April 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Several months ago, I determined that my years-long fondness required reexamination. I quietly took a break from the Mac to get some perspective, to check out Vista, AMD, and Longhorn (Windows Server 2008) untainted by Apple's PR and uninfluenced by other journalists and bloggers. I elected to take a break from reviews of new Mac hardware, the occasion of which always piques my interest in Apple's platform. There were times when I felt I'd chosen the worst possible time for this hiatus. I ended up passing on MacBook Air, Time Capsule, Harpertown Mac Pro, and most painful of all, the new MacBook Pro. It was difficult seeing InfoWorld pick up reviews of these from sister publications, but I take my responsibility to readers very seriously. I can't very well counsel you on technology choices if I consider the field limited to one worthwhile player, especially when that player projects the image that it competes only with the generation of systems that preceded what's presently sold.
I found enormous value in my time away from Mac. I made the kind of discoveries I used to make routinely before I took on the Mac as a specialty, and as I take up the Mac again -- which I am doing immediately -- it's clear that my appreciation for the platform is justified, and that the customary split of my effort and attention between Apple and AMD is justified.
The genuine, practical superiority of AMD's Barcelona server platform, and its Phenom desktop platforms that derived from Barcelona, came to light during the break I took from Mac. A one-socket, quad-core Spider (Phenom plus ATI CrossFire graphics) runs Vista so obscenely fast that even a die-hard Mac user's head will turn. Privately, of course.
I found it extremely intriguing that systems built on Phenom platforms can tune themselves autonomously for the maximum possible CPU and GPU speed over a surprisingly broad range, based on a whole system approach that takes cooling, power supply capacity, and your preferences for noise and maximum power consumption into account. I found that I could speed bump an AMD Phenom desktop for free by moving it closer to the floor, where the cooler air prevails. What a grand idea that in itself shows genuine customer-focused insight.
I gained a fresh appreciation for the GNU compiler collection, which has taken remarkable strides since I last took a deep dive in it. I was unaware of the level of engagement from commercial partners, including Apple, AMD, and Novell. Each is undoubtedly pursuing its own agenda, but it does so within the framework and culture of one of the most tightly controlled and liberally licensed open source projects in existence. AMD has finally embarked on the long road to compiler parity with Intel with its contribution of Family 10 (Barcelona/Phenom) architecture-specific optimizations to GNU.
Apple has been busy on the gcc front as well. Objective-C 2.0, with its desperately needed garbage collection, has been a reality in the GNU toolchain since Xcode 3 was in nondisclosure beta. In release 4.2 of gcc, auto-parallelization joins auto-vectorization to adapt projects to multiprocessing and vector acceleration without developer intervention. Unless I'm mistaken, the public beta versions of the iPhone SDK, now at Beta 3, mark Apple's first swing at Microsoft-style free public distribution of pre-release dev tools. The privilege of early access has been reserved for paid members of Apple's Developer Connection programs. That iPhone SDK carries all of the latest GUI tools, documentation, and GNU command-line compilers, including Fortran, into Apple's default distribution. Hit Apple's iPhone Dev Center and scroll to the bottom of the page for the download link. You do not need to pay the $99 fee to register as an iPhone developer to use the new tools, which compile applications for Leopard as well as iPhone.
Apple is getting ever more daring in its engagement with open source in other ways. WebKit, the fast HTML/CSS/SVG rendering and JavaScript engine used in Safari, has caught on like wildfire outside Apple, and why not? To get a commercial browser, loaded with current and emerging standards, free and open for incorporation in your software, is the stuff of fantasy, and Apple holds virtually nothing back. The WebKit project is not strictly Apple's. It enjoys broad community engagement, but it is worked as a priority by Apple's staff, even to the benefit of direct competitors. For example, the browser on Nokia's E-series phones is WebKit-based, and this is not the only example where Apple effectively put its staff and technology to work for the benefit of a competitor. The GNU toolchain's adaptability to multiple embedded platforms will see WebKit in everything from phones to toys, starting with iPhone and iPod Touch. Now that WebKit has been accepted into Google's Summer of Code, I can't wait to see what innovation comes from that gathering. I plan to ply the most influential attendees with the libations of their choice and get their take on where development is headed.
Apple pushed the source code for the publicly exposed innards of OS X Leopard, known as Darwin 9, out for public download on MacOS Forge. Every time it does that, I imagine the move preceded by arguments inside the office about the effort and risks that such a program visits on Apple's platform business. The work of preparing a project of Darwin's size for public distribution is inestimable, and Apple deserves credit for putting it on the agenda of its top OS engineers and project leaders.
I love the conservative approach that Apple is taking with iPhone, especially with regard to multiprocessing. iPhone applications need to launch and quit instantly, yet relaunch after the first execution, having cached and persisted their closing state in detail. It's a freeze/thaw model of state persistence that I'd like to see extended to applications in general. Apple's Xcode has Instruments (prior: xRay), a tool that jams electrodes into your program's and the system's running environment. It records and charts statistical data at runtime along several axes for later examination. It's the most effective means of hand-tuning code for efficiency that I've ever used, and it shows the benefits of persistence quite plainly.
