Thoughts on Mountain Lion

Posted on 16 Feb 2012

Today Apple not-so-quietly told the world about about the new version of OS X dubbed Mountain Lion. Its coming this Summer and introduces a number of features which essentially provide further integration with iCloud and iOS. You can find out more about it at Apple but I just wanted to note a few thoughts down myself.

Firstly, Apple have replaced iChat with a new app called Messages… however, it is still essentially iChat. You can access the original buddy list and talk via AIM and Google as you have always done, but what’s new is the ability to send iMessages to any iDevice. After some trialling today (they released a beta).

I can say that it works extremely well except for one thing which is still annoying me: sending from devices that have been set up with a different called ID will cause them to show up as separate threads for people, even if they have all your addresses in one Address Book card. Only after you’ve set the same caller ID across all your iDevices will this work as expected and I think this extra step shouldn’t be needed.

Apple have also introduced the Notification Centre to OS X which looks exactly the same as the iOS version, whereby a linen-backed (yes, that linen) panel with your notifications is revealed by what appears to be a two-finger swipe from right to left.

However, notifications appear in the top-right corner of the screen and fade away after a few moments, just like Growl. In one fell swoop, it seems that Apple have killed off one of my absolute essential apps which, personally, is a great shame.

What I am happy to see though is GateKeeper – a new feature that essentially locks down what apps can and can’t be installed on the system. The user can select from three levels of security:

1. Applications from the App Store
2. Applications from the App Store and identified developers
3. Applications from anywhere

Apps from the App Store are obvious but the most interesting is “identified developers”. This is the default setting for a fresh OS X install and requires that all apps are digitally signed by the developer - something that I personally find to be very sensible, although how easy this will actually be for developers remains to be seen.

Finally, Apple also released a new version of Xcode (4.3). Its now distributed as a single application instead of as an installer for the real thing, something that never fitted in with the App Store process, in my opinion. All the apps are now self-contained in Xcode.app though they can be kept in the dock as always.

Although there was some confusion at first, it appears that the command line developer tools are still available, though they are buried in Xcode’s preferences instead.

Even better though is that the popular osx-gcc-installer package has now been officially endorsed by Apple and this is what is downloaded via the preferences. You can now set up a full development environment in OS X via a single 171mb download.

Why Chrome Rocks

Posted on 15 Feb 2012

This morning I finally realised why Google Chrome is my favourite browser. Not because they took the address bar and added search to it; rather because they took the search box and allowed you to type in a URL if you really want to.

This is what makes using Safari or Firefox so tedious for me: I have to press Cmd+L to get to the URL box and then tab across to the search box. Something that I used to do hundreds of times a day! It seems combining the two really puts the internet at your fingertips.

If you really must insist on using Safari, I’d suggest the Omnibox plugin which combines the two together. It doesn’t work as well as Chrome’s in my opinion but its still a welcome improvement.

Rebooting: Behind the Blog

Posted on 06 Feb 2012

A quick word on the technical side for the interested: the site is still built on Jekyll as it continues to serve me well – we even use it at Agincourt to build static sites because makes managing layouts much easier.

I’ve also switched to Github Pages for hosting; compiling the site and then uploading up to S3 via Transmit was a pain and put me off actually posting anything. Now I just commit and push to Github where the changes are automatically published for me.

Rebooting & Writing

Posted on 04 Feb 2012

Rebooting this site has been on my agenda for some time and now that I’ve finally settled on a design, its time to actually start writing. As a programmer, I need to think and write concisely and I hope that writing this blog will help me to better formulate my thoughts.

Unsurprisingly, the best way to improve writing is to just write. I use Byword which removes any distractions by running in full screen screen mode; hiding the menu bar, dock, windows, everything but the text. Best of all, it has built-in support for Markdown which is how I mark up the posts.

The hard part is motivating myself to write something, to do something that is both useful and meaningful to me. To be restless and strive for nothing less than perfection against all odds. For now, though, I’ll close with a quote from from Steve:

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.