Live from Austin!

On average, computers last me for about 4 years. Last week, I was still using an 800MHz iMac.

Partly this is down to my being frugal. It’s like the TV situation, where I didn’t buy the HDTV until my family visited and laughed at the 20″ TV, and seemingly made it die of shame shortly afterwards.

Partly it’s because Macs remain usable longer than PCs. A PC Magazine survey found that Macs tend to last 3.9 years on average, compared to 2.4 years for Windows PCs. (Of course, with Linux you can keep an old machine usable for even longer.)

Partly, though, it was because I wasn’t wild about any of Apple’s offerings. The Mac Pro is too big and expensive. The current iMac is unergonomic and (in my view) ugly. The Mac Mini is too limited. The MacBook Pro series used ATI graphics. I was going to wait, and maybe get a plain MacBook as a kind of stopgap, more by a process of elimination than as a matter of choice.

Then Apple revved the MacBook Pro. They ditched the ATI graphics, and put in an LED backlit display in the 15″. I was sold. So, I have a shiny new Mac.

One advantage of making computers last 4 years is you really notice the upgrade when it comes. Going from a 16MHz B&W Mac to a 180MHz PowerPC color Mac was awesome. The switch to a wide screen and dual core CPU is almost as good. I can leave GraphicConverter optimizing PNG files, and the machine stays totally usable. Mail also flies with multiple threads able to run in parallel.

I use each upgrade as a cue to go through my files and clear up. I move old stuff to CDs, make my folder structure more consistent, get rid of cruft, and so on. This time there’s a lot to throw away, because any PowerPC Mac software I was keeping around is now obsolete. One problem area is PhotoShop Elements, because Adobe still haven’t got an Intel native version. The PowerPC one will run under emulation, but I’d rather wait for Adobe to get their act together.

On the plus side, now I can go try all the cool stuff that has appeared in the last year or so, that was too CPU-intensive for my old machine. And maybe do an official Red Pill Intel release.

RedPill 1.4.2 is out. Adds Tiger compatibility. I haven’t upgraded to Tiger myself yet, so let me know if you find any problems…

I was quite amused by the guy who wrote saying he was trying to get the source code to work under Tiger, and confessed that he didn’t know any C and could I help him? Right, yeah, I’ll do that.

Also, yes, I know Tiger doesn’t include StuffIt. I didn’t pack it using StuffIt, I packed it as a bzipped disk image with welcome dialog, but the guys at info-mac apparently have a policy that all such things must be unpacked and repacked with StuffIt.

Source code is at info-mac too.

I finished up Red Pill 1.1, and sent it off to info-mac.

Then tonight, I noticed there was a piece of debugging code left active in the build that was dumping crap in the system log. So I quickly fixed it, called the result 1.2, and sent that off with an apology.

And then I downloaded it myself to the iBook, and immediately noticed that the license agreement still said 1.1.

I shall just have to rely on the fact that nobody reads license agreements… and next time I start a project, I’ll have to work out how to automate more of the packaging process.

Red Pill 1.0 hit info-mac and MacUpdate, and the early reviews are in…

OK, new screensaver early beta now available for download for a limited time only. Requires OS X 10.2, unfortunately.

The actual animation is by no means finalized; think of this as a demonstration of the sort of things the finished screensaver might do.

You might be wondering why on earth I’d want to make yet another screensaver inspired by That Movie. Well, I got some e-mail from someone who suggested it. I pointed out the various attempts already available, but he managed to convince me that they weren’t good enough, and that SnowSaver did a much better job than any of them at dealing with the “things drifting down the screen” part of the problem.

Of course, that still left the rest of the problem to deal with. There followed a great deal of frame-by-frame examination of movie footage and hand-drawing and optimizing of symbols. There was also the minor detail of writing just over 1,500 lines of Cocoa code, which includes a particle system, an OpenGL text library, and a couple of state machines… Generally speaking, the project has obeyed Hofstadter’s Law.