Month: April 2006

Om Malik points out that broadband customers want cheap, not fast broadband.

Think about it. Do you really need 10 Mbps downloads for when you’re with your computer? Or would you rather have 256 Kbps all day every day. I’m firmly in the latter camp but then I’m adapted to a mobile lifestyle. I use a laptop I’m envious of 3G/EVDO services in the US. I use WiFi all day (and part of the night). I’ve previously blogged about “Going Bedouin” being the future for small companies.

I do make exceptions for some of my friends (Yes, Jared, you) who need to have tremendously high download speeds and frighteningly good upload speeds due to ADSL2 and the general weirdness of French TV (I love it…I don’t understand it, just love it.)

Joel Spolsky has a fabbo article on why your software company needs more than just programmers. The rest of a software company is there to support the programmers. It’s there to make sure the most complex stuff they have to worry about is solving the really hard problems they enjoy solving. They’ll get distracted from their mission by a leaky faucet, they’ll lose valuable sleep over P.A.Y.E. and V.A.T., they’ll lose part of their beard when they have to keep track of rent, rates, insurances, etc.

His example of Dolly Parton is a great one. No-one expects Dolly to be able to set up an amp, hawk records to distributors, paste up posters about her next tour. She sings. And we listen. She may not be your cup of tea, but the machine that enables her performance on your iPod is undeniable. As another example, modern armies run at a ratio of 7:1 for support staff: fighting men.

Joel has a list of things he identifies as ways to make programmers productive. Pay attention.

Seems we’re almost done.

Aidan warned me about a show-stopper bug or two the other day and me, not being a coder, took it as game over. Then two hours later he tells me he’s sorted it. I’m still unsure where the problem was – something to do with the SyncServices schema or even with the reporting of Synchrospector – something that was tickled by the 10.4.6 update.

But everything is fine now.

On a slightly related subject, Daniel Jalkut has an article on Pride of Ownership as related to software developers being proud of the work they do. He touches on the veil of secrecy at Apple and it’s interesting, reading Scobleizer, how transparent Microsoft seems to be.

We’ve been pretty open so far – I’m standing on the shoulders of giants 🙂

I’ve not spoken face to face with Aidan in a couple of years and I’m looking forward to it, and not a little nervous about it. I know he’s just going to say “Man, you got fat….”

One of the biggest problems with the Intel Transition is the possibility of marginalisation of PowerPC-based computers. This didn’t occur much with the transition from MOT 680×0 processors. It took time for applications to be PowerPC-only and there were very few that appeared to be PowerPC-only and completely changed the face of the market.

With the Mac OS X transition, there were immediately a lot of apps that were simply not possible on Mac OS 9. But these were the features that we wanted Mac OS X for and we saw it as “cheap” because it was just software. Nevermind that we had to eventually re-buy most of our software and for some people it was very expensive.

Now we have PPC-based and Intel-based Macs in the channel and we’re seeing all sorts of new software appearing. We have x86 virtualisation from Parallels, statements from VMWare that they will be supporting the Mac, Apple producing Boot Camp software which permits Intel-based Macs to boot into Windows XP.

There will be more and more applications which will be Intel-only. This isn’t a bad thing per se – there were lots of apps that were Mac OS X-only though we didn’t see this as bad with the PPC transition just over a decade ago.

All of this fuels new hardware purchases. It fuels upgrades. Apple loves transitions as a result. What is more evident is that Apple attracts people who enjoy having the latest and greatest. Intel has said they enjoy working with Apple because even with 5% of the market, Apple customers buy new hardware. Look at the sales of Intel-based machines. They’re flying out the door. I’m looking forward to the Apple Earnings Conference Call on April 19th. We’ll know then how many have shipped. And I’l bet that just after that, we’ll see the replacement for the iBook.

It is important for developers to target the PPC market as well. For the last 5 years, Apple has been selling between 3-4 million computers a year, all running Mac OS X. Ignoring upgrade customers, that’s a market of nearly 20 million computers and, unlike the Windows market, very few of them are dumb terminals, cash registers, automated teller machines and word processing appliances. In comparison, the Intel Mac market is going to be a twentieth of the size this quarter. It’ll increase quickly but we’ll see growth limited by demand for the chips. I’d love to see figures for Intel shipping their Core Solo/Duo chip range to find out what percentage of their Core business is going to Apple. Just like it will be interesting to see the adoption of their next-generation dual-core/quad-core/64-bit chips.

Anyway, it’s Sunday morning. I need to get out of bed

I usually like reading at ONLAMP but this article really annoyed me.

Should Apple worry about a Console running with the Cell processor? Of course not! The author also claims Sony is making a break from Microsoft and going with Linux in the PS3? Oh, the way they STUCK with Microsoft for the PSone and PS2?

And using Cell for generic computer tasks? Gahhh, the author has annoyed me and I’m only on the first page!

It gets worse though. It becomes a poster child for Linux. Is anyone still shouting about Linux now? Does anyone care? Is Linux REALLY going to overtake Apple in graphics and music markets?

Frankly, Adrien Lamothe has overloaded the idiot quota. Would you believe that this article was written in March 2006! We have to be nice though. It’s his first ONLAMP article.

It’s incredible.

Apparently a PowerPC/Mac OS X version of Photoshop was slower than an Intel/Windows version of Photoshop running on an Intel Mac.

Did Rich Brown get paid for this article?

In a year, everyone will have a Mac

Everyone.

Okay, I’ll qualify that a little. Everyone you know who actually cares about their computing experience will be using a Mac.

I spent a little time today installing Windows 2000 on Parallel’s Virtualisation workstation product (free 30 day trial). It’s only $50 so for some people who need Windows for the odd app, it’s an attractive option. Heaps more responsive than Virtual PC (which has always been sluggish) but after it was said and done I did think: So now what?

One of the guys is bringing in his Windows XP SP2 disk along with Half-Life 2 and some Middle Earth game for the guys to have a look at with BootCamp. It’s something we have to play with especially as we expect lots more people to buy Macs in the near future.

At the end of the day, the Mac hardware has just been a container for the software. We want to use nice interfaces. We want to use good software. We didn’t choose Windows for a reason.

And I’ll not miss it after the 30 days trial is over.

Everyone has blogged about Boot Camp. Give it a rest — it was inevitable.

This post comes about for two reasons:

1) My MacBook Pro arrived (yay!)
2) Mike (among others) in work has installed OS X on his Intel laptop.

So here is the list of apps I use every day, and ones that I use frequently enough to always have available (in no particular order).

• TextMate (fantastic text editor)
• NetNewsWire / MarsEdit (rss reader / blog editor)
• Adium (multi-flavour instant messenger)
• Colloquy (IRC client)
• QuickSilver (quick app/command launcher)
• VLC (multi-flavour video player)
• OmniGraffle (diagrammer)

Everything else either comes with the OS, or is very specific to my work (e.g. Subversion, Eclipse)

If you’re a Mac user, leave a comment or a trackback about what apps you use.