MacBook Pro - The Happy Entry

Ok, so after my last entry, a couple of my coworkers blasted me as Mac hater. Well I'm not, so in this entry I will attempt to write about a few of the cool things I like. But here's the deal. I'm sure everyone has been a situation where a movie has been so hyped up by friends, that it cannot possibly meet your expectations. Napolean Dynamate was one of those movies that I can remember. And at first, I didn't see what the big deal was. But after watching it for the second and third time, I have come to enjoy it. Well, the Mac is pretty much the same way. People are so fanatical about the Mac, that one just can't help being hypercritical about it. That's just how people are. So anyways... Its pretty inside too - What better thing to go with the fit and finish of the laptop than to provide a good looking desktop environment with it. Animations and other large BITBLT operations are incredibly smooth. The Mac has set a new standard for this. There some functional things that I miss in GNOME and XP but they are largely nit picks. Look ma, its UNIX - I've been using a Java-based SQL explorer lately called HenPlus. One optional component is the ability to use the GNU readline library via JNI. Being a BASH user since college over 17 years ago (ish!) readline is in my blood. So looking to compile it on OS X, I found some compilation instructions. Which worked like a charm. The only difference from what was described was that I wanted to place the shared library with the rest of HenPlus instead of in /Java/Library. I thought LD_LIBRARY_PATH would do the trick, but it didn't. After a little searching, I found that the correct environment variable is DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH. No biggie. No, its really UNIX - Over the years at Sun, living through the Motorola to SPARC and Intel year, and from SunOS 4.x to SunOS 5.x, I have put together a rather complex shell envionment which sets environment variable and such based on the architecture and platform, among other things. I pulled that environment over to my MacBook home folder, fired up Terminal and watched. Low and behold, it just worked. All I really needed to do was set up a config file for MacOS to adjust some variables, and voila! Fink or DarwinPorts - After my initial experience with Fink, Jed turned me on to DarwinPorts. My initial attempt at trying to use DarwinPorts failed before I realized I needed XCode installed, but worked like a charm afterwards. This may be one of those religious debates. Since Fink provides precompiled binaries, its a little easier to get going with than DarwinPorts, but there is something about having binaries compiled for your exact platform. Not to mention DarwinPorts has a native Carbon version of XEmacs available. After doing a little comparison, DarwinPorts appears to have more up to date applications, so for now I have punted Fink. Spotlight or Quicksilver - Perhaps another one of those religious debates. Levi has it on his essentials list, but after reading about it I didn't quite see how it differed from Spotlight. And, in fact, there are several comparisons out there. Each appear to have their advantages. I'm typically not fond of full-disk indexers but since MacOS is foreign to me right now, it seems like a good idea. It sounds like Spotlight might be a little more efficient in indexing, so for now I'm going to stick with it. Overall, a good week with the MacBook.

(2007-02-03 07:52:25.0) // Permalink