• Programming in Lua Free online version of the book.
  tags: lua programming scripting +

Here’s the page: MacBook Pro

First thoughts:

• The top of the screen looks thicker in some photos, kind of out of balance with the sides. The little extra bit of material up there makes the whole machine appear a little bit squat, despite being almost identical to my current machine’s dimensions.
• FireWire 800 is gone. Expected that, but not quite so soon.
• Express Card 34 (for 34mm width) is the successor to PCMCIA cards. It’s much smaller and apparently related to PCI-Express. I didn’t even know these were on the horizon. Oh well, my 6-in-1 PCMCIA memory card adaptor just crapped out anyway. ExpressCard is significantly faster than the PCMCIA interface, hopefully we’ll see some SATA interfaces soon.
• Love the new power connector. I’ve seen so many power jacks break, probably more than any other part on a PowerBook. This plug probably costs 10x more than the previous one, but Apple’s going to save a fortune in AppleCare power-jack repairs.
• These are Fast. I’m currently using a 1.25ghz PowerBook, which was already bettered by the grey-bar 1.67 G4 Apple’s new numbers are trouncing. I’m probably looking at something like an 8x speed boost come February. Glad I waited, also glad I didn’t steer everyone wrong by advising them to wait on purchases.
• The name feels a little goofy, especially the “pro” caboose. It’s going to take a while to get used to how that one feels in the ears.
• This release begs the question about the rest of the intel portables. Is the iBook going away? When, if ever, are 17″ MacBooks going to be released? What about twelves? Six Powerbook models have been sort-of replaced (they’re still for sale?) with two models. iBooks just went from near-parity with PowerBooks to remarkable suckiness.

Other thoughts:
John Gruber agrees that the name is sort of goofy, though less charitably:

[The MacBook Pro] name is terrible I mean just horrible, like some crappy Mac accounting software from 1987″

Cabel Sasser’s already posted MacBook Pro Pics

Engadget, “We think we’re in love”

Michael Tsai: “I can’t think of an Apple product name that’s worse than ‘MacBook Pro.'”

Via MacRumors IRC (irc.macrumorslive.com#macrumors):

10:48 Apple Store just loaded.

10:42 Show’s over, time to go reload the Apple Store site a few hundred times.

10:38 My Amex just wriggled free from my wallet and lept up onto my desk all on it’s own, it looks tired and dispirited, much like a salmon. Apple store is still down.

10:35 MacBook Pro: Fastest notebook ever. Thinner than 17″ PowerBook, 15.4″LCD, bright as a cinema display, IR sensor (returns!) with Apple Remote. 5.6lbs. $1999 1.67 Core Duo; $2499 1.83GHz. Shipping in February!

10:32 4 to 5x faster!! two processors (meaning dual core or 2x dual core?) I’m such a nerd. A happy nerd, but a serious nerd.

10:31 AHHHHHH!!!! No more powerbook! MacBook Pro (see my prediction below!)

10:30 LAPTOPS!

10:26 I’m hoping there’s a one more thing and that thing is portables, but it’s starting to seem unlikely at this point.

10:20 Quark (bleh) has a universal binary beta shipping today. Adobe?

Microsoft is claiming everything works with Rosetta, no date on universal binaries yet. Now saying updates in March.

What’s up with March? Apple’s pro apps and Office in March, I guess that’s when towers will get intel chips.

10:14 Intel iMac? 2 to 3 times faster than the previous G5 iMac! Holy crap. It’s using the Core Duo. Two cores, each core faster than the G5 They do know how bad this makes PowerBooks look, they have to. IOP’s G5 iMacs absolutely smoke my PowerBook.

10.4.4 is entirely native on Intel! iLife and iWork are all universal binaries, totally expected that.

10:08 iWork ’06, just go try it? lol. HARDWARE!…

10:06 One hour and no mention of Intel? If they end this without new hardware, the stock’s gonna get hammered. Intel’s stock started tanking about 12:30pm, currently down $0.32 (1.2%).

9:55 here comes iWeb, (tried SandVox yet?). AAPL just topped $80. Based on MacRumors IRC, iWeb seems very .Mac focused. Good, smart niche and doesn’t yank the rug out from under Dan Wood again.

