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Design Interface Technical Visit This Site

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In another excellent entry to his collection of Mac OS X commentary, John Siracusa today posted a review of Mac OS X Tiger 10.4. The most interesting part of the article was the description of the UI subsystem, Quartz.

I really appreciate a lot of things about Mac OS X. Well thought out enhancements to usability (Expose, working drag and drop, a hierarchical menu bar) have been among my favorites. However, Quartz has been a most egregious of offenders, so much so as to keep me from even using my old PowerBook for nearly a year. As someone who uses a computer every day, interface responsiveness is about as critical as it gets. OS X, unfortunately, has the slowest (most resource hungry) GUI of any operating system I’ve ever used. Even OS 9 was faster. Just try resizing a window and watch your CPU peg at 100%.

Siracusa nicely details (with pretty flowcharts) why OS X has suffered from what I’ll dub a molasses complex since Aqua was at Day 1. Regardless of how fast the actual hardware inside is, just using any G4 Mac felt slow [IMO]. The bandwidth of the data paths between hardware required to render things to screen (CPU, RAM, GPU) was being eaten faster than a fat kid at a candy store.

Fortunately, things have changed for the better. I have yet to use Tiger on the requisite hardware, but if the block diagrams Siracusa shows correspond to real-world UI speed gains, I’ll happily be back in the Apple camp once more.

That is, if Apple would nicely explain to me why my <1 year old iBook G4 can’t even support this and most of the other whiz-bang features Tiger brings to the table.

Categories
Technical Web Design

OSX on a website. No, really.

JavaScript has certainly come a long way.

In between the innumerable midterms I’ve had in the past two weeks I’ve been learning a bunch of web technologies, including PHP, MySQL, and CSS. A cool trend I’ve noticed has been the consistencies between all of these languages and things I have already learned. PHP has classes and functions, just like Java/C++, and CSS has a very straightforward, logical structure. Programming is definitely a difficult skill in general, but things like this help.

Since my first major project idea is unacceptable to CSH, my second idea is happaning instead. Simply stated, it’s going to be a Major Project database where people can log in and edit the projects they own or view a list of upcoming projects. I hope its up to par in time…its already taken forever and a day so far just to learn the skills necessary.

Categories
Technical

Server Info

I got some name-based VirtualHosts goodness set up so you can read real-time stats of the site. Thanks to phpsysinfo for making this easier.

Edit: VirtualHosts barfed. Back to the normal way until my OS Scripting practical is over.

Edit 12/2009: This is another feature that didn’t make the transition to new hosting and I have no intention of bringing it back. So there.

Categories
Humor Technical

googolplexes of maps

Not to play second fiddle to tech news sites but this one is really cool. Google Maps just integrated Keyhole’s satellite images, so you can search for a place and see a real photograph of the place from 5,000 feet. Google bought Keyhole last October.

Here’s where I’m living right now at RIT. Reading headlines off newspapers will remain exclusively for the CIA, but what we get (for free) is really cool.

Not to pull a Bush and forget about the rest of the world …a world-wide already existing alternative is right here.

Categories
Technical

This can’t be legal

It was bound to happen eventually…

Some shady person has pulled out his melting pot of copyright infringement and mixed old school videogame ROMs with a little Java emulation. Meaning you can play old Sega, Nintendo, and GameBoy games for free online, and now thanks the technology you can even play casino games online, in funfind.net you can learn everything about casino games.

Its even got a pleasant amount of sketch. “Sonic 5 3D Blast” is definitely not a real game…and is definitely 8 bit. Enjoy!