apple

A new spin of Mac version of UltraEdit is out. I used the previous beta version for 2 days of demoing in Serbia and it worked great. The production release should be very soon and I for one am a happy camper.

Cheers

Tim…

I upgraded to the iOS 4.2 the other day (the evening it came out in the UK). Steve Jobs reckons, “iOS 4.2 makes the iPad a completely new product”. Maybe I don’t use it the same as everyone else in Apple-land, but it seems just… kinda… no freaking different…

I really don’t understand how I can remain completely immune to the Apple marketing hype when I’m desperately trying to be assimilated. I keep buying their products and waiting for a Jobsian flash of magic but it’s just not happening. What have I got to do to? Marry the guy?

Maybe it’s like enlightenment and the more you try the harder it is to reach. I shall meditate for a month with my iPad balanced on my head, my MacBook Pro on my lap and my iPod Shuffle up my ass. Maybe then I will understand all the heavenly glory that is Apple, or maybe I’ll just get a sore ass…

Cheers

Tim…

I signed up for the beta program, so now I’m rockin’ UltraEdit (beta 5) on Mac. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s already so much nicer than TextWrangler.

Cheers

Tim…

I wrote recently about UltraEdit coming to Mac. Another tool I ‘ve missed since my Windows days is Snagit. The default screen capture on Mac is OK, and Shutter and Gimp on Linux are both OK too, but none of them compare to Snagit in my opinion.

Today I got an email proclaiming that a production release of Snagit is now available for Mac and since I have a valid Windows License I get to use it for free on Mac. Joy.

It’s now installed and running quite nicely. Now if only they would do a Linux version…

Cheers

Tim…

When I was a Windows user, one tool I felt I couldn’t live without was UltraEdit. It’s awesome.

A few months ago I checked the UltraEdit website and saw a Linux version of the editor was available. Unfortunately, it only had a subset of the functionality found in the Windows version. I checked again yesterday, and the Linux version is still lagging behind, but it’s a bit better than it was. I wrote to the company (IDM Computer Solutions) to ask when/if some of the functionality I require would be coming and it looks like the next release (start of next year) will include everything I need for my day-to-day use. What’s more, towards the end of this year there should be a Mac version available. Joy!

There are of course alternatives out there, but I really like Ultraedit and I’m happy to pay for a lifetime updates license on each platform (I already have a Windows one) if I have to. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a nice Christmas present from IDM Computer Solutions.

Cheers

Tim…

In one of my previous posts I mentioned I bought an iPad whilst at OpenWorld. Well it’s a few days old so I thought I’d write a little something about my thoughts so far.

I was originally very skeptical about the whole iPad thing. I switched from a 17 inch laptop to a 13 inch MacBook Pro to reduce then weight of the bag I was lugging round at conferences. At OpenWorld I got so sick the weight of the MacBook I decided to buy the iPad and I must say, from a weight perspective at least, it is a massive improvement.

Having not been part of the iPhone crowd I was initially very confused by the interface. Reading content was a breeze but editing and typing was truly arduous. Over the last few days I’ve got used to it and for the most part it is OK. I’m typing this blog post now using it. Having said that, without a separate keyboard it is not a good device for content generation. Simple text is fine, but cut & paste is a complete pain. Don’t even get me started on pasting hyperlinks into blog and forum posts. Too much effort.

Where it really comes into it’s own is for reading content. I’ve got Kindle for iPad and the books are really neat and easy to read. I’ve also moved some PDFs of the Oracle docs onto iBooks and they are much easier to read on the iPad than the Kindle. Very impressive. The screen does suffer in bad light compared to the Kindle, so if you are only going to read novels, then save a load of cash and use a Kindle. If on the other hand you want to browse the net, check emails and do some minor content generation, like blogging and twitter, then the iPad is great.

Two other factors that weigh heavily in it’s favour compared to a laptop are the instant on/off and excellent battery life. No more hassle at conferences and on planes. Just switch it on and go.

