Tag: OS X

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Business Technology

Open Enterprise Server 11 SP2 Released

I’m a little excited about this announcement because OES 11 SP2 is going to serve as the backbone for some major infrastructure improvements here at work in the near future. The use of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP3 as the backbone has me excited along with a bunch of nice little additions and improvements.OES 11

The main thing I have  been testing is connecting OS X 10.9 Mavericks machines via AFP and I am happy to announce that it is working as it should right out of the box! That will open up some exciting possibilities for the future here on campus.

I still have some testing to do and then to actually order the hardware and do more testing … then FINALLY be able to make the switch and move us over to OES 11 and retire our aging NetWare 6.5 servers. They have served us extremely well, but I am looking forward to being able to shut them down for the first time and hopefully have our OES cluster serve us for years to come.

Categories
Technology

Divisive Visions

Mac

I was struck a little bit recently by some competing visions for what the future of computing might look like. I recommend listening to the Episode 49: Roamio and Siracusiet of the Accidental Tech Podcast.

Especially listen to the show-after-the-show when they start talking about the “iPad Pro” and the future of both desktop and tablet computing in general. It is a great look at competing visions, a little, among the three hosts of that show. Also, just subscribe because it is a great podcast overall.

At the same time, the 30th anniversary of the unveiling of the original Macintosh was going on. The normal retrospectives, parties, tweets, and all other things one would expect to be going on during the time happened … and then this one tweet crossed my Twitter stream.

http://twitter.com/fraserspeirs/status/427019332221435904

He is speaking of the interview Jason Snell was able to land with current Apple executives for Macworld. This is another one worth a read/listen.

I don’t share his fear since the article was specifically about the Mac on its 30th anniversary and also because my thoughts definitely fall along the line seeing a very important place for the Mac and OS X in the future.

I wrote recently about this in regards to Steve’s Jobs analogy of a car vs. truck as tablets/mobile vs. PC. Just as trucks and tractors aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, so OS X isn’t going to be going anywhere soon. However, it does leave open some exciting possibilities.

This passage from the article really hit home with the power Apple has with two distinct and complementary platforms.

In fact, as Schiller pointed out, in some ways the success of the iPhone and iPad takes some of the pressure off and “gives us the freedom to go even further on the Mac.” Now the Mac doesn’t have to be all things to all people.

That is straight from an executive’s mouth. That’s a really important distinction. With iOS and OS X being distinct platforms, it does give Apple an amount of freedom to really push the envelope in different ways that you would if you only had a single platform from which to try to hit the needs of everyone.

That is an exciting prospect for today, tomorrow, and for the future of iOS and OS X.

The flip side is that it allows Apple to keep out things from iOS which might increase the complexity and alienate the huge groups of users who are now using iOS devices who never would have sat down and used a computer. I don’t want to continually add complexity and “power” to appease users who are better served by OS X. I want both platforms to continue to push ahead in the areas they are most capable.

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Technology

Not Dead Yet!

Today I received a sizable update for the alpha of TextMate 2 which I use as my mainline programming editor. The move from build 9495 to build 9503 (today’s) took a few months, but it looks like there were a sizable number of nice little changes.

Go ahead and click the above link to see a list of the changes pushed. Good to see development continue.

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Technology

My Problem with GNOME 3: Follow Up

Here is a follow-up to my earlier post. Thanks goes out to Phil Wels for getting me the needed screenshots so that I can finish the comparison.

These screenshots were gathered from an 11″ MacBook Air with OS X Mavericks and the latest Firefox. Since Apple added an explicit full-screen mode since OS X 10.7, I have two images for comparison (and you can find the GNOME 3 and GNOME 2 screenshots in the old post).

MavericksWindowMarked

MavericksFullMarked

I can definitely understand why Apple added the full-screen mode. When you split things up you get the following numbers:

  • Windowed content height: 660 pixels
  • Full-screen content height: 704 pixels

That’s a big difference.

Even more significant (in my eyes) is that it validates my gut feeling from earlier. OS X, even when using a regular Firefox window, shows more content than GNOME 3 (and even a few pixels more than GNOME 2). When you take into consideration the full-screen Firefox, then it gets to be ridiculous.

If I did my math correctly, you get the following:

  • openSUSE 13.1 GNOME 3: 634 pixels or baseline
  • SLED 11 GNOME 2: 23 pixels or 3.63% more
  • OS X 10.9 (windowed): 26 pixels or 4.10% more
  • OS X 10.9 (full-screen): 70 pixels or 11.04% more

You can see the advantage full-screen has on OS X 10.9. Of course, this matters the most on the smallest of screens (in height), and 768 pixels is about as small as they come … but it does show much GNOME 3 does crowd out content more than GNOME 2 and OS X.