Topic: osx

Snow Leopard: the Obvious Choice

Ivan Moscoso, Wednesday, August 5, 2009 @ 11:00 am

When OS X 10.5 (Leopard) was released back in late 2007, I told a colleague at the time that Leopard was, by far, the worst release Apple ever put out. You can pardon a bit of hyperbole there, but after a healthy string of solid releases of OS X that just "worked", the problems produced by Leopard were numerous (one might counter that this is all relative-- four to five issues might not sound as numerous to users of other operating systems, but for OS X, these were a pretty big deal, and kept me from switching for months).

By comparison, Snow Leopard marks a great return to the kind of releases the Mac community came to expect. Yes we still have a month left to wait for its release, and yes there might always be small glitches, but as one long-time Mac user the answer to the question of "is it really all that?" the answer is pretty clear to me at least: "Yes, yes it totally is."
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Windows Development on a Mac

Jason Pearl, Tuesday, July 14, 2009 @ 10:58 am

I've been in just about the same cycle for almost 15 years now. Install Windows. Install the software I need on top of it. Wait about 6 months to a year until I can no longer take the gunk slowing down my system ("Windows Disease"). Backup my data. Format my drive. Rinse and repeat. Do this maybe 3 or 4 times, and then upgrade my hardware. Sound familiar?

So I got smarter. I started making images using Ghost. This has worked fairly well. I get a new system, I set it up as pristine and fully featured as possible, then I take an image of it. This way the install step takes a couple button presses, leaving me to do more useful things with my time. Like blog or something.

Fast forward a couple years. Processors are way faster and have more cores. Virtualization is no longer a toy, and can now be used not just for enterprise purposes, but on the desktop. Sure I'm mostly a Windows developer, but that doesn't mean I don't want to write iPhone / Mac applications. So after cursing my previous laptop up and down on a daily basis, I've upgraded to a MacBook Pro. It's tiny, it's fast, and it runs OS X and WINDOWS via VMWare Fusion. Windows runs spectacularly on my MacBook. The most beautiful part is, as far as I can tell, there is no parallel (no pun intended) to "Windows Disease" on a Mac. It has continued to run as fresh and fast as the day I installed the OS. Now with my backed up copy of my Windows virtual machine, starting from scratch on Windows is as simple as taking a fresh copy and spinning up the backup VM.

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Software Development

Mouse wheel (scroll) Event in Flash Player running on a Mac

Sasha Dzeletovic, Thursday, September 18, 2008 @ 1:04 pm

One of the great advantages of Flash technology is cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility. That is almost entirely true but a few things did slip Adobe.

A big issue that was overlooked is support for mouse wheel event on Mac OSX. A pretty basic functionality you would think. If your interface is heavily relying on mouse scrolling, your audience on Mac's will probably have a "so how does this work" blank stare.

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Software Development