Taking a break from Mac hardware gave me a chance to drink more deeply of the software that Apple maintains off its beaten path. MacPorts and Apple's validated versions of open source projects are open source treasure troves stuffed with some 5,000 free applications tuned and packaged for Intel and PowerPC Macs. Digging through these repositories is so addicting that I had to issue myself an edict to get back to work, which I shall do, newly confident in my mission and purpose. I'm a Macophile for good reason.
Posted by Tom Yager on April 16, 2008 03:00 AM
January 03, 2008 | Comments: (0)
CES and Macworld Expo predictions
Two trendsetting trade shows hit back to back, starting next week. Here's a preview.
Being far softer of belly and of brain for the time off, I'm glad to be returning to working and working out. Just in time, too, because I have just enough time to amp up for that one-two punch of trendsetting trade shows, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and Macworld Expo. During my vacation, I have taken advantage of half-hour breaks between naps to stock my quiver with relevance-seeking, pitch-piercing projectiles. I go to trade shows with a mission based on my view of what matters, which oft times yet entirely by chance fails to overlap with what everyone else considers important.
Consider my take on Macworld Expo. I think that the headliner there, although Mac heads will be loath to acknowledge it, will be Microsoft. It's been four years since Office for Mac, the one piece of software that every professional Mac owner must have, has felt its creator's touch. The new features in Office 2008 for Mac are almost incidental. Office 2008 is Universal, meaning that it runs natively on Intel and PowerPC Macs. Microsoft came by that honestly, using Xcode and Objective-C, accumulating expertise along the way that has made the developer staff blogs of Microsoft's Mac Business Unit one of the very few I check out regularly.
That's not to say that I have no questions about Office 2008. For instance, why will Entourage in the standard edition of Office 2008 stand out as the only mail client that doesn't connect to Exchange Server? I'm also curious about Office 2008's integration with the OS X dictionary that's shared by all Mac apps. I can see both sides of this: Microsoft's Office dictionaries and proofing tools are available in many languages and are geared for auto-correction, while Mac users like having one consistent master dictionary and thesaurus that operates system-wide.
Lest you think that I'm writing about Officeworld Expo, Macs built on Intel's Penryn 45-nanometer Core 2 CPUs will roll out at Macworld. I'm selfishly hoping that a Penryn MacBook Pro will be first out of the gate. The Santa Rosa model is more than fast enough. I'd like longer battery life and a break from the heat. Macworld Expo's heavy emphasis on an IT track fills me with new hope for an eight-core Xserve. That could bring a consolidation angle to OS X Server virtualization. I have a wish here, too: I'd like to see the entire OS X presentation layer rendered optional for OS X Server, with a flip of a switch in the Server Admin tool or a command-line operation. This would vastly shrink the resource footprint of a virtualized Mac server.
The iPhone will be a star attraction as well. The 3G iPhone will make its bow, and perhaps we'll see a hint of the iPhone/iPod Touch software development kit (SDK) that Apple plans to deliver in February. My personal wish is a screen alignment process, like the one that Microsoft handhelds use. This addresses the parallax problem that makes iPhone typing so error-prone. If Apple or AT&T decides to put a premium on 3G iPhone or the iPhone service plan, the raspberry you'll hear during the Macworld Expo Webcast will be mine.
Why would a publication of InfoWorld's orientation dispatch someone to CES? Don't let the word "consumer" fool you; CES isn't a city-sized Circuit City. It's chipmakers and manufacturers selling to manufacturers and importers, importers selling to distributors, and America making a rare appearance as a global peer player on its own stage. It's a chance to see technology and strategy in the making, as well as products that are already well entrenched in Asia and Europe but haven't yet caught the slow boat to the States.
I always see breakthroughs on multiple fronts at CES, and it's not a show I try to predict. I do expect to see the theme of consolidation play at CES as it does in IT, but with the spin of simplicity that IT doesn't usually take the time to make a priority. For example, when IT thinks of it, unified communication is a complicated server-side solution. What electronics vendors want is to sell that idea to consumers in a retail box. Why? Because that's what consumers demand. If there is a consistent lesson to take away from CES, it is that simplicity always deserves priority.
Posted by Tom Yager on January 3, 2008 03:00 AM
November 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft's homework for the holidays
Visual Studio 2008 goes gold. For Windows developers, Thanksgiving and Christmas have been canceled
Struck sullen by seasonal affective disorder? Soaring airfares got you grounded? Well, Windows developer, be of good cheer, for Microsoft has delivered you from your holiday doldrums. The retail release of Visual Studio 2008 is available now, and that means one of two things: Don't bother showing up for work after the holiday break unless you know it cold, or start planning that "training" junket for early in actual 2008.