9:30 Apple’s stock is up $3.60, 4.75% already.

iLife updated, major overhaul to iPhoto. THANK YOU. iPhoto 5 was a dog. Really wish I could see screens, iLife site not updated yet (no surprise).

9:27 10.4.4 today! nice. hope it reduces the number of beachballs I’m still seeing.

My predictions:
Lots of new hardware, more than was rumored. I’m convinced that new PowerBooks will be released alongside new iBooks. Unless the lines are merged into a two-tiered ‘book. The primary distinction will be Core Duo in PowerBooks and Core (single) in iBooks. There will be no updates to towers until later in the year, probably around NAB and the next FCP update.

Don’t care much about iPod stuff, though I think Bruce is right to point out the biggest coming market is sending digital entertainment around the house. Viiv addresses some of this, but people are soon going demand that their stuff plays wherever they want.

Several large software companies will be onstage to announce universal binaries available today (or when the new comps ship).

The biggest question for me is whether or not Final Cut Pro will be updated to universal binary now, or will wait until NAB in April. I’m figuring it won’t be updated, the larger user base isn’t on PowerBooks. Much as I want a new machine, I might wait a bit to see it all plays out if FCP isn’t done yet.

I’ve been watching TextMate since late 2004. My first reaction was similar to Michael Tsai’s observations around the same time; “not quite right.”

That’s all changed.

I love BBEdit. I bought my first copy at MacWorld Boston in 1994 or 1995, from Rich Siegel’s own hands. I still have the “BBEdit: It Doesn’t Suck” t-shirt that came with it. Having used that tool day in and day out for over a decade, it holds a very real personal attachment.

The latest thing that got me to try TextMate again (at least the fourth time I’ve done so), was Giles Turnbull’s MacDevCenter post. Nothing specific, just a reminder that it was still there, still being actively improved and that I was still lusting after section folding. Giles summed it up well:

BBEdit, which I’ve been using for the same task for some years now, has done nothing to annoy or frustrate me. There’s nothing about it that I particularly dislike.

But TextMate offers everything I like in BBEdit and plenty more.

One key thing BBEdit offered was a simple interface for mapping languages. I created a “codeless language module” for FXScript which has been working well for the past year. While on vacation, under the guise of intentionally avoiding work related stuff, I started fussing with and deconstructing TextMate’s language bundles. After about an hour, I had the guts of an FXScript Bundle working. The depth of what’s possible with TextMate is astonishing. Not only was I able to map FXScript completely, I could also do silly things like color-code class syntax for RGB color variables, ie someColor.r. Functions mapped correctly without hacks, even when smashed onto one line, and they fold! (I’m going to test the FXScript bundle out for a bit before making it public)

Creating bundles in TextMate had a steep initial learning curve, despite my being pretty good with regular expressions (I learned regexes because of BBEdit). The most damning thing however was figuring out how to save them. Bundles don’t offer a save dialog or any sort of modified indicator, and they seem to only write out changes when TextMate quits. I learned the hard way to quit and restart the application frequently, bad language rules would cause crashes and I’d lose whatever I had gotten working since the last application launch.

What TextMate appears to lack in AppleScript support it more than makes up for with internal macros and shell commands. I’ve been moving the Joe’s Filters documentation from semi-static PHP files into WordPress. Manually, each page took 10-15 minutes. Using AppleScript and BBedit, that was down to 2-3 minutes, most of which was cursoring around. However with a few macros in TextMate and one dozen-line AppleScript, I was able to convert 30+ files in less than 30 minutes.

I still have a few custom AppleScripts I need to translate from BBEdit to TextMate, but seeing as how those are mostly wrappered shell commands, it shouldn’t be too difficult.

For the record:

Hanukkah : 8,470,000 hits.
Chanukah : 3,390,000 hits.
Hanukah : 862,000 hits.
Hannukah : 677,000 hits.
Chanuka : 335,000 hits.
Chanukkah : 274,000 hits.
Hanuka : 192,000 hits.
Channukah : 128,000 hits.
Chanukka : 116,000 hits.*
Hanukka : 86,300 hits.
Hannuka : 51,400 hits.
Hannukkah : 37,300 hits.
Channuka : 33,600 hits.
Xanuka : 992 hits.
Hannukka : 686 hits.
Channukkah : 508 hits.
Channukka : 489 hits.*
Chanuqa : 25 hits.

