- Joined
- Dec 26, 2007
- Messages
- 1
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 1
- Location
- Ruislip, UK
- Your Mac's Specs
- MacBook
Just before Christmas last year, I bought a MacBook. It's not cheap here in the UK, but I wanted a laptop, and didn't want Vista as my desktop. I already have an aging 700MHz Celeron system I converted to Ubuntu a while ago, so the Intel based MacBook seemed an interesting choice.
I've never used a Mac before in any great depth, what I found is a desktop that Linux is missing and a fast elegant machine. Installing applications by drag and drop reminded me of my Acorn Archimedes with RiscOS.
The downside of the Mac has been the finder. I'm constantly finding things that annoy or just seem plain dumb with Finder. Attach a network drive, it appears on the desktop but you have to go there - I was expecting to be taken there immediately I connected but had to figure that one out. Opening files sometimes catches me out - Finder seems to lose context where you are buried deep in a directory, and there are no quick routes back, until I added them myself.
Enough of the rant about Finder.
My main interest in the Mac is to write applications for it. So I had a look at Xcode. <Shudder>. One rant about Xcode - talk about option overload! Takes me a while to remember where everything is... second rant is about documentation, more about Apple's documentation than Xcode.
I've settled on wxWidgets for my cross platform development needs, and use something called DialogBlocks. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux (not tried it on Linux yet).
So far what I've written uses wxWidgets and stays away from platform specific bits, though I made use of a few cross platform libraries - tinyxml, portmidi and lua.
I'm looking into audio units and finding the api there much cleaner than Windows (VSTSDK and ASIOSDK). I've got a simple midi library for Windows, now I can do the same for the Mac. PortMIDI got me going but is clumsily set up on the Mac. On Windows it talks directly to the built in synthesiser, on the Mac, you have to configure one.
Looking through the Apple developer docs I keep getting stuck finding things. Took me a while to track down 'Handle'. I used FindNextComponent and GetComponentInfo to examine an audio unit. You pass in a 'handle' to get the name of an AU. Once you've got this handle, er, what do you do with it to get at the string? Lot of hunting around the internet I finally found the answer, but wondered why it was such a long journey!
Since I'm learning to be an electronic musician in my spare time, I note a lot of applications for creating music are developed for both Windows and Mac. The bigger market is Windows but the Mac is not forgotten.
So I haven't switched, but I have both machines, a Mac and a PC. I use Firefox on both, and used Thunderbird for email with an IMAP server I configured on Linux until the PC hardware fell apart (currently not booting!).
For the next week or two, I'm totally Mac. The real issue is the lack of screen space - the MacBook has a small screen...
I've never used a Mac before in any great depth, what I found is a desktop that Linux is missing and a fast elegant machine. Installing applications by drag and drop reminded me of my Acorn Archimedes with RiscOS.
The downside of the Mac has been the finder. I'm constantly finding things that annoy or just seem plain dumb with Finder. Attach a network drive, it appears on the desktop but you have to go there - I was expecting to be taken there immediately I connected but had to figure that one out. Opening files sometimes catches me out - Finder seems to lose context where you are buried deep in a directory, and there are no quick routes back, until I added them myself.
Enough of the rant about Finder.
My main interest in the Mac is to write applications for it. So I had a look at Xcode. <Shudder>. One rant about Xcode - talk about option overload! Takes me a while to remember where everything is... second rant is about documentation, more about Apple's documentation than Xcode.
I've settled on wxWidgets for my cross platform development needs, and use something called DialogBlocks. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux (not tried it on Linux yet).
So far what I've written uses wxWidgets and stays away from platform specific bits, though I made use of a few cross platform libraries - tinyxml, portmidi and lua.
I'm looking into audio units and finding the api there much cleaner than Windows (VSTSDK and ASIOSDK). I've got a simple midi library for Windows, now I can do the same for the Mac. PortMIDI got me going but is clumsily set up on the Mac. On Windows it talks directly to the built in synthesiser, on the Mac, you have to configure one.
Looking through the Apple developer docs I keep getting stuck finding things. Took me a while to track down 'Handle'. I used FindNextComponent and GetComponentInfo to examine an audio unit. You pass in a 'handle' to get the name of an AU. Once you've got this handle, er, what do you do with it to get at the string? Lot of hunting around the internet I finally found the answer, but wondered why it was such a long journey!
Since I'm learning to be an electronic musician in my spare time, I note a lot of applications for creating music are developed for both Windows and Mac. The bigger market is Windows but the Mac is not forgotten.
So I haven't switched, but I have both machines, a Mac and a PC. I use Firefox on both, and used Thunderbird for email with an IMAP server I configured on Linux until the PC hardware fell apart (currently not booting!).
For the next week or two, I'm totally Mac. The real issue is the lack of screen space - the MacBook has a small screen...
