pingles

New MacBook Pro

I’ve had a 15” PowerBook G4 for about 3 years now, its served me well but it was proving just too slow to run Aperture and Photoshop, something I was increasingly using it for as I started getting more and more into (digital) photography.

I could no longer resist the MacBook Pro’s following Apple’s recent updates to 2.4GHz cores and machines capable of taking 4GB of RAM. So, I popped into the Apple store and picked up a shiny new 17” MacBook Pro. I know I’ve mentioned that I’d never dream of carrying around such a behemoth and that I was looking forward to see whether rumours around an ultra-compact MacBook Pro materialised, but, I’m absolutely smitten.

Performance wise, it absolutely leaves the old G4 for dead. Loading Aperture takes a split-second (no kidding), compared to a good 20/30 seconds on the G4. Editing images was more of a slog, requiring a good deal of patience to make adjustments, wait for the rendering, tweak it back, wait for the rendering. It’s almost instant now. Plus, with the 17” screen I can fit everything on the screen I need, and that’s without going for the HD option (that was a little too extreme).

The machine is a little larger than the 15”, but, not hugely and, it feels around the same weight as the old G4! The screen is large, sharp, and way brighter than the G4. Smitten I say.

Finally, I also got Parallels running so I can do .NET work on it also (and on a large display). What really impressed me was how you can just tell it to go with an express install and it runs through an unattended install for you, no need to sit and wait for it all to happen, away you go.

To complete it all off, I also bought an Apple Airport Extreme so my 320GB LaCie external drive I’d been using for the odd backup is now shared over the network and I no longer have to keep it attached. Backing up to the vault from Aperture works exactly as if it were directly attached. Sweet. It’s a little slower, but so much more convenient. And, should I need more storage, just stick another drive onto a USB hub and away you go.

Just love it all when it works together!

Visual Studio Regions are Evil

I’m yet to see the point of them. For those that aren’t familiar with them, they’re a preprocessor directive that means inside your C# code you can write:

#region Propertiespublic String FirstName { get { return “Paul”; } }public String LastName { get { return “Ingles”; } }
#endregion

Then, inside the Visual Studio editor, you can expand or collapse whole regions of code.

In principle it’s the same as turning away and not looking directly at the big smelly pile of stuff, but rather cover it up in something that makes it look neater, or like not looking at your bank balance when you login to your online account.

Screen displays are pretty large these days, certainly enough for most reasonable pieces of code. So, the fact you need to put stuff in a region is not stopping-the-line, it’s a work-around. Rather than addressing the problem - you’ve got a big pile of code that could be more organised in code - by say, refactoring and improving the design, and thinking more about roles and responsibilities of classes instead of just dumping stuff places because that’s what’s being passed around). Instead, you organise your editing experience. Lovely.

It’s like Edit & Continue in the debugger, if you’re going to need to edit code as you debug, you’re spending too much time with the debugger.

Wii Rule

I don’t normally post stuff which isn’t development related, but after such a fun evening I couldn’t resist.

I popped into the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street last Friday to purchase a copy of Singstar for a barbecue and party I was going to over the weekend.

Well, just inside the store were a few small boards advertising that they now had Wii’s in-stock. I headed upstairs to the game department to buy Singstar and as I was paying asked whether they still had any. They did, and a few minutes later I’d bought a Wii, an extra controller and a copy of Wario’s Smooth Moves.

I’ve never had so much fun playing on a games console before. After a particularly stressful day I ‘unleashed the fury’ in a surprisingly competitve game of Bowling with my flatmate. It was a very cathartic experience, plus I won 3 games to 2 :). Following that, our other flatmate broke from his work and joined us to play Baseball. He howled with laughter the first time he moved the controller around to see his Wii Mii making the same movements on screen. Watching one person throw to bowl, and the other then following shortly to swing for the ball was particularly funny.

As for Wario Smooth Moves, it’s the weirdest game I’ve ever played but also insanely addictive - pumping your hands up and down to pop the balloon, and moving your hands back and forth in a sawing motion to sweep the floor during a curling game are just 2 examples of the fantastically funny mini-games.

So far I’m thrilled… I can’t wait for the second Nunchuck controller and Mario Strikers Charged Football to arrive and try it out over the Internet.

All in all, probably the games console I’ve purchased and the one which everyone (including a skeptical flatmate) has been incredibly impressed with.