OMG. Why did I not see this before? OnLife.
No time to write more, but if you like OnLife and spend time in VoodooPad, I created a scriptlet for VoodooPad. Unzip and put the files into ~/Library/Application Support/OnLife/Scriptlets/. Restart OnLife to see the new source in your list.
Update 01/23/2006: I’ve put up a page for my OnLife hacks. Enjoy.
I was looking for some information discussing the intersection of extreme programming (which our development team is adopting) and user experience, and I ran across this selection (in Google’s book search) from Extreme Programming for Web Projects (by Doug Wallace, Isobel Raggett, and Joel Aufgang).
Get your graphic designers off Macintoshes! We are big Mac fans and have a great deal of respect for the operating system (OS), but it is a fact of life that most Web team [sic] use Windows. Furthermore, Macs are brighter than PCs. So many times we have seen a design created and shown to a customer on a Mac and then found that it was too dark for the general audience, which is 95 percent Windows users. It pains us to say it, but every Web development tool that we have seen is either not available for Mac or has a perfectly good equivalent on Windows. Photoshop and Illustrator are identical on both platforms. The only role with an argument for having a Mac is the tester and then only if the customer has selected to support the platform.
I’m curious as to what folks think of this. In a discipline which tries to include a worker-focused environment (scroll down to “ExtremeEnvironment”) I think that the designer should be able to use the hardware and software that makes him/her the most productive (and happiest).
To the writer’s statements about software and tools not being available for the Mac (”every Web development tool that we have seen is either not available for Mac or has a perfectly good equivalent on Windows”) I would say: turn it around. Every development tool I’ve needed has either been available for the Mac or has had a perfectly good — and in this designer’s eyes , better — equivalent.
As to the comments about designs having to work on the appropriate platform; these are givens - any designer worth their salt will be doing this anyway. We’ve known about gamma issues since forever and know how to avoid these pitfalls.
What do you guys think? Does running a Mac spoil the XPishness of your team? (He asked, expecting the answer no.)
Yes, I want a MacBook Pro. Yes, the name sucks. “PowerBook” was such a strong brand - and it came about long before the CPU had “power” in it, so why drop it now?
Update; Unsanity agrees.
Jim Roepcke took me to task for my previous comment about dual-booting an Intel-based Mac with Windows. I said:
Would make my life easier as a developer.
Jim responded:
Easier? How? Easier as in, don’t need to port your app to Mac OS X now?
Dual-boot is a dual-edged sword. The Mac could effectively be dead for gaming. Why would anyone spend the money to port a game to the Mac now when you can just say “install Windows”. Anyone who’s spent enough money on a Mac good enough to run new games on is probably not going to flinch at spending the money to install Windows to play games.
Ditto for plenty of other Windows apps.
Jim makes a good point, though in my case I was referring to the fact that it would be convenient for testing web apps on Windows. However, on an Intel-based Mac, a product like VMWare would run Windows with near-native performance, so dual booting becomes a non-starter.
I do wonder sometimes what second- and third-order consequences this “switch” of Apple’s will have…
Picking up the pieces: John Siracusa mourns the Power PC:
That, in a nutshell, is why this is a dark day for Apple. It’s yet another little thing that Macs used to do, if not always better, then at least differently than Windows PCs. Macs are now slightly less special.
Preach it, John.
I’m hopeful, but melancholy at the same time. Goodbye, PowerPC.
Chatting with Cam Barrett, he brought up a point I had not thought of… He postulates that by switching to Intel CPUs, |Apple| could be the only computer maker to be able to offer hardware that could dual-boot Mac OS X / Windows. Eeeeenteresting. Would make my life easier as a developer.
Read an early draft of my Personal Platform.
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