Ok, so a number of people have pointed out I haven’t blogged for a WHOLE year, well close as damn it.
So, here it is. I thought saving a post for my blogs 5th birthday would be a good point to start a fresh.
What would possibly fill a year void? Well lots of stuff has changed, some personal stuff that’s interfered with my ability to get stuff done on the scale I was used to, so I guess the year gap has just been the result of pushing certain things down the pile!
Hopefully, I won’t suffer too much interference this year, and I promise to keep attacking my blog with all sorts of goodies.
So what would be a good opening fresh start entry?
APPLE.
Apple has altered my perspective on usability, design, apps and lots more. It’s changed my focus completely on what I should be doing day in day out.
Firstly, for example, this entry is being composed in Blogsy, a most amazing iPad app which means I should be able to blog quicker, easier and from almost anywhere my pad can get a 3G signal.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. After having spent the worst year of my development career doing a 3do convention of a SNES game called Clay Fighters using a Mac Quadra 840av (which was a really top end mac at the time) I almost gave up development and started flipping burgers for a living. It was that bad. A pure, unadulterated dog turd.
My hatred for Apple lasted over 17 years. ( in fairness I should mention Metrowerks and Adobe played a big part in making it a truly sh*t experience. )
Nokia smart phones, windows CE phones ( the ones with the stylus because it was just a cut down version of windows)
even Atari portfolio and Olivetti quaderno’s. Forever searching for that perfect portable. Then in about 2008 a friend at a place I was contracting at showed me the first iPhone. It’s not that I hadn’t seen Apple gadgets before, I’d watched all the iPods come and go as I shunned them all for creative labs and other players. Avoid apple at all costs was still firmly burned into my psyche.
I don’t know how it happened. I think the infectious fanboi talk my friend eventually forced me to play with his phone. Once I’d held it, stroked it, felt the interface move, fiddled with all the cool apps that made the device go beyond a being just a simple phone, or a device with a crappy windows metaphor, I was hooked.
I bought one. From that point on Apple has eventually infected every aspect of my day to day computing. I do most casual computing sat on the sofa with my iPad. I play music on my iPhone, send video to the Apple TV from the pad playing it on the tv. My MacBook air has replaced my PC as my main work machine, and the gesture control via the magic pad, pretty much removes the need for multiple monitors. It’s so effortless to use, and a more pleasant environment in which to spend your time.
This is before you get to the design aspect of the hardware. The MacBook air is a joy to behold. I have a pouch that it slips into, along with all the cables, and my phones I use for developing all in a space half the size of a ream of A4 paper. Amazing. Another joy of the air is total silence. No fans, no noise. Well, that’s not strictly true, it does have a fan but, and it’s a fairly big but, it only ever kicks in WHEN ADOBE FLASH IS RUNNING. And that’s a pretty big one, it totally destroys the environment when everything is silent, and flash powers up. Pretty unnavoidable when even adobe’s crappy installers use flash. Like WTF? I’m afraid I’m with Steve on this one. Flash cant die soon enough.
My pc is now sitting idle rarely used. I have Parallels running on my mac for when I need to do pc work. VS2010 and Blend 4 work flawlessly, and it’s so quick you wouldn’t know which hardware you’re actually sitting in front of. Talk about best of both worlds.
All from kit the size of a few A4 sheets.
It’s slick. The design, aesthetics and everything about the physical devices make sure you don’t want to put them in cases and cover them up.
Ok, that’s my fanboi bit over. There are a couple of minor flaws.
Firstly, iTunes. Quite possibly the worst media manager ever conceived. On the PC it IS the worst media manager, on the mac, it’s bad but at least it’s useable. Barely.
Secondly, X-Code. This really is a throwback to the early 90’s and I’m convinced Apple can’t possibly be using that to develop any of their code. Not possible. XCode crashes performing the simplest of tasks. Remove a file from the project. Crash. Add a folder. Crash. Get ( the very weak !) intellisense. Crash.
Subversion integration is a complete joke. There are NO indicators that it’s doing anything, then 3 minutes later it will come back and report it’s done. Or crashed. And it’s messed up the working copy so many times I’ve abandoned the integrated SVN in favour of a third party util, Cornerstone which is absolutely fantastic.
Maybe I’ve been spoiled with Microsofts total devotion to its dev community. VS2010 is pretty amazing.
So, hardware = awesome. iDevices, possibly the most beautiful gadget you could own. OSX Lion, the jury is still out. Maybe I’m still burning from the earlier brush with the Quadra. The interface for lion, the gesture integration, well, that’s fantastic, but it just doesn’t feel like the ‘work horse’ my pc felt like. Yet. But it’s getting there.
Happy 5th birthday blog!