Monday, March 17, 2008

MacBook Pro notes

I'm doing this blog entry from Qumana (see link at bottom of post) because I'm not impressed with Blogger's own Web 2.0 platform. Note to Blogger: if you're so freaking fond of AJAX, use it to update the captcha while I'm blogging so I don't get that irritating failed authentication error. Qumana was originally written for Windows, but since it's a Java app it was quickly ported to OS X.

Much of the last few years I've worked pretty closely with Linux. Linux is a damn good way to squeeze performance out of a cheap platform (e.g. used PCs). So, now that I have an irritatingly expensive laptop running OS X, XP SP2, Vista, and Ubuntu, I can test how webpages look in a buttload of browsers simultaneously side by side. The impetus to even learn Linux for me back in 2001 was so I could test our website on Konqueror.

Regrettably X11 is broken in Leopard, which effectively shits all over a number of popular cross-platform open source apps like OpenOffice, Inkscape, GIMP, etc. It's almost as if Apple were not-so-subtly telling developers to port to Aqua. NeoOffice is working like a charm.

The magsafe connector on the Pro is pretty strong. It feels like an electromagnet.

Note to Apple: Your laptops do not have full keyboards. Therefore, they do not have dedicated DEL keys. While Screen Sharing is a pretty application, it appears impossble to send CTRL-ALT-DEL to a host computer from the laptop, because the fn-delete combination is not recognized by the host as DEL or some other reason. We will connect to non-Macs, and we will need special keypresses not available from your keyboard (Linux needs support for SysRq).

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