Tag Archives: apple

Here they go, good bye MeeGo!

For quite a while I’ve been fascinated by the idea of owning a Linux based smartphone, which I can log into using SSH and install software on it and such. And Maemo seemed to be the thing. Later the baby was joined with MobLin and renamed to MeeGo, and the fact that it was a joint effort of Intel and Nokia made it sound like a promising idea.

Today it is clear that Nokia is not going to invest in Meego any further. Nokia announced their strategic partnership with Microsoft, hammering the final nail into Meego’s coffin. The official version of my speculation, of course sounds better:

Under the new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project. MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.

Which I translate to: “MeeGo is a playground for experiments and we will probably not completely stop working on this one first product in the pipeline that is almost done, but don’t expect much more.”

I (barely dare to) hope I am wrong.

So the smartphone market will be dominated by three dark forces: Apple, Google and Microsoft.

Not that the announcement is a surprise, it’s just a pity that there will be no open alternative, and I was hoping for one.

The German Mac Keyboard is not developer friendly

I know that the vast majority of Mac users will probably not care about what I have to say today, but this is something I’ve hated about my Mac for a while now.

Back in 2006 when I switched to a Mac, the biggest problem apart from the poor Finder GUI is the fact that the German Keayboard completely lacks printed characters that you frequently need as a programmer.

If you sit in front of your Mac’s German keyboard and want to write a program in C, Smalltalk, Objective-C or most other programming languages, you won’t find any of these characters printed on your keyboard: “[{|}]~\” and probably a few more.

Don’t get me started about the key combination to enter a Tilde!
But that put aside, given the fact that in Objective-C, Apple’s favored programming language, is stuffed with square brackets for message sends and curly braces for all blocks of code, it is somewhat a crime to programmers to not print these characters onto the keyboard.

Since I guess many developers constantly move between Mac and PC, it is surely not only me who starts searching for them on the keyboard every time they sit in front of the Mac. My primary development environment is VA Smalltalk on Windows, XCode is more of a secondary environment for me, so the fact that all of the above-mentioned characters sit on different keys on a PC and a Mac make it harder (if not impossible) to transfer the knowledge on which key to press into the muscular brain.

Apple has a design principle of less is more, and most of the times, it works out really well. But in this case, it is a complete failure in my opinion.

I like my aluminium keyboard. It is nice to type on, I can go very fast on it without too much mistyping (except for special characters), so a third-party keyboard that could replace it is probably hard to find. The ones I’ve seen so far also have no special characters printed on them in the German layout. I am quite sure I couldn’t handle a US Keyboard layout, so I have to live with it (I know because I had to type on french, swiss and czech keayboards before and I really felt lost). Grrrrr!

Java on the Mac: no need to worry

A few days ago, Apple revealed their plan to give up providing Java Runtime versions for Mac OS X. There was quite some speculation if this means Apple plans to diss Java similarly to Flash.

But obviuosly, they really just said: we’re not investing anything any more, but we welcome Oracle to do that for our platform.

Which is what will happen: Apple just announced that they will support Java 6 on Snow Leopard and Lion, and Java 7 will be provided by Oracle. This is true for many platforms, so the Mac will be like all the others.

So we’ll have Java and Eclipse on our Macs for quite some years to come.

Hat Tip to MacRumors

How closed will the Mac universe be in, say, 5 years?

I love using my Mac. I like my iPhone. The new Air is really an interesting piece of hardware.

Part of the reason I like my Apple products is that they run quite stable and offer a pleasant overall experience with installing/uninstalling applications. I also like the fact that I can use my Linux/Unix shell commands on it.

But there are times when I wonder how long I’ll like to use Apple products.

The newly announced MacApp Store will probably make finding and installing (and, of course buying) applications easier than ever.  But there is a back side to the coin. Apple wants the experience to be as good as possible and so tries to keep everything out of the App Store that may disturb this. By explicitly disallowing all programming languages other than C/Objective-C and runtime environments, they try to make sure that you cannot install anything from the App Store that’s not perfect. But what’s perfect is defined by Apple.

As long as it is still possible to install software on a Mac that is not purchased in the App Store, I still have a choice, and if I want a Java/Ruby/Smalltalk/Clojure/Scala-written program on my Mac I still can do so. But what if Apple decides to lock Mac OS 11 completely and only allow Apps from their App store on it?

Will we have to jailbreak our Macs to run Eclipse or Pharo in a few years?

And what if Apple is succesful with this policy? How long will we be able to install software of choice on any other commercially available OS?

Let’s hope I am just dreaming a nightmare and reality is different…

Is Apple hinting at Java’s exit from Mac OS X?

Back in 2006 when I made the move to a Mac, Apple had put a lot of effort into making Java/Swing Applications feel like native on Mac OS. Adopting Java and integrating it well with MacOS was key to attract new users to the Mac.

But Apple today is self-confident enough to declare mainstream technologies a legacy on their machines. It seems Adobe’s Flash (which is not shipped pre-installed on the new MacBook Air and is not available on any iOS device) now has a prominent friend.

Apple today announces that they won’t maintain a JRE for Mac any more:

As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the version of Java that is ported by Apple, and that ships with Mac OS X, is deprecated.

This means that the Apple-produced runtime will [..] may be removed from future versions of Mac OS X.

