Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category

More on Leopard

October 31, 2007

If you’re interested in learning more about Leopard than I told you in my last post, head over to John Siracusa’s 17-page review at Ars Technica.

One nice tidbit from the review is that you can replace Leopard’s new reflective Dock with a more functional one by entering the following commands at your terminal:

> defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

> killall Dock

This will give you the same style of dock that you’ll get if you position the dock to the left or right of your screen, even if you put the dock at the bottom. If you change your mind, and want the new shiny reflective dock back, just repeat the above commands replacing “YES” with “NO”. The changes will stick through a reboot.

Advertisement

Tags:, ,
Posted in Apple, Technology | 3 Comments »

Developing on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

October 27, 2007

The latest version of the Mac OS X operating system, numbered 10.5 and called “Leopard,” was released last night. I went out and bought it and upgraded the iMac that I’m writing this post on. It’s a nice upgrade, with all sorts of little features. Here’s Apple’s detailed list of features, here’s a mainstream review, and here’s the perspective of a developer.

The installation went smoothly for me. Don’t be surprised if your hard-drive is busy for a about half an hour after you first boot up; that’s Leopard’s Spotlight search program indexing your hard drive.

I want to focus on some of the new features for developers, particularly the upgrade of the Objective-C programming language to version 2.0, and the upgrade of the XCode integrated development environment to version 3.0.

Objective-C is an object-oriented version of C, dating from the early 1980’s, which is a strict super-set of C; that means ordinary C programs will compile successfully under an Objective-C compiler. That makes Objective-C sound a lot like C++, but I like Objective-C a lot more than C++. C++ takes a “Swiss army chainsaw” approach, throwing many new features into the language, while Objective-C is much more minimalist, basically extending the language just to support objects with a Smalltalk-like syntax. Objective-C is also much more dynamic than C++; much more is decided at run-time rather than compile-time. Because of that, it feels a lot closer to programming with a nice scripting language like Python or Ruby. Here’s an excellent introduction to the Objective-C language by Apple; it’s a surprisingly literate piece of technical documentation.

Objective-C is almost never used by itself, instead you use it in conjunction with a set of extensive libraries (the Cocoa libraries on Mac OS X or the GNUstep libraries on Linux or Windows). Cocoa and GNUstep derive from the NeXTStep and OpenStep libraries developed by the NeXT Computer company in the 1980’s and 1990’s. They add both fundamental features (e.g. string handling features, hash tables, that type of thing) and GUI-creation features. These libraries have been under development for 20 years, so they are extraordinarily mature. And since Apple uses Cocoa and Objective-C to develop all of its applications, including Mac OS X itself, it is clear that if you want to develop desktop applications for the Macintosh, you need to learn about them.

I actually believe that using Objective-C and GNUstep is also a very reasonable choice on Linux (or Windows), for those types of applications where you would otherwise use C++, but few people actually make that choice. In fact, I have found that GNUstep and Cocoa are compatible enough that one can pretty easily maintain code that works on all platforms if you need that.

Apple provides a very nice integrated development environment called XCode for free with Mac OS X. If you have not upgraded to Leopard, you’ll be limited to XCode 2.5, while Leopard gives you XCode 3.0. One of the nicest parts of XCode is the “Interface Builder,” which lets you build GUI’s using a GUI instead of by writing code.

With Leopard, Objective-C is being upgraded to version 2.0. Perhaps the most important new feature included is garbage collection. It’s an opt-in system, so legacy code will still work, and you can turn it off if you like allocating and releasing memory yourself, but for new code, most developers will obviously be very happy to have it. This removes one of the major warts of the Objective-C language.

0321213149.jpg

To learn more about building desktop applications for Mac OS X, I highly recommend “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X” 2nd edition, by Aaron Hillegass. I only wish that there was a third edition that covered the new features of XCode, Objective-C and Cocoa that have appeared in Tiger and Leopard. (UPDATE: Apparently, a 3rd edition is scheduled for Spring 2008.)