It’s early days, but I think this will now replace my laptop for everything except presentations with demos.

Cheers

Tim…

Like apparently hundreds of thousands of others, I upgraded my machines running Mac OS X from version 10.5 (Leopard) to 10.6 (Snow Leopard) last Friday. I'm now a Snow Leopard user, and I like it just fine.

I was excited about this upgrade, because I love the notion that the people who released it care about optimizing the performance of my system. One of the optimizations I looked forward to was reclaiming over 6 GB of disk space after the upgrade (see Bertrand Serlet's announcement at 00:20:48 to 00:21:11 in the WWDC 2009 keynote video).

Lots of people in the Twittersphere were excited about the space savings, too. Before I upgraded, I checked to see what people were tweeting, just to make sure I wasn't about to walk off a cliff. Many people mentioned tremendous disk space savings that were well in excess of the 6 GB that Apple promised. Pretty exciting.

We have two Mac computers. Here's how the savings went for us:

Mac #1      10.5      10.6      Savings
-------  ---------  ---------  ---------
Total    148.73 GB  159.70 GB
Free      47.70 GB   59.71 GB   12.01 GB

Mac #2      10.5      10.6      Savings
-------  ---------  ---------  ---------
Total    185.99 GB  199.71 GB
Free      68.66 GB   83.95 GB   15.29 GB

So, ...wow, we saved over twice as much space as Apple had advertised. But there's a curiosity in the numbers. Do you see it? How did my total capacity get bigger as the result of a software upgrade? The answer is that my capacity didn't really get bigger; it's just that Apple now measures disk space differently in 10.6.

I knew this was coming because of this article called "Snow Leopard's New Math." Snow Leopard still uses the abbreviation "GB" to refer, now, to 10⁹ bytes, whereas, before, Leopard used the abbreviation "GB" to refer to 2³⁰ bytes. The problem, see, is that 10⁹ ≠ 2³⁰. In fact, 2³⁰ is bigger. So in Snow Leopard, Apple is dividing by a smaller unit than it used to, which results in disk capacities and file sizes looking bigger than they used to. (Here's a good article about that.)

It is misleading that Apple used the same abbreviation—"GB"—to refer to two different units of measure. However, Apple is well justified in using "GB" in Snow Leopard. IEEE 1541-2002 says the right abbreviations would have been "GiB" (gibibytes) in 10.5 and "GB" (gigabytes) in 10.6. By that standard, Snow Leopard is right, and Leopard was wrong. All's well that ends well, I suppose.

Now, back to the space savings question. How much space did I really save when I upgraded to Snow Leopard? To answer that, I need to convert one of the two columns in my analysis (labeled "10.5" and "10.6") to the other column's unit, so I can subtract. Since when I watched the WWDC keynote film, my mindset was of 10.5-style "gigabytes" (properly gibibytes), I'll convert to GiB. Here's the answer:

Mac #1      10.5        10.6      Savings
-------  ----------  ----------  ---------
Total    148.73 GiB  148.73 GiB
Free      47.70 GiB   55.61 GiB   7.91 GiB

Mac #2      10.5        10.6      Savings
-------  ----------  ----------  ---------
Total    185.99 GiB  185.99 GiB
Free      68.66 GiB   78.18 GiB   9.52 GiB

That's still spectacular, and I'm plenty happy with it. I have basically bought a whole bunch of performance enhancements and 17 GiB of disk space for $49 plus tax (I bought the Snow Leopard upgrade family pack). I think that's a pretty good deal.

This whole story reminded me of the old days when I used to install Oracle for a living. People would buy, say, a brand-new 100,000,000-byte disk drive and then be upset when the df utility showed considerably less than 100 "MB" of free space. Part of the explanation was that df reported in mibibytes, not millions of bytes.

It's interesting to note that in Snow Leopard, df -h now reports in Bi/Ki/Mi/Gi units, and df -H reports in B/K/M/G units (defined as IEEE 1541 defines them). Smart.