I was reading Wil Shipley’s blog on being crazy. And a lot of it just seemed to make sense to me. From further conversation, it was revealed that his software, Delicous Library made $54,000 in sales on the first day, without advertising. Now that’s sweet, considering this software costs $40/piece.
Apple Campus Beer Bash. The Wallflowers played on. Nice! I even got a drinking tag, as opposed to last time. And an iTunes voucher to get their new “The Beautiful Side of Somewhere” song. Then I went a little crazy and bought a bunch of iPod accessories – iTalk and an iTrip. If that wasn’t enough, on impulse, I grabbed an iSight too. Then a battery pack from Griffin for the iPod (now I can get about 20 extra hours for tunes). Yay. I can’t seem to find Penguin Mints anywhere (CompUSA either), and Fry’s is too far away.
- Hubert, I don’t know where you’ve heard/seen that Apple will ship the Intel C/C++ compiler, but they’re definitely backing XCode and GCC. In fact, they encourage gcc usage, as it will provide smooth transitions, and one of their new Intel Macs already had gcc -arch compiled to handle ppc and i386. This probably quenches the rumors that Intel will build PowerPC processors.
- Boolean searches in Spotlight enhances it with NOT/OR searches – useful. I haven’t tried Beagle yet, but this shouldn’t be a hidden feature but really pimped up.
- Wah, Delicious Library is seriously being pimped at WWDC. I think they’d be winning some design awards sometime soon. For those of us using Linux, there’s mCatalog (requires Mono). All this uses the exposed Amazon Web Services API.
- Popped Mono on OS X. To use gtk#, I need X11? Eh, it isn’t native, but it works right. Well, here’s news, Mono is not cross-platform, either. Mac users hate X11 apps. Why do you think we have NeoOffice/J being more popular than OpenOffice.org/X11? So besides wxWindows, we may never have a true cross-platform GUI out there (and its not even a pretty solution).
- Been playing with Dashboard widgets a lot. Its highly impressive. CSS, JavaScript, and basic HTML, and you get some really useful features. Also mining Apple’s Web Kit. There’s a lot of potential here, and with some good CSS-fu, lots of cool widgets can happen. XCode is something I’ve used a bit more, and I’m rather impressed – jump around .js file functions too. It even edits HTML! Its very cool.
- Tried Abiword. Its kinda nice. Lightweight, doesn’t require X11, I’m kind of impressed. I wonder if gnumeric is also available on OS X and if it’s as good (I mean, I keep on reading about abiword at planet gnome…).
- Quartz Composer is cool. If this is what the programming future is going to be, we’re going to get a lot of cool, high-end apps. The toy RSS screensaver is completely easy to build! However, it performs shitless on my iBook G3 with the Radeon 7500. Looks like I really need to get some power… erps, PowerBook thing at some stage.
So, the venerable Steve Jobs said Apple is switching to Intel from PowerPC, which he summed up nicely: “Remember, you all develop on this platform not because of the underlying architecture, but because OS X is just so good”. Okay, that might’ve just been a little paraphrased, but the audience in general were all very gusto.
He confirmed that OS X has always been running on x86 without any issue. It was designed to be cross platform from the start (this can more or less be viewed as the case thanks to Darwin x86). But of core importance is that folk need to use XCode if they want to get their OS X working on both PPC and Intel; otherwise this wonderful Universal Binary support will not exist. And then, for apps that still require PPC to run (and are not Universal Binaries), there’s Rosetta, which will translate the PPC instructions to x86, on the fly without performance drop.
Reasoning is units for performance per watt, for the future roadmap. In 2006, Intel is poised to give 70 units/watt, while PowerPC will give only 15 units/watt. Turns out he mentions nothing about cooling, the use of fans, etc. What about Altivec? Or even how the ads and performance benchmarks constantly used to berate similar software running on x86 (Photoshop performance comes to mind – at least 50% faster on a Mac and what not). A lot remain unanswered currently, but I guess more will unfold over the week.
Where does this leave Linux PPC? Besides IBM or Pegasos hardware, Apple wants the transition to happen by 2007; it however should launch its first Intel-based computer by next year. Does this also mean that I can buy the next version of OS X and run it on any run-off-the-mill x86? Mmrm
Posted on 4/6/2005, 4:26 pm, by Colin Charles, under
Life.
Right. I’d like to sing along to “my bags are packed, I’m ready to go”, but I’m not. I just booked myself into a hotel room for the next week. Getting money changed was a chore – banks in Australia don’t really keep USD lying around, so a trip to the money changers in the city was immenent. What a perfect time for the AUD to be at its lowest as well, right?
This stayed in my browser without even a post. Oops. I’m in San Francisco now. So anyone in the area that wants to meet up, do drop me some e-mail. I’m near Union Square. Sitting in the Starbucks at the corner of Powell, getting free wireless. Looks like my daily grind might have to come from here – its 24 hours, so I’m hoping the free net access (though unreliable) will come.
Oh, so I got pulled over to secondary inspection at US immigration today. I’m a “frequenter” it seems. So they wanted to know what the heck I’m frequenting the US it seems. Told them, and they were satisfied. While waiting at secondary, there was another bloke on the same flight as me (from Sydney, though), who got us all laughing. His reason for coming to America? He was going to marry his niece. At least now I know even the immigration droids have a sense of humor.
Oh, caught Ocean’s Twelve and Millon Dollar Baby. Former was good, latter was rather, oh well, I’m not into boxing.