If you’re interested in programming Macintosh applications, but prefer to use Ruby, Python, or Haskell instead of Objective-C, you should know about RubyCocoa, PyObjC, and HOC, which let you call the Cocoa libraries from those languages. These tools are very nice, (I’ve actually only used PyObjC personally) but you’ll still need to have some familiarity with Objective-C to understand them.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Apple, Programming, Software, Technology | 1 Comment »

iTunes U

October 11, 2007

04_large20070905.jpg

I bought one of the new iPod Nanos last week. One of the main reasons that I wanted one was to be able to listen to and watch the video lectures available at iTunes U while walking or traveling. There’s quite a bit of interesting material available for free download. For example, I’ve been watching lectures from the weekly colloquium of the Stanford Computer Systems Laboratory.

There are also MIT courses about graduate-level Digital Communications taught by Edison and Shannon medalist David Forney, or introductory Biology by Eric Lander and Robert Weinberg, or Mathematical Methods for Engineers (look under Mathematics) by Gilbert Strang, all in video. The podcast section of iTunes Store also has many videos of entertaining 20-minute talks from the TED conferences held over the last few years.

Of course there’s all sorts of other material available; I’m just pointing out some more academic videos.

It’s somewhat annoying how difficult it is to find specifically video material; there’s much more material available only as audio, but the video material is not really specifically singled out in any way. Also, you should know that you can also watch all the material directly on your computer, but if you want to do that, you should also visit this MIT OpenCourseWare page or this Berkeley webcast page. Both of these pages have a lot of additional video courses available in formats other than the MP4 format used by the iPod.

The iPod nano is very small and light. It’s my first iPod, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the earbuds are actually pretty comfortable. The screen is really sharp, but it’s also really tiny, so while it’s OK to look at occasionally to see what’s going on, but I wouldn’t want to watch a long movie on it. The iPod Touch will definitely be a better option for that.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Apple, Education, Science, Technology, Video | 2 Comments »

Video Conferencing Using iChat

October 10, 2007

Scientific collaboration is really difficult when you cannot talk directly with the person you’re working with. This has long made collaboration with distant colleagues cumbersome, to say the least. Fortunately, we live in the 21st century, and video conferencing technology now exists that is simple to set up, and works extremely well.

For the last few months, I have been using Apple’s video iChat software, and I can recommend it highly. It seems to have two major applications: connecting family members, and enabling business video meetings.

I have been video-conferencing with my colleague Stark Draper since he went to the University of Wisconsin earlier this summer. Video conferencing reliably works much better than phone conversations, and nearly as well as face-to-face meetings. It might seem surprising that it should be that big an improvement over phone conversations, but in fact human beings are very visual creatures, and a lot of information is conveyed by expressions and gestures. When you talk to somebody via video conference, they really seem like they’re with you in the same room.

If both you and your colleague have a recent Apple notebook or iMac with iSight camera built in, setting up iChat will be very easy; it just takes a couple minutes in all. You’ll need to sign up for a free trial .Mac account, which lets you use iChat (if you already have some other instant messaging account, like a Jabber account, you can also use that). The free trial lasts for 60 days after which you need to pay $100 if you want the full benefits of a .Mac account, but even if you don’t pay anything, you will still be able to continue to use your account for iChat. Since I wasn’t very interested in the other benefits of .Mac, that’s precisely what I did.

iChat uses the H.264 codec, which gives a very nice sharp image, although occasional video compression artifacts are noticeable (they’re interesting if you’ve worked on video compression, like me). There is also a very slight delay, which is noticeable, but not too bad. Actually setting up the video connection is trivial; it’s just a matter of knowing your partner’s .Mac account.

Other software like Skype exists for those of you with Windows or Linux. I don’t have any experience with video-conferencing with these services. If you do have such experience, and especially if you can compare with iChat, I’d be interested in your comments. Perhaps the main advantage for the Macs is just the fact that the camera is already built in.

