Author: Pat Skinner

I make apps.
I love empowering people with tech, saving time, and delivering delight.
Piano player and German speaker.

Categories
Design Interface Technical Visit This Site

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In another excellent entry to his collection of Mac OS X commentary, John Siracusa today posted a review of Mac OS X Tiger 10.4. The most interesting part of the article was the description of the UI subsystem, Quartz.

I really appreciate a lot of things about Mac OS X. Well thought out enhancements to usability (Expose, working drag and drop, a hierarchical menu bar) have been among my favorites. However, Quartz has been a most egregious of offenders, so much so as to keep me from even using my old PowerBook for nearly a year. As someone who uses a computer every day, interface responsiveness is about as critical as it gets. OS X, unfortunately, has the slowest (most resource hungry) GUI of any operating system I’ve ever used. Even OS 9 was faster. Just try resizing a window and watch your CPU peg at 100%.

Siracusa nicely details (with pretty flowcharts) why OS X has suffered from what I’ll dub a molasses complex since Aqua was at Day 1. Regardless of how fast the actual hardware inside is, just using any G4 Mac felt slow [IMO]. The bandwidth of the data paths between hardware required to render things to screen (CPU, RAM, GPU) was being eaten faster than a fat kid at a candy store.

Fortunately, things have changed for the better. I have yet to use Tiger on the requisite hardware, but if the block diagrams Siracusa shows correspond to real-world UI speed gains, I’ll happily be back in the Apple camp once more.

That is, if Apple would nicely explain to me why my <1 year old iBook G4 can’t even support this and most of the other whiz-bang features Tiger brings to the table.

Categories
RIT Visit This Site

And Now, the Ollie Williams Discipline Forecast

Oh mah Bezebel have I been working. I finished my major project and worked on lots of school work in the past week or so…it’s that time of year again when Burnout Factor™ is nigh, and summer is blindingly close…

So of things interesting to read, documents written about you or your major but for hiring managers are high on the A list. A list of such documents from RIT can be found here if you’re so inclined. See how cool your major is compared to the rest of em.

He gonn’ get it!
Glad they’ve still got it..

Categories
Technical Web Design

OSX on a website. No, really.

JavaScript has certainly come a long way.

In between the innumerable midterms I’ve had in the past two weeks I’ve been learning a bunch of web technologies, including PHP, MySQL, and CSS. A cool trend I’ve noticed has been the consistencies between all of these languages and things I have already learned. PHP has classes and functions, just like Java/C++, and CSS has a very straightforward, logical structure. Programming is definitely a difficult skill in general, but things like this help.

Since my first major project idea is unacceptable to CSH, my second idea is happaning instead. Simply stated, it’s going to be a Major Project database where people can log in and edit the projects they own or view a list of upcoming projects. I hope its up to par in time…its already taken forever and a day so far just to learn the skills necessary.

Categories
General

Firefox + Extensions = Hotness

Of course, if you’re a savvy Internet user, you’re already amongst the 44-some million users of FireFox. Pop-up blocking and tabs are so last year. There’s a world of very useful Extensions that make browsing that much nicer.

Categories
General Visit This Site

Did I Forget To Mention?

So today I wake up at the crack of dawn to the sweet mellifluous ballad of 5 huge Mac trucks under my open window whose drivers get no greater satisfaction from life than slamming their cargo doors up and down, racing around the loading dock in reverse (“BEEP, BEEP, BEEP!”) and establishing the alpha male through engine revving. Only the most X-Treme men of the world man these rigs, reminding the hapless bleary-eyed college students quietly dozing on the floors above of their insignificance in the most awesome quest of foodstuffs delivery.

Squinting into the bright light and fumbling the window closed, I wake up enough only to realize that I won’t fall asleep again this morning.

9:20 AM. Damn, the air got stuffy in here. Slowly I realize I have a written German test in 40 minutes. Sweet! I do reasonably well on it, nice given the lousy morning. Then there’s a quite challenging OS Scripting Midterm at noon whose ass receieves a fair amount of kicking. But this day has more fun in store for me, so I get to wrap things up all nice and shiny with a quite difficult Data Analysis quiz who kicked my ass. Phew, its over. I get back to floor, only to realize that I just missed the Social Computing meeting I’ve been reminding myself to go to for a few weeks now. I didn’t get tax forms I’ve been expecting in the mail so the Feds will be after me come Friday.

Did I forget to mention Monday is the worst day of the week?

Ah well. I made up for it a little bit by browsing around for CSS hacks. See them in action at the spicy examples!
Tomorrow should be better; I’m getting tests back instead.