Ah Yes, Standards

Gotta love 'em.

My Snow Leopard Review

Snow Leopard (10.6) is incrementally better than Leopard (10.5) and in a different universe to Windows 7 Ultimate and other flavours.

What I like:
Performance, and performance potential.
Forcing developers to abandon evil code injecting Input Managers if they wish to be compatible with 64-bit (ie, the future).
Gamma at 2.2 to fall in line with the rest of the world except anyone who cares about gamut.
Lots of other tiny things that add up to the computer working for me and not vice versa.

What I don't like:
Resolution independence seems all but abandoned. The pointer still scales to something akin to jaggi lines.
Spaces is kind of useless to me without a 3rd party addon like Warp.

Verdict: if you have an intel based Mac you'd be a fool not to buy it for £25. Unless you already have the developer build 10A432 in which case you probably would be a fool to buy it. Because you already have it.

What Impartial Tech Press

At least they made no effort to hide where they get some of their advertising revenue from before bigging up Windows 7 over Linux. I mean, GNU/Linux is free FFS, how can Windows 7 family smack be any cheaper?! How can upgrading any version of Windows be easier than "apt-get upgrade" ?!

Windows 7 RTM: My First Impressions

I won't bore you with my lack of hyperbole and lack of enthusiasm for Microsoft in general. Just look at the screenshot above (click for larger). That's right, with a few clicks you really could be partying like it's 1995. Anyway, I was able to kick the tyres on Windows 7, and here's my opinion:

1. Installation (from scratch) is much improved. I like the fact that Windows 7 will now prompt you to join a wireless network at install time and defaults to NTP for time accuracy. Welcome to the 21st century, finally.

2. It was installed on an old Dell Latitutude D610 with 2GB memory and something like a 1.8GHz processor. It sped along at speeds reminiscent of Windows2000. No "revolutionary" Aero interface though so still subjected to watching windows draw themselves in and out. Something I do not have to put up with when running Ubuntu on this laptop, but not a big deal.

3. The Windows Basic GUI is not too bad. I especially liked the fact that I could increase the DPI to 125dpi (from the standard 100dpi) and the GUI wouldn't puke on dialogues. It remains to be seen if third party apps puke when assuming 100dpi on a 125dpi system.

4. Windows 7 has a "dock" which reminded me a lot of using KDE around 2002.

5. I was still unable to create a folder and name it con. To me this is just a sign of deeper exception handling sprawled throughout the OS. Even if it's my imagination, it becomes my perception which becomes what I believe. An OS loaded with internal exception handling manifesting in the GUI just makes me think it's cobbled together with little care or attention.

6. Easy enough to change the pointer bitmap to a bigger size without fuss. This is something you cannot do in Mac OS X after almost 10 years. Are we going to see SVG pointers in Snow Leopard? Don't bet on it.

7. The "Search" in the Control Panel actually helped me find what I was looking for. I was shocked that such a feature should now finally be helpful in a Microsoft OS and, for the most part, unambiguous and written in plain english rather than doublespeak with assumptions.

All in all, it's not a bad OS. It's just not a great OS considering its decade long iterative development cycle and opportunities to lead, innovate, and jump the curve after spending $10,000,000,000 dollars in R&D (tax deductable I'm guessing). It's unremarkable and, basically, more of the same. Not necessarily a bad thing, but is this round of lipstick on the pig enough to get you to switch (from XP, Linux, Mac OS X)?

Suffering On Safari, Didn't Enjoy Opera, Back To The Gecko

Let me start this rant by saying all web browsers are pretty amazing things. However they are all mature enough that they now must differentiate themselves and be remarkable to get my interest. I seem to be forever flitting between Safari, Opera and Firefox. With the beta preview of Safari 4.0 I thought they'd nailed it and (after turning off all the stupid bookmark animations) it became my primary browser (taking over from Firefox which always seems a bit oh-look-I can-see-how-slow-XUL-is-at-redrawing-the-chrome-on-my-dual-core-laptop-with-9400M-graphics-F-F-S). Anyway.

When Safari 4.0 beta was released many fanboys hated the fact that the tabs were moved right to the top of the window, thus saving space and screen real-estate. Important for me on this 13" screen. It still had the dumb feature of forcing you to save passwords you might have forgotten before allowing you to login and stuff, but I figured they might fix that for the final release. Wrong! Not only is the do-you-want-me-to-remember-the-password-you-just-typed feature still dumb, they moved the frickin tabs back to the luddite position! The travesty!

So I tried the Opera 10 prerelease. Close, but no cigar. I know Opera innovates and the others emulate but even with John Hicks' fantabulous new native skin and a pleasing tint of "sea" it's just not ... quite ... right. Maybe it's the wasted pixels in the "Personal Bar" that annoy me and the staccato scrolling. And the fact it tries too hard (it's an email client, a bittorrent client, does widgets, etc etc). Talk about convergence. Markets always - always - diverge. You think the iPhone is a converged device? Think again. It's a new category of device, it's just in the interim no one really knows what it's called. It's a diverged form of computer in an ultra portable form-factor. Smartphone will stick I guess. So like the iPhone is not a phone without the smart, Opera is not a browser without a suite of crap I just don't use. Not that it's bloatware, it's anything but. It's just ... annoying and somehow unsatisfactory.

So I updated my Firefox to 3.5b99 and grabbed Annorax's GrApple Crisp and am thinking, no loss here. And the password-asking-remembery thing allows you to say "okay, remember it!" after you can see a successful login with the correct password.

I guess I'll be fine until Google Chrome is released for end-users. I'm such a Google whore.

Final Cut Pro Driving Me Nuts

So currently I'm on a tight deadline to deliver a fine cut of a "Two Week Film Collective" project (#2wkfilm to you Twitterers) and I'm at a point where I may as well do a final render and call it quits (a feature film shot and edited in two weeks is always going to have production value issues). But, oh no. Apple FCP 6 does not make my life that simple.

1. Rendering out using "current settings" (derived from Panasonic TZ5 acquisition so must be Apple M-JPEG codec doing the honours I guess) I get this ghastly luminance intensity shift across the entire frames where I've dropped subtitles (subtitles being key to the plot). Yes, I've checked gamma and compositing settings, tried rendering YUV and RGB etc etc. I've come to the conclusion this is an inherent calculation bug with the M-JPEG codec and it's not going to be fixed any time soon because M-JPEG is soooooo yesterday's codec.

2. Rendering out using Apple's ProRes 1280x720@30p - result! No luminance intensity shift! W00t! But on further scrutinisation I realise the frickin sync is drifting ... and not in a manner that indicates a mismatched framerate, oh no. Scenes lose sync, and a couple of scenes later it's back in sync. Sounds like a screw-up on the timeline, right? Nope. Timeline plays back perfectly in sync. The sync issue with the ProRes is best described as wow-and-flutter - it's like the audio is playing back from a stretched tape. Very odd. And very very annoying.

So I'm wasting my life and CPU cycles trying out some different codecs, currently running a standard MPEG4 compression through Compressor (since Compressor is going to be annally retentive about picture quality and sound sync, right?)

It's enough to drive me back to trying out Sony Vegas and Windows 7 on a cheap PC.

Animated Gifs And Apple Safari

Just forget it. If I get an animated gif turn up in my RSS Google Reader in Safari 4 on Mac OS X it brings the entire machine to its knees like something important isn't multithreaded. I don't blame Safari 4's beta status, cos it was the same in all previous versions. Rubbish.