Today at the uni (my beloved MIT – Milan institute of technology) a friend of mine that have recently bought an Asus eeePC 701 (Xandros version) told me he can no more stand linux since now that is used to OS X’s easiness all linux’s problems are too annoying! Hearing this really surprised me since my friend, before moving to Mac, was one of the greatest GNU/Linux’s supporter I’ve ever met!
You know… when you get used to the fact that everything works fast without problems it’s quite hard to “come back”. Just an example… yesterday I saw a poor linux user working for about half an our on his ubuntu trying to get connected to uni’s wifi… with no success! For me it is just a matter of opening the MacBook and it automatically get connected to uni’s wifi!
We are sorry for not writing for a such long period but exams at uni kept us quite busy! Anyway now, since we finished all the exams, we are again free. To restart witing on this blog we want to show you this beautiful photo of our macs…
Since my mental illness is still not cured, and I’m very much into this “game of life” thing, I also developed a version of Conway’s game of life for Mac OS X using Objective-C and the framework Cocoa.
Esthetically speaking the Cocoa version is much more cool then the Java one… but the algorithm is actually the same. I named it “CocoLife” fusing “Cocoa”, the name of the framework I used, and “Life”. The application’s icon represent a particular configuration of the game of life called “glider”.
Since I cured much more the develop of this version I filled up the application with many “cool” features! In CocoLife is possible to:
Configure the colors of background and automata
Choose between 4 different world sizes (50×50, 100×100, 250×250 and 500×500)
Choose the world type (bordered-world or loop-world)
Change the execution speed of the simulation modifying the interval of pause between transitions
Create personal world configurations using the bult-in world-editor
The application, released under the license GNU GPL v2, requires Mac OS X 1.5 Leopard to work.
Two weeks ago I did it! I bought the new Apple’s super thin computer… the MacBook Air! Obviously the model with the 1.6 GHz CPU and 80 GB PATA Hard Drive since I’m not rich enough to buy the Solid State Disk model (I’m also not a fan of solid state technology… so having the money I would have opted for a 1.8 GHz CPU and PATA HD).
You know… I don’t care if it hasn’t any dvd drive or neither a ethernet port! On my old MacBook the ethernet port was still virgin after 2 years of use… and the dvd drive is useless since I have my iMac to burn and read DVD (I usually rip my dvd-movies and put them on a portable HD) so I got only advantages from the Air: less weight to carry around at uni, less space occupied in my bag and a battery with a much longer duration (tested… it truly worked for 5 hours)!
Another thing I love of the Air is that it has all the “coolnesses” of the pro series (like the ambient light sensor for automatic adjustment of keyboard illumination and screen brightness). So I can say I’m pretty happy with my new toy!
I did a video of the unboxing… I hope you’ll appreciate it:
I really enjoy developing on Mac OS X… especially thanks to XCode and Cocoa (what a superb framework)!
What makes Cocoa such a great tool is letting you concentrate on your project making easy accessing to all those low-level “stuff” that always slow down your work! For example… it is possible to create an essential browser writing down just a single line of code (of course after making the UI graphically with Interface Builder)!
Once you’ve set up the UI with a textfield, a button and a webview all you need to write is:
Don’t you think that all this is so cool? I mean… for example, if you’re working on an RSS aggregator you can just spend time working on the core task of the application avoiding the waste of time derived from implementing a built-in browser for rendering news!
You can download the xcode project of “single line of code browser” clicking here!
Few years ago seeing a Mac here at the MIT (Milan Institute of Technology… also known as “Politecnico di Milano”) was a quite hard task… nowadays things are fortunately different! About two years ago, with the migration of Apple to Intel platform, something began to change!
Since then Apple computers started spreading through students… at the beginning was just two guys then they become four, then eight…. and so long! Now 1/3 of one hundred students class has a Mac (the most popular machine is the MacBoock… but it also happen to see a MacBook Pro sometimes). Also many teachers (most of them are Electronic Engineers) are moving themselves to Mac… and as a consequence many courses adopted multi-platform tools in everyday activities (with benefits also for Linux & BSD users).
The only “bad” things is that now, using my MacBook, i feel special no more since around me, in a radius of 3 meters, you can see 4 or 5 other Mac! (here I’m obviously kidding).
Posted by Freedom 
Posted by Freedom 
Posted by Freedom 