Chances of me purchasing MAC hardware are diminishing

Posted: 20091230

Pheeew, a few months ago I was just about to purchase an EFI-X Dongle, that enables certain PCs to run an unmodified original version of Mac OS X, therefore being a legal alternative to expensive, although neatly designed Mac hardware.

Bottom line is those guys and EFI-X probably have an illegal piece of hardware there, since apple won a legal battle a few weeks ago, and what is even wore - it turns out those guys even stole GPL code.

Oh my, looks like I have to bite the bullet and buy original apple hardware...

Some day.

Purchasing a used Mac Mini with 2-4GB RAM for 400euro when you can buy a noname Core i7 with 8GB RAM for that money?

Argh.

The main idea was cross-platform development with C++ and Qt. BTW, I had my share of Objective-C/Cocoa exposure with the iPhone SDK (which to some degree resembles Mac OS/X development with Cocoa) and XCode, more in the sense of writing code for all the different controller types, some webkit embedding etc, the whole interface builder <-> XCode roundtrip.

I basically wrote multiple mini projects for all kinds of UI constellations that can be coded with CocoaTouch. I thought it was pretty neat, but nothing really breathtaking... Apart from CocoaTouch, the basic idea of Core Animation (which in its core is C++ btw, just look at the XCode callstacks) is pretty cool, since you can animate any UI element. I think Qt picked that up. Core Data seemed like a pretty neat sweet spot between serialization and an embedded DB. Smells like persistence, but contains indices and querying capabilities. Overall I liked the fact that a lot of components still had C interfaces (apart from Cocoa Touch), and the documentation was very good.

It was my first serious Mac OSX UI exposure, and it didn't turn me into a fanboy (If you have to type "[" all the time in Objective C I find it a bit disheartening as a developer to be unable to find that key printed on the Mac notebook keyboard. But these are minor problems. Don't get me wrong. The iPhone experience seems to be a breathtaking experience for some people, therefore the SDK is important. And it's a neat thing.

Whish you guys a Happy New Year 2010