Here’s a video that shows Steve Jobs demoing the new version of iChat that will be released with Leopard, the new version of Mac OS X coming out this month. It will give you a good idea of what a video chat is like; you might think that the reality is not so nice, but that’s essentially the quality I get with my video-conferences with Stark.

The upgrades for Leopard actually seem pretty minor to me; it will be nice to be able to share .pdf documents or presentations, but you can already basically do that by emailing the files. And I’m not too excited about the ability to distort my image or use weird back-drops. Originally, there was supposed to be a useful new feature in iChat for Leopard which enabled you to share your desk-top with your video partner, but it’s not clear whether that feature has been moved to another part of Leopard, delayed, or dropped altogether. We’ll soon find out. UPDATE: It looks like the desktop-sharing feature exists after all, which is excellent news, especially for people wanting to help out their computer-challenged friends and relations. However both sides of the chat will need to have Leopard for this to work.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Apple, Software, Technology, Video | Leave a Comment »

Viral Video Geniuses

September 5, 2007

This is one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in the last year, by video director Nalts.

Another of my favorite video directors is Christine Gambito, known as “HappySlip.” She often does very funny one-woman skits based on imitating her relatives (including her father who is always shown from the nose down, eating junk food and saying “disaster”), but I’ll show a different type of video here, because it sets up the third one in this post:

So now you know enough to properly appreciate this one, where Nalts “sneaks into HappySlip’s Pad:”

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Apple, Entertainment, Humor, Video | 1 Comment »

Music in Computer Games and Windows on Macs

September 2, 2007

kennedycenter.jpg

For certain genres of computer games, such as grand strategy games, the music can make a huge difference in the experience. One of the reasons that Civilization IV has been such a great hit is its wonderful music, particularly composer Christopher Tin‘s beautiful menu track “Baba Yetu” and opening track “Coronation.”

This music has attracted considerable notice; the picture above, taken from Tin’s website, is of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington Master Chorale performing “Baba Yetu” at the Kennedy Center. Tin makes “Baba Yetu” and “Coronation” (actually remixed versions slightly different from the computer game versions) available for download at his samples page, along with other samples of his work. (To download, just right-click and “save link” instead of left-clicking.) If you’re curious, the lyrics for “Baba Yetu” are actually a version of the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili.

My son Adam really enjoys playing the historical grand strategy games produced by Paradox Entertainment (Europa Universalis II, Victoria, Crusader Kings, and right now especially Europa Universalis III.) These games also have excellent music, but there are some tracks that he prefers more than others, and the music sometimes gets too repetitive in Europa Universalis III because there’s not as many tracks as he’d like. Adam also told me would play Crusader Kings mostly for its excellent music, and he would read the “Civilopedia” in Civ IV because it would let him listen to “Baba Yetu.”

Well, to give him a little more control, we made a playlist in iTunes, and put in only the tracks he likes from the games we own, and now he’s completely set. He just turns off the game music and uses his iTunes playlist instead. Speaking of iTunes on Windows, this is a funny quote from Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs a couple months back:

And speaking of running Windows on an Intel iMac using Bootcamp, which is what we do to run Windows-only games, this is a very funny link, but it’s not really accurate. Honestly our iMac running Windows (we actually run Windows XP instead of Vista because it runs games better, and is more stable) is easily the fastest and most stable Windows machine I’ve ever seen, probably largely because it’s missing all the bloat that normally comes on a PC (and because I’m very careful about what gets installed on it.) Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal also reports that an iMac running Vista is the best Vista machine he’s seen.

Tags:, , , , , , ,
Posted in Apple, Entertainment, Games, Humor, Music, Software, Technology, Video | 1 Comment »

Fake Steve Jobs

August 2, 2007

If you don’t know about this blog, you should really check it out. It’s a very funny take on the software and computer industry, and you can even occasionally learn some interesting technical things while reading it. A good place to start is with this post. Apparently there’s some mystery about who actually writes this blog. (Edit: sadly, not anymore…)

Tags:
Posted in Apple, Blogging, Entertainment, Humor, Technology | 2 Comments »