Apple Macs (by alaric)
I've always been somewhat attracted to Mac OS X - the combination of a UNIX system and a mainstream consumer OS with GUIs and the other nice stuff you get form a modern commercial system seems too good to be true.
However, a project I'm working on looked like it'd be easiest if I had the same OS to compile it on as the other developer (thanks to the build system, which turned out to be a bit less platform independent than one mimght like), so I picked up a second-hand G4 with OS X.
It seems nice; I've only crashed it twice (once with a nice clean kernel panic when an NFS mount went bad, the other time it just mysteriously froze for no apparent reason), which isn't that bad really. iTunes is really nicely designed, and it's a totally new experience to me to have a mail client that actually shares an address book with my Handspring Visor!
I wish I could use a more normal keyboard, however, I don't like where the tilde is, and that " and @ are the wrong way round, and that # is hard to get. I tried plugging in a USB keyboard with a layout I liked, but much to my horror, it still thought it was a Mac keyboard and just produced the character a Mac would have when pressing the key in that position, regardless of the decal on the key... I'd always imagined that USB keyboards would be sensible and send Unicode characters, plus special codes for function keys, rather than still doing all that keymap scancode stuff that traditional PC keyboards do. Oh well.
Tue 4th Jan 2005 2:34 pm 
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