Entry tags:
iPad in my Pocket
My iPad Mini arrived today. I am all in love. My purse will be much happier carrying this, rather than the big one.
Mirrored from Under the Beret.
Entry tags:
iPad Mini
Apparently, Engadget writes:
It’s still not “small,” though. While a fully outstretched adult hand can generally grasp it without help from the other, you’ll still want both for typing and using apps. It’s still too big for your average pocket, and it’s not going to save you a heck of a lot of room in your knapsack compared to the 9.7-incher.
Me, I think, my current iPad is just a touch heavier than I want in my purse. I do carry it in my purse, but I think it’s a bit heavy. The Mini would probably be perfect.
Apparently Engadget doesn’t imagine purses.
Mirrored from Under the Beret.
Entry tags:
No Java Love
Apparently Leopard has shipped without Java 6.
I guess I won't be upgrading for a while yet.
Entry tags:
In Scribus
Some days, I realize how little I know about computers. I mean, I'm a good programmer. I think very highly of my programming skills. But when it comes to things like knowing about good free software or just about anything involving hardware, I'm pretty ignorant.
This latest round of "my god, there's a lot of stuff I don't know" is brought on by discovering Scribus, an open source page layout tool. I downloaded it on the weekend, and I've been toying with it. I love the potential, but so far, it's been very slooooooooow. And they tell me why that is: it's a PowerPC build, running on my Intel Mac under Rosetta. So I wonder: why isn't there a Universal build?
So I'm already fishing around trying to understand what it takes to build this from source. I'm sure there are people who are intimately familiar with building stuff like this all the time. But not me. I feel like I have a lot of gaps in my computer knowledge for someone who codes as much as I do.
Entry tags:
Mantra
Just keep repeating: I don't need a MacBook Pro. I don't need a MacBook Pro. I don't need a MacBook Pro.
I don't need a MacBook Pro. Nope. Not me.
Entry tags:
Evolution of a workstation
So when I got my Mac Mini last year, I knew it was a bit of an experiment. I generally suspected that I wasn't going to use it 100% of the time. Initially, I liked toying with it. And after I loaded Firefox and Thunderbird on it, I could accomplish all the casual use stuff on the Mac.
But there were a bunch of things I felt sure that I was going to keep returning to the Windoze box for. I mean, we use Windoze at work, so it seemed likely that the things that I do at work, I'll want to do at home as well. In particular, I suspected that I'd want to use the Windoze box for at least:
- Java development
- Printing and scanning
- Graphics manipulation
- Word processing / Presentations
But, one by one, I've crossed many of those things off the list. I've put Eclipse on the machine, letting me work on Java code without having to learn a new IDE (XCode). I've abandoned Paint Shop Pro in favour of The GIMP. I've hooked a printer to the Mac. My camera cable is directly tied into the Mac. Pretty much all I use the Windoze box for is scanning and (rarely) Microsoft Office documents for work (I have OpenOffice on the Mac, and I consciously chose to not buy Microsoft Office for the Mac). I'm not really a video-game playing person, so that wasn't a factor for me.
Two things haven't been entirely fruitful.
- I haven't really found a newsreader that I like enough to get back on alt.poly; and
- My ICQ/AIM client, Gaim, doesn't have a Mac distribution, so I haven't really been chatting (I wonder if the name change to Pidgin will affect that).
Today, I moved the USB splitter cable that connects a USB port on the Windows box to the multiple ports on my monitor. And I realized just how infrequently I use the Windoze box (when Ian was visiting, he failed his saving throw versus new technology and started up the PC to check email; his defence was that he lived in Seattle).
All in all, I think I'm a convert.
Entry tags:
What's the Objective, See?
Java on the Mac has a bunch of really nice features. Things that solve common problems on other platforms.
There are all kinds of applications for which integration for the Mac is a little half-baked. Some applications (like GIMP, for example) are clearly second-class citizens. They start, they run, but they're always "different".
And I'm not sure that Objective-C makes any sense to me. It seems like Objective-C and Cocoa are Mac developers' favourite way of building apps. Who uses Objective-C for anything else? It seems... self-marginalizing. I mean, I'm not really into Ruby or Python in any big way, but if either of those were used in place of Objective-C, I'd understand.
Entry tags:
Get Info
Anyone know if there's a Java API that lets me set additional information on Mac files? In particular, I'd like to set an icon for a file that I'm writing out.
Entry tags:
Mac Stuff
Let's say I have a Mac application, and my application has three windows. Is there a key combination that allows me to change focus from one window to another? Or must that always involve a mouse?
Entry tags:
Iconoclast
Gah! Can someone explain Mac icons to me? Mac has this tool called Icon Composer, which I think I understand. It takes a few different sizes of icons (in some image format) and bundles them up into an icns file. That much is clear to me. I kinda like the .icns files; they're simple and easy to understand.
Then there are these other icon things that I find here and there. On "free icons" websites. These icons don't seem to be .icns files. They can't be opened using the Icon Composer, and they can't be chosen when I'm using the Jar Bundler tool. But in all other respects, they seem to behave like icons. What gives?
Entry tags:
Java and Mac OS X
Huh. Java 5.0 on the Mac comes with both Java Advanced Imaging (JAI) and Java 3D already installed.