The Beauty and the Nerd

Elegance doesn’t belong to the tailor. Concluding a quick test drive, I added offense to injury as I attached both a jurassic wacom tablet and a cheap numpad to a shiny, brand new Mac Air.

So new in fact that I’m surprised I haven’t bled my fingers off the sharp edges. Not that I’m really complaining either, it’s a definite plus (to my liking) that the ‘soap box’ designs inaugurated by the first iMacs have been sliding off the chart, if ever so gradually.

As I quickly discovered, my new Mac isn’t overly social. With just a couple of USB ports, a jack, (what appears to be) a card reader and no LAN connector, it clearly came back from the beautiful, wireless future.

At 1.3 kg, the 13” beastie doesn’t outweigh all competition. To compliment it with a decent freeware pack (xcode, blender etc…), I took advantage of a merry 600kb/s, sending my smaller (11”, 1.1kg), sturdier (3 USB ports, LAN, …) S101 to the rescue. This time around, you won’t be blaming me for hanging out with a portable drive.

I’m not absolutely disappointed. I can avoid having to hook the num-pad after I get hold of my 16 buttons Razer. Even the  num-pad works better with the mac than with the eeepc, although that’s sheer luck and nothing you care about unless you’re a blender user.

In conclusion I’d say it’s a cute, slim laptop with a beautiful screen, and that is exactly what held me from getting the seductively small, yet potentially unfit for purpose 11” version.

Beyond Perfection

I’m staying in Hong Kong for another day. It’s almost becoming a pilgrimage and this time I’ll even post pictures when I get a chance. One year back I was busy designing my first game and resurrecting my 3D modeling skills. This time around I took my girlfriend along and tried to make a holiday out of it. While this wasn’t altogether unsuccessful, it made me notice a couple of things:

  1. I don’t want to hang around without a computer I can code with. Yes, I can code on my eeepc and I’m interested in porting my stuff to JME, but no, that’s not bread and butter to me now.
  2. Projecting myself a couple of months in the future, I’ll have no day job to speak of and no office to commute to. Commuting isn’t great, working from home is worse. So finally it’s the prospect of being able to code somewhere else, that got me to buy an OS-X laptop. Sure, not all the time, just so I can get a breath of fresh air without idling the whole afternoon.
  3. Apple now boasts an 11” laptop. I wanted one 2 years ago and now that it’s out I have no use for it, or too much use for a bigger one.

I still found some time to do some modeling. This time I tried a different approach to organic modeling, taking advantage of the retopo Blender feature to draw a connected mesh over geometric primitives. I’ve been putting off writing about my organic modeling experiments/training since 2001 but I’m still thinking about it (sigh).

Tempting Murphy’s Law

Keeping source code in SVN is nice. Doing all the work from just one computer isn’t. So taking aside uncertainties regarding my geographic location, or my willingness to cage myself in my flat 24/24, 7/7, I had another, triflingly good reason to get another Cocoa-enabled tin. I need to duplicate my existing development environment to guard against a minor disaster. I’ve just done that, or about… Have a 1 coder team if you really have/need/want to. Don’t just keep everything in the same box forever. You and your projects will survive this box.

Write once, run on PC?

Feeling inspired, I installed Unity 3D (pending serious evaluation for at least 12 months) and Eclipse Pulsar on my new Mac. Then I realized the Nokia dev kit doesn’t seem to be running on OS-X. Oh well…