Igor Delovski Board

[delovski]

Adobe's John Nack explains lack of PPC support in Soundbooth

'To help bring some sense to the table, Adobe's John Nack (the product
manager of Photoshop, mind you) has stepped in to lay down the company's
decision on his blog. Long story short, John explains that support isn't being
'removed' from the product - while it's been dubbed as 'Audition Elements'
by some, it's a brand new baby for both Mac OS X and Windows. In this
context, Adobe made the choice of streamlining development (supporting
one chipset) which favors focusing on things like features and performance,
rather than trying to get a team of audio engineers who are used to working
with Intel-based chips to start jugging a second architecture (PowerPC) which
Adobe believes Apple is treating as "dead to us." '

[delovski]

Did you know?

If you have an external drive and you booted your PPC Mac of it, the drive will
not boot from the Intel Mac until you reformat it. And it has to be reformatted
with the Disk Utility on the Intel Mac.

But that's not all: Once reformatted on the Intel Mac, it will no longer boot
from a PPC Mac.

[delovski]

JoS: Switching away from OS X?

"++ for Parallels, I'm using it to run IE (to access my companies IE-only time
and expense reporting system) and VS.NET (to do window coding), and it's
all smooth sailing. The only problem I've had is that the fans on my MacBook
run a little loud after a few minutes when running Parallels."

[delovski]

How to disable GCC parallel compilation of universal binaries

"I know it's a useful feature since I have a core duo processor, but I'm
compiling quite heavy C++ sources and my machine has not enough memory
to keep TWO instances of GCC compiling them in memory at once.. "

[delovski]

Charles Ross in About This Particular Macintosh

"An interesting in-depth how-to column in Mac E-zine "About This Particular
Macintosh". It provides insight into mounting and using SheepShaver,
Basilisk II, and Mini vMac."

[Ike]

Scott Byer: Macintosh and the Intel switch

"From having projects with large numbers of files that open quickly, to having
compact debugging information, to having stable project formats that are
text-merge-able in a source control system. These are things XCode is playing
catch-up on. Now, Apple is doing an amazing job at catching up rapidly, but
the truth is we don't yet have a shipping XCode in hand that handles a large
application well. And switching compilers always involves more work than you
would think in a codebase of this size."

[XNote]

Yellow Box for Windows Still Exists?

"... it could represent an interesting development, however, in the evolution
of Mac OS X and keeps open possibilities for Apple to launch more Windows
applications or even provide that functionality to Mac OS X developers.

Update: This poster points to code indicating that Safari for Windows is not
written in Cocoa:

... the windows 'port' of Safari does not use one line of Objective-C/Cocoa
but is programmed in C/C++ against C-libraries from Apple (CoreFoundation &
CoreGraphics) and Microsoft (Win32)."

(Forum Link)

[delovski]

Carbon List: 64-bit Caron Summary

"I'd probably moved more Mac OS X code to Intel than anyone else before
the announcement -- some of the iApps and a bunch of other apps, plus a
ton of work in the OS -- and of the code I'd worked on, the Cocoa apps
happened to take more work than the Carbon ones."

[delovski]

apple - Universal Binary Programming Guidelines - Data Types

"A long double is 16 bytes on both architectures, but only 80 bits are
significant in long double data types on Intel-based Macintosh computers.

A bool data type is a single byte on an x86 system, but four bytes on a
PowerPC architecture. This size difference can cause alignment problems.
You should use fixed-size data types to avoid alignment problems. (The bool
data type is not the Carbon Boolean type, which is a fixed size of 1 byte.)"