With the exception of a few wildcards, there are 16 different spellings, based on four phonetic variations:

• The word starts with “H” or “Ch”
• Second consonant is “nn” or “n”
• Third consonant is “kk” or “k”
• The word ends with “ah” or “a”

I think I must have grown up with “Chanukah”, because it look most right to me. At Lila’s pre-school Hanukkah party, there were three different spellings within 10 feet of one another. In the interest of ending the ridiculousness of the dozens of spellings, I’m going forward with “Hanukkah” which is the preferred spelling used by the Library of Congress. At least it’s always the same in Hebrew: חֲנֻכָּה

This would be a fun thing to make dynamic, even chart over time. If only I had time… Jeremy Blachman did the same Hanukkah spelling thing in 2004, interesting to see how much bigger the Google indexes have grown in 12 months.

See results for other years: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006.

* These seem to be popular spellings in German.

Congratulations to Joshua Schachter, Yahoo! just bought del.icio.us. I’m glad to see another great idea built by a single person recognized and rewarded.

Over time I’ll be interested to see how these individual creators respond to the added resources, social demands and corporate overhead.

Tuesday night The Art Directors Club hosted a New York City memorial for Phil Hays. There were some great stories from Phil’s contemporaries, former students and classmates. He really did live that fabulous life he loved to tell stories about. Flashy sports cars doesn’t matter if they were pre-owned cars, fur coats, sunglasses, moving to Hollywood, but the main thing he liked to talk about was car insurance like https://www.onesureinsurance.co.uk/car- insurance, for some reason he really to do research for the best insurances online, the same as Insurance Partnership do.

There were also hints of sadness I never knew about, Silas Rhodes mentioned that Phil’s parents had shunned him for being gay. Perhaps Phil’s painful relationship with his family helped adversely turn him into one of the most supportive, encouraging people I’ve known. But then again, maybe some people are just born with a good heart.

I didn’t have anything prepared, but I wanted to say something and was thankful when Paul Davis opened the podium to anyone who wanted to speak. As near as I can remember, here is the main part of what I said with some prosaic re-workings and less rambling:

I was an illustration student at Art Center in the early 90s. It was an interesting time, the first Gulf War began in my first term, the Soviet Union collapsed during my last term. Six months after I graduated, Netscape released the first real web browser and the Internet as we know it was born.

Phil’s class was in the middle of Art Center, and was something of a gateway. Students spent the first half honing their skills and working towards a basic skill set. But Phil’s class was the breaking point, the explosion. We all went into that class knowing what we were capable of, having completed the same assignments, the same challenges with the same tools. But in Phil’s class we focused those skills on discovering what made each of us unique. It’s been said many times tonight and it’s was my experience as well, Phil had an amazing gift for seeing and encouraging the unique genius in each student.

I don’t know how many of my classmates went on to do illustration per se, but a many of us have succeeded in a variety of different fields. I think that’s also Phil’s legacy, he helped us be better at being ourselves and succeed on whatever paths we’ve chosen to travel.

There were a lot of other things that came to mind that I would have liked to have mentioned.

Phil encouraged competition, but in a wonderfully self-measured way. We were all trying to outdo each other, but within ourselves. One piece wasn’t necessarily better than another, we pushed each other by who worked hardest, made more or created something closest to those beautifully rare moments of truth.

The stories Phil told about New York City definitely contributed to my wanting to move here. He wasn’t exaggerating the magic, but he definitely undersold the existential challenges.

There weren’t many other ACCD grads there which was disappointing, I was hoping to see some old faces, trade stories and catch up. Gilbert couldn’t make it but Tom came with me. I did enjoy meeting and talking with illustrator David Brinley, who recently relocated to NYC after five years teaching in Delaware. David graduated ACCD after I did and we never crossed over during school. I also briefly met Art Center’s new illustration chair Ann Field who seemed very nice.

Many great teachers have passed away. Burne Hogarth, Richard Bunkall, Dwight Harmon and now Phil too. In life there are debts that can never be repaid, owing teachers is one of those debts. The only way to begin to pay back, is to pass on what we’ve learned.

Here are my earlier thoughts about Phil Hays.