This does not mean that Java will go away from the Mac any time soon, but there will (very likely) be no Java Runtime from Apple any more. So now it is up to Oracle (or any other third party) to provide a Java Runtime for the Mac, because it seems Java 7 (if that ever becomes real) apps will not run on Macs any more. But it also means that betting on languages that run on the JVM for development on the Mac is not a good idea (I am especially thinking of Clojure and Scala here).

Some may think that’s no big deal, since Java is a server-technology and the overall market share of Macs is quite small.

But this also makes life harder for providers of software packages that are portable, like IBM (Lotus Notes, Symphony, DB2 tools etc), the Eclipse project, Oracle (admin tools) and many others. What will happen if they cannot install on Macs any more?

Will this hurt the Mac platform or the software vendors? Will the possible inability to run a Scala-App on Macs influence the developers’ decisions, or will it make the Mac an unattractive platform for users due to missing applications?

Is this just Apple moving away from the mainstream or is the mainstream becoming irrelevant for some corners of the IT industry?

Hat tip to macrumors

MacBooks and Docking

Over at The Apple Blog, Jon Buys brings up a question that I’ve asked myself quite a few times before: why is there no docking station for Apple’s laptops?

It really is a shame, as beautiful as the new 27 inch LED Cinema Display combination with a brand new MacBook or MacBook Pro may be, that you still have to connect at least 3 cables to your laptop before you can go. And still you need a solution for where to put your MacBook, either for use in clamshell mode or as a second screen.

I am a big fan of the wired keyboard and wired Apple Mouse (which was once called the Mighty Mouse)  and have a docking station for a backup drive and the digicam, so I  love the idea of having all that stuff connected immediately when the MacBook comes home. Having the charger in the display is also a good idea, but you could also have it in a Docking Station which doesn’t require me to plug in any cable at all. I just put my laptop onto or into it and am ready to go.

A Docking Station from Apple could also make machines like the MacBook Air more appealing to people who want more than one USB port and stuff. You could have a small machine like the Air on the road and a battery of connections at home. Not really a new idea, but one that would fit perfectly into the Applesphere.

The new Cinema Display also has a real flaw: it only has one input and only plays with Macs, because it’s Mini Display Port. I’m not sure what kind of adventorous battery of adapters you’d need to connect another PC. So buying an LED Cinema Display means giving up a lot of alternatives.

Come on, Apple, Docking stations are not really a fresh idea, I’ve had one with my work laptop back in the mid-nineties, and they weren’t actually a brand new idea back then.

Smalltalk on iOS – again an option?

It seems like the growing demand in Android gadgets and the noise of App developers have finally made Apple rethink their rules (Press Release):

In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

So it seems like it will be allowed to put packaged Smalltalk applications onto the iPhone, iPad (and maybe soon Apple TV???).

We would never say that Steve lost a battle or had to give in to the Mob, would we ;-)

Did I mention that both Squeak and Pharo run on the iPhone? Maybe this change may even motivate some Smalltalk Vendors to work in that direction.  This is surely good news for Esteban and his Mars/Deimos project and for John’s iSqueak work… But not only for Smalltalkers, but also Rubyists, Flash developers and so on…

[UPDATE] Daring fireball has some more details on what exactly changed. The whole “Objective-C,C, C++ or JavaScript only!” nonsense seems to be gone. Downloading code is still forbidden (which was to be expected and is no obstacle for many Applications). There are also some comments about the now publicly available guidelines for app approval.

Things I miss in Coda.app

Not that I think my web design abilities were particularly useful, but working on web applications comes with the necessity of editing HTML and CCS files and some JavaScript.

My favorite tool for doing so is Coda from Panic Software. I’ve been using Espresso from MacRabbit quite a lot as well and still like many of its features, but somehow Coda works better with my muscular brain.

I sometimes wish the two teams just threw together what they have, because there are a few things that I really miss in Coda: Continue reading →

Why Snow Leopard still sucks with SAMBA

If anybody tries to tell you that Macs are first class citizens in any network, just give them a mild smile and walk on.

Since the release of Snow Leopard (mac OS X 10.6) many moons ago, connecting to Samba shares constantly causes trouble.

At first, there were really bad problems copying/moving folders or Mac OS X Packages (which in effect are folders) to these shares. If you were lucky, you got an error, if you weren’t, your data was lost. Seems like this problem is solved since 10.6.3.

Now with 10.6.4 the Finder seems to be on drugs all the time. It frequently looses connections to Samba shares, displays the servers but cannot connect to them, and most of the time, the servers are not found automatically. You cannot access them by name, but “GO to Server…” with the IP works. Automatic reconnect on reboot? forget it, it only works 40% of the time…

I don’t remember seeing much of these problems in Leopard (10.5) or Tiger (10.4).

So if you thought the grass is a lot greener on the Mac, let me tell you there’s enough to be improved. And some stuff is not fixed even after more than a year, or each update introduces different problems.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of any OS that doesn’t have “weak spots” (I’m using a term that Steve Jobs has learned by heart a few weeks ago).

Am I alone with these problems?
Has anybody heard of good solutions / hacks / workarounds?
I’d be happy to get some pointers in the comments…

Okay, I’ve typed some of my frustration into my blog, so back to work…