Visual Studio 2008, a.k.a. Orcas, and the accompanying .Net 3.5 framework went live for download on November 19. If you've been tracking the beta and CTP (community technology preview) releases, you won't find much new in the retail release, but many working Windows developers may find that the retail delivery of Orcas creates new challenges, now that concepts such as .Net Foundations (presentation, workflow, communications), Language Integrated Query (LINQ), and ASP.Net AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) have found form in tools that employers and IT shops expects developers to use.
That's as it should be. I can't say that Orcas is overdue -- it's right on schedule -- but developers have been taking to alternatives for much of what Orcas brings to the table. AJAX, Web design surfaces, and elevation of JavaScript to a first-class language count among long-neglected necessities. Microsoft is quick to mix its extensions in among the standards, with Silverlight and the Expression tools harking back to what some might think of as the bad old days of Internet Explorer's JScript and site-essential ActiveX controls.
Adobe's Flash made the world safe again for sites that demand native browser extensions, and Silverlight pushes .Net and Windows Media to Windows and OS X clients as embedded objects that have an enticing YouTube-inspired "click to play" icon that downloads Silverlight.
Microsoft has gotten the message that free tools get developers educated and excited, and while IT shops rarely jump language or OS platforms, developers do. Microsoft's Express editions of Visual Studio 2008 went live for download simultaneously with commercial releases of Visual Studio 2008. Microsoft has used employee blogs to build developer communities, and VS 2008 Express Editions has a dedicated blog ostensibly devoted to those who enjoy writing code.
Microsoft's blog-as-landing-page approach sends me on a tangent: Coding4fun is an authorless blog, which might be construed by the audience that Microsoft hopes to reach as a misuse of the Web log ethos. Blog, schmog; blogging purity is headed the way of open source.
Coding4fun is a portal, more like an open source project's news page than a blog. Everyone who wants to throw a snit over commercial tainting of blog culture has a green light. The next frontier of commercialization is social networking. Oh wait, that's been done.
Visual Studio 2008 pulls me back in with two features. First there are the visual designers. Visual Studio's lame approach to native and .Net interface layout has driven a good deal of Windows developers to Flash and AJAX for front ends that probably belong embedded in the application. Perhaps someone passed a note to Microsoft's Tools group that Java does a better, more consistent job of client presentation design than Microsoft's official suite. Visual Studio 2008, along with the bundled Expression tools, brings Windows developers beyond the Win32 age. Here's a tip: The visuals don't require Vista. Vista and VS 2008 are a "better together" experience, but no employed developer, not even in Microsoft, writes apps that name Vista as a prerequisite.
The other VS 2008 win is the ability to cross-target multiple .Net runtime releases with one toolset. That's right, you can create .Net apps that don't choke when a particular release of the .Net Framework has not been installed. Launching a stand-alone app that opens a browser to Microsoft's .Net download site is the kind of thing that makes an end-user go "huh?"
Visual Studio 2008 goes a long way toward erasing arbitrary boundaries that Microsoft created between .Net, Web, and native apps, and for the first time in a long time, there is a reasonable, Microsoft-blessed pathway to targeting the Mac. But some boundaries remain firm. I don't keep Windows servers online any more; mine is a Leopard shop. I had planned to pull down the 4GB DVD image of Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition, and subsequently burn it for review on the Mac Pro system in my lab. I expect too much; the download requires an ActiveX control, which mechanism OS X, sadly, failed to implement. Also noteworthy is Microsoft's quiet acceptance of the slow uptake of Windows 64-bitness.
Visual Studio 2008 is a strictly 32-bit toolset, runnable in 64-bit Windows on Windows (WOW, which I always considered to be a counterintuitive acronym for legacy compatibility) and capable of producing 64-bit targeted code. That's a bummer because compilers make a dandy argument for the use of 64-bit code.
Developers don't have to jump platforms to catch up to the now. Sun has, hands down, the most powerful multitargeted (x86, SPARC, Solaris, Linux) toolset in the industry, and there's nothing Express about it. Sun's dynamic tracing facility, implemented in Solaris as DTrace and in OS X Leopard as X Ray, provides a scriptable interface for tracking and playback of system and application performance data at runtime, no instrumentation required. Sun's toolset is loaded with scary optimizations and profiling tools that Visual Studio lacks.
Apple's XCode has had solid source code management and interface building chops from the jump, and Objective-C 2.0 brings concepts embodied by .Net and Java into the modern age. It did that 10 years ago, but that's not germane to this discussion.
The point is that while Microsoft continues to give developers the best reason to curl up in front of the fire with their notebooks (actually, two reasons, including documentation, now that print is dead), you might also want to use that expensive broadband pipe of yours to suck in a Solaris DVD image, or gift yourself a Mac and find out why there's so much exceptional native software for it. However you spend it, I bid you an enjoyable holiday.
Posted by Tom Yager on November 21, 2007 03:00 AM
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