Live, From iPod Touch!
Testing, testing, 123! Coming to you live from the iPod touch! Just trying out the new wordpress app! Seems to work very well, east blogging on the go.
Dual Displays and the Tale of the Dead Cinema Display
I’ve used dual displays in the past, but never really got anything out of them because they were pretty small, 17″ and 15″ inch to be precise. Also because they were different sizes, it was difficult to come to a compromise for positioning and arrangement so that dragging windows or moving the mouse between them was smooth and unhindered.
Also I never bought both monitors with intention of using them together in a dual setup, i just thought I’d give it a try.
Anyway, recently, my beloved 23″ Cinema Display died after a power cut, (reminder to buy surge protector -_- ). The kick in the balls came when I found out it was just days out of warranty (reminder to buy Apple Care -_- ). Apple wouldn’t service it without a hefty charge, so I took it to a local Apple Authorised Service Provider to see if they could help. They booked it in, and sent it off to their repair department with no promise that it would be repairable. About a week later, I had a phone call explaining that it was going to cost somewhere in the region of £415 to repair the display because the main unit (read: everything) needed replacing. I didn’t speak to them directly, and this was left as voice mail on my phone. I meant to contact them to tell them that I would just buy a new display and to scrap that one, but forgot.
About 5 days later I had another phone call and this time I was available to speak directly to the person handling my case. I explained to him that for £415 I could almost buy a brand new display from Apple, or even get a brand new display cheaper elsewhere. It just wasn’t an economically sensible thing to do. I also explained to him the warranty issue, and he told me I could probably get an extension on the warranty if I phoned Apple and explained the situation to them. So I did. Apple weren’t exactly what I would call empathic or helpful and basically told me they couldn’t do anything unless I told AT Computers to phone Apple and prove the date it broke…
Things didn’t look good. I phoned AT Computers anyway, and told them exactly what Apple told me, and the guy said he’d do it. He’d ring Apple and give them all the details. So I left it with him in the hope I could get an extension. Sure enough a few days later, I got a ring back from AT Computers telling me that Apple had issued an extension on the warranty and that a new Cinema display was on its way to the local store for me to pick up. I was elated. There was only one problem.
During the time when I was under the impression that the Cinema Display was dead, gone and not coming back, I went ahead and bought a new Samsung SyncMaster 245B+. It’s a lovely 24″ widescreen display that cost about 2/3rds the price of the Apple display and it’s an inch bigger but it uses the same resolution (1920×1200) as the 23″ Apple Display.
So I was now faced with a choice. Send back the Samsung display and get my money back, or keep it and set up a dual display situation again and see how it goes.
Well I chose the latter option and set them up on my desk side by side. I remembered one of the other reasons why dual displays didn’t work for me in the past: not enough desk space. Well luckily this time, my desk is big enough to accommodate both displays, even if I did have to move my Mac Pro to the floor.
With both displays using the same resolution, and the one only being an inch bigger (it’s hardly noticeable, they both look about the same size) I can definitely say that this dual setup is awesome. Twice as much desktop space allows me to have just as many windows open as I usually do, but spread them nicely and not have so much clutter, improving my work flow. Especially when I’m developing, I have around 20 windows open including all the ones open in Xcode, iTunes, Adium, Mail, Terminal, the iPhone Simulator, Documentation browser, etc.
The main problem I had was getting the colour and brightness to match on both displays. I’m still not perfectly happy with the colour configuration, but I think it’s as close as I can get them. The Samsung display has a warmer colour temperature than the Cinema Display, meaning it has a more yellow tint, whereas the Apple one has a more blue tint. It’s not so noticeable now that I’ve adjusted the settings, but I don’t think I’ll ever get it truly right unless I invest in one of those monitor calibrators. I think they’re expensive.
Another gripe is that when running a fullscreen OpenGL application (such as a game), it restricts mouse to the OpenGL app only, and the second screen goes blank. I imagine there’s a particular driver one requires to extend OpenGL apps across monitors. No biggie. I don’t think it’d be a good idea anyway, since the centre of the game (where your character, or your cross-hair would be positioned) would be split in half by the borders of the displays themselves.
Finally, I’m still not sure which display I want to use as my primary. I’m trial-ing the Samsung as the primary for the time being, since it has that extra inch. But I still feel the Cinema Display has a sharper display, and more correct colour gamut. So we’ll see.
Sexy Bass
I’ve dabbled with basses in the past, whether it being playing with one owned by a friend, or in shops, but this weekend I finally went and bought one for myself. I’ve always liked basses, especially the meaty ones.
I went around the shops in Cardiff looking for one that would suit me. I was looking for something more than just the standard 4 string bass. I enjoy the freedom of range that my 7 string guitar provides for me, and I believe that having more range can only be a good thing. More bass to play.
First stop was Gamlins, where I pored over some of the offerings. I almost came ( 
) when I saw this gorgeous looking 6 string monster with a beautiful wood effect finish. The only problem was it’s price. £999! And that was discounted from £1249 because it’s case was broken. I decided I wasn’t going to (and couldn’t) spend that much on my first bass.
