Some mac stuff
Posted on 7/6/2005, 6:53 pm, by Colin Charles, under
General.
- Hubert, I don’t know where you’ve heard/seen that Apple will ship the Intel C/C++ compiler, but they’re definitely backing XCode and GCC. In fact, they encourage gcc usage, as it will provide smooth transitions, and one of their new Intel Macs already had gcc -arch compiled to handle ppc and i386. This probably quenches the rumors that Intel will build PowerPC processors.
- Boolean searches in Spotlight enhances it with NOT/OR searches – useful. I haven’t tried Beagle yet, but this shouldn’t be a hidden feature but really pimped up.
- Wah, Delicious Library is seriously being pimped at WWDC. I think they’d be winning some design awards sometime soon. For those of us using Linux, there’s mCatalog (requires Mono). All this uses the exposed Amazon Web Services API.
- Popped Mono on OS X. To use gtk#, I need X11? Eh, it isn’t native, but it works right. Well, here’s news, Mono is not cross-platform, either. Mac users hate X11 apps. Why do you think we have NeoOffice/J being more popular than OpenOffice.org/X11? So besides wxWindows, we may never have a true cross-platform GUI out there (and its not even a pretty solution).
- Been playing with Dashboard widgets a lot. Its highly impressive. CSS, JavaScript, and basic HTML, and you get some really useful features. Also mining Apple’s Web Kit. There’s a lot of potential here, and with some good CSS-fu, lots of cool widgets can happen. XCode is something I’ve used a bit more, and I’m rather impressed – jump around .js file functions too. It even edits HTML! Its very cool.
- Tried Abiword. Its kinda nice. Lightweight, doesn’t require X11, I’m kind of impressed. I wonder if gnumeric is also available on OS X and if it’s as good (I mean, I keep on reading about abiword at planet gnome…).
- Quartz Composer is cool. If this is what the programming future is going to be, we’re going to get a lot of cool, high-end apps. The toy RSS screensaver is completely easy to build! However, it performs shitless on my iBook G3 with the Radeon 7500. Looks like I really need to get some power… erps, PowerBook thing at some stage.
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For Gnumeric, you still need gtk. Gtk hasn’t been ported on Mac without X11. AbiWord does not use Gtk on MacOS X nor on Windows. Gnumeric is one of the reason I started working on the Gtk for MacOS X…
As for the Intel compiler, I read that from the announcement. Apparently, it will be an option for those not willing to use gcc (follow my eyes). As usual, it still all rumors until we get the actual beast. That how it works.
Thanks Hubert. I’ll start taking a look at fink/darwinports (preferring the latter), so lets hope things just work.
They’re firmly behind gcc (and you can tell from their public branches too). Developer machines too were xcode 2.1+gcc
Finally dumped NeoOffice today. Couldn’t take the speed of Java anymore. I’ll live with OpenOffice under X11 for now, even though the fonts suck (and keeping OOo copies of all my fonts doubly sucks).
Finally dumped NeoOffice today. Couldn't take the speed of Java anymore. I'll live with OpenOffice under X11 for now, even though the fonts suck (and keeping OOo copies of all my fonts doubly sucks).