Daring Fireball: The ‘Un’ in ‘Unsupported’:
You can do these things. You may well find them useful. You may well consider them essential to satisfy your own desires. But when you do these things, you are assuming responsibility for any adverse effects caused by them, now or in the future.
Word.
$welcome = implode(‘ ‘, array_slice(explode(‘ ‘, $welcome), 0, 19));
vs.
$welcome = $welcome.explode(' ').slice(0, 19).implode(' ');
In my opinion the message-passing (or ‘chaining’ as the javascript crowd likes to call it) notation is much clearer. The lack of pervasive OO is yet another one of the niggling little details that makes me dislike PHP so much.
And yes, I know I should have a preg_replace() first to normalize the whitespace, but I think the example is already cumbersome enough to prove my point.
GCSF has an excellent write-up on the “Why doesn’t Apple use Intel Inside stickers?” question from last Tuesday’s iMac press event. Personally, I didn’t understand the vitriol with which that question was met from the Mac ‘blog-o-sphere.’ Okay, that’s not true, I understood it, I just didn’t agree with it.
While it’s nice to see that Apple have finally offered a hardware RAID solution for the internal drives of the Mac Pro, I am saddened by the fact that I will not be buying one since they cost a thousand dollars.
Regular consumer-level RAID cards go for about two to three hundred bucks. But they can’t be used with the internal drive bays in the Mac Pro because those bays connect to the motherboard through a a pair of proprietary cables. The data half of that pair plugs into the motherboard with an HDI-36 connector. The question that keeps me up at night is: Why hasn’t anyone determined the pin-out of that plug and made an adapter cable? It’s just a simple 30cm cable with an HDI-36 socket on one end and 4 SATA plugs on the other.
Hell, I’m tempted to do it myself. Wiring up a cable is well within my abilities and I’m pretty sure I could find the right socket somewhere in the digikey catalog. But there is the remote possibility that my homemade cable might accidentally bridge the wrong pins, fusing part of the RAID card’s circuitry open and burning out the southbridge. It’s a remote possibility, but it would necessitate a new motherboard for my Mac Pro, and would almost certainly void my warranty. And a new motherboard from Apple would cost about as much as their RAID card.
A long time ago, on an operating system long since EOLed, there was a tool called Kaleidoscope that allowed you to skin the Mac UI. Along with many other people I suffered under the delusion that I could produce a skin that would be half-way usable. Thankfully, the evidence of that delusion has been mostly washed away by the passage of time. (Even the mighty Internet Archive Wayback Machine responds with a satisfying “Not in Archive.”) But, alas, there are still a few traces here and there.
So, I present to you Ascaris (it’s flat, it’s grey…it’s named for a parasitic worm!):
Ascaris is a flat, boring interface. I designed it that way, because I really dislike all of those flashy, lets-see-how-many-people-we-can-blind, overly-colourful Schemes that are out there.
I have taken elements elements from the BeOS, the Apple Lisa, along with a few others, and tried to slap it all into a small little package. Oh, yes, I also borrowed some icons from Macintosh System 0.97. Nothing like those pre-release Apple products for nice art.
And Ephemerol (yet another Aaron hack):
Ephemerol is my rendition of the current Apple human interface, based on the well-known Platinum, née Apple Grayscale, née Aaron window style. Ephemerol draws more from my own graphic design preferences and common sense than Aaron/Apple Grayscale does.
Where Apple Grayscale is an excruciatingly exacting rendition of Apple’s Platinum Theme, Ephemerol throws what Apple wants out the window round back with the ferns and forgets it, making something I like and can plug.
Ephemerol was inspired by the my initial observation that Windows 95’s slab-style windows were ‘Really cool!’, despite the fact that the OS is rotten from the reversed-engineered-CP/M up. I took all the bits I liked and could implement from NeXTstep/OPENSTEP, the BeOS, OS/2, and a couple others, and threw it all into Aaron, stealing shamelessly from other good schemes when the desire arose, which didn’t happen all that often.
However, over time, the look of Ephemerol has changed from Aaron (which has since been superseded by Apple Grayscale or Macâ„¢ OS 8) considerably. Much of the first version has been left behind, and it is getting more and more difficult to pinpoint where the various parts of Ephemerol were inspired by. The grow boxes excluded of course.
Who needs a Tardis when you’ve got software?
Assuming the Leopard Finder is a 64-bit application (and thus able to take advantage of the speed improvements that brings on Intel’s hardware) and given that the Carbon Framework is not 64-bit clean, that means the new Finder will be a rewrite based on the Cocoa framework.
Assuming.
Update: The Leopard Finder is 32-bit Carbon. Oh well.
Will Happen (2/3 = 67%):
Might Happen (1/2 = 50%):
Won’t Happen (6/6 = 100%):
Once again, I prove to be a much better pessimist than an optimist. And I did not see the Safari 3 announcement coming at all.
Along with Windows Vista, Microsoft shipped a collection of new fonts optimized to work with sub-pixel rendered anti-aliasing (specifically, Microsoft’s ClearType technology).
One of those fonts, Consolas, is mono-spaced and intended for command lines, text editors, and everywhere crotchety old geeks demand that their letters and numbers line up into vertical columns.
It is a very nice looking font, and has (for the moment at least) replaced Bitstream Vera Sans Mono as my text editor font of choice. Consolas has a proper italic face, while Bitstream Vera Sans Mono only has an oblique. I have TextMate set up to italicize variable names and comments and the greater visual difference between the roman and italic faces makes it much easier to see the semantic structure of a block of code at a glance. The design of the characters is closer to that of the [MPW Font](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monaco_(typeface)) than Vera Sans Mono; I used the MPW Font day-in and day-out for a number of years and am still fond of it, so Consolas get extra points for nostalgia. Oh, and did I mention that Consolas is designed for sub-pixel rendering? Because that really does make a difference.
The only problem I had with Consolas, and the rest of the ‘Vista font’ family, is that you had to buy Vista to get them without resorting to underhanded means. Fortunately, that is no longer a problem.
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