I noticed one that looked similar with wood effect, but was only 4 string. I asked to have a go on it, and the dude told me the electrics were dysfunctional, so I left it…
Then we went onto G.M. Music, and tried to fit 6 of us into that tiny cave they call a “shop”. It was a bit funny really. They had an assortment of 4 strings, from Stagg, B.C. Rich, Gibson etc. But only one 5-string, a fugly Fender Squire (hate them). And it was too expensive and covered in dust, so it had obviously been there a while too…
We left G.M. Music pretty quickly, heading for Cranes. On past experience, I knew I was heading to the place that would house my holy grail of basses. I stood looking at the selection of basses, greeted with plenty of 4, 5 and 6 string basses, both fretless and fretful (?), left and right handed. This was a serious bass inventory. Only problem was their price again. Despite most of them being on sale, discounted almost half price, some of them were still around the £500 mark, especially the 6 strings. Then I caught a glimpse of this bad boy hiding near the back. A gleaming red Hudson (I’d never heard of Hudson guitars until now) 5 string beauty. I asked the to have a go, and he set up an amp for me.
First impressions count for a lot, and this one almost sold me instantly. The sound it emitted after plucking the low B was as meaty as meat gets. It made the air in your chest cavity vibrate. You could really feel the power. It was then that the guy explained that the pickup was “Active” and assisted by a 9v battery housed in the back of the guitar. This makes the pickup so much more sensitive, giving the bass a much fuller sound and picking up the tiniest of vibrations. It makes it really easy to play, since you don’t need to pluck the strings nearly as hard as other basses I’ve played with in the past. I spent about 10 minutes finding my way around the fretboard, getting a real feel for it, and I was sold. This is a sexy bass. Not to mention it’s Thru-Neck too, very classy.
The best part was it’s price. £299 discounted from £465. A great deal in my opinion. I hardly put it down all weekend, despite being at a LAN party for most of the time.
Here are some pics for the curious:
A Word On Snow Leopard
For those that live under rocks - or lead normal happy lives, Snow Leopard is OS X 10.6, Apple’s next update to OS X.
You might be able to find some discussion on the net about it, and you’ll eventually see that any intelligent discussion comes down to the fact that people think the update should be free… like a service pack is for windows.
This is because Apple have made the mistake of telling the press and public that 10.6 won’t contain any new features. That’s surely going to make consumers think “What? Then what am I paying for?”. The truth is that Apple are introducing a ton of new features - they’re just not aimed at consumers.
What Apple have said publicly is that 10.6 will be a complete optimisation and clean up with strong emphasis on increasing security and stability. Great! But people have come to expect those things to be free, as point release updates, like 10.5.3.
What people don’t understand though, unless they’re familiar with the technologies being used, is that the updates being made in 10.6 are far more than the bug fixes they’re used to downloading through Software Update every two weeks.
It’s a sad fact that people have come to understand Operating System updates as GUI Updates. They think that if it doesn’t look different, then nothing has changed. They couldn’t be more wrong. 10.6 will be bringing in features that enable the system to run up to twice as fast as it used to on the same hardware, be more secure without bloating the system, and reduce the amount of disk space the OS occupies on disk, leaving you with more space for your music, videos and whatever else you store.
Look at Microsoft. Bill Gates has been quoted saying that Microsoft tend not to work on bug fixes and system optimisation, because bug fixes don’t sell. You can’t market bug fixes - people don’t care. What people do care about, is the new transparency features, the 3D windowing system and all that crap. Apple are also to blame here, they’re not totally innocent, they turned mundane backup features into a 3D interface, and gave it a fancy name, and managed to spur a product out of it too.
And sadly, it’s true. You tell someone that this OS that looks exactly the same, and doesn’t contain anything immediately visible as being ‘new’, and then you show someone the exact same OS, but with a bit of an interface update, and which do you think they’ll choose?
It’s my opinion that the general Apple customer will turn their nose up at 10.6, due to the aforementioned points. The people who will embrace 10.6 and more importantly understand what changes have been made are developers. I believe Apple are targeting the developer community with this release, and here’s why:
Grand Central
“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.
Ask any developer and they’ll tell you that writing software to take advantage of multiple cores is difficult. So what does this do? Removes that difficulty and allows developers to make their applications multicore aware without having to sacrifice time and effort that could be well spent on making their application better.
This is also good for the consumer - they just don’t know it, and never will. Grand Central will make all those applications that Apple users have come to love and live by run faster and more efficiently. It’ll pave the way for more apps that they’ll come to love and allow the existing apps to improve. Why wouldn’t they care about that??
Open CL
Another powerful Snow Leopard technology, OpenCL (Open Computing Language), makes it possible for developers to efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit (GPU). With GPUs approaching processing speeds of a trillion operations per second, they’re capable of considerably more than just drawing pictures. OpenCL takes that power and redirects it for general-purpose computing.
This one is another feature targeted at developers. Similar to nVidia’s CUDA technology, this allows developers to write programs that utilise the graphics card to offload a ton of processing, hence speeding up the application. What’s my powerful graphics card doing as I write this post? Nothing much - displaying some windows… Unless you’re playing a game, or using a graphics intensive application, your GPU is going to waste. Adobe are already looking into including this technology in Photoshop to allow processing of large scale image on the GPU, freeing up the CPU to worry about keeping the system running smoothly.
Again, why wouldn’t consumer’s care?
Those are two of the bigger features being brought in with 10.6, along with complete 64-bit a whole new filesystem (ZFS), and I’m sure there will be more to follow (Safari 4 anyone?).
Just because these features don’t reveal themselves upfront to the user doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t plowing tons of time and effort into this release. This work is so much more than a service pack. The OS is being effectively rewritten from the ground to accommodate these new enhancements. When has a Service Pack ever done that for Windows?
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