke”).

The first thing to note is Apple’s continuing shift towards openness.

An open XML file format for Keynote (although Apple will have to publish a detailed specification document plus DTDs and such for the format if they really want people to build tools for the format).

It seems that the Apple software development culture has realised the value of open standards, of letting people scratch their itches.

Apple will be interesting to watch over the year.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

A lot of people have fond memories of the old Macintosh Pluses and SEs, the conceptual ancestors of the all-in-one iMac.

One thing that a lot of the same people also forget is that those machines were also the portables of their day, which sounds, considering the size and shape of the machines, completely false at the face of it.

But those machines have to be assessed in their proper context. At that time, those machines where the lightest, most portable and yet commonly available machines around.

Add the excellent user interface to the mix and you’ll realise why they were so popular for so long.

So Apple and mobility go back a long way.

Yesterday, it became obvious that mobility and mobile computer has become Apple’s primary focus.

A luggable desktop-replacement on the high-end. After that you have a slightly more portable desktop-replacement for those who do not have servants to carry their luggage. Then you have a ultra-portable full-featured notebook followed by the economy solution.

Whatever your mobile need, Apple is now almost guaranteed to have a solution.

It could be argued that this is by necessity, the PowerPC processors available today are rather anemic as desktop processors, a joke as workstation processors, but are excellent mobile processors. Power-efficient, fast enough for most mobile tasks and run at genital-friendly temperatures.

Maybe, but the mobility focus would be a smart move in any case.

A quick look at the state of computer-ownership at my local university reveals that almost everybody owns a desktop computer but only a fraction owns a laptop.

So you’ve got two markets, one is completely saturated with recent machines, the other is almost completely unsaturated.

If you were running a computer company which one would you focus on?

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.