Solipsism Gradient

More comments on this by DrunkenBatman and John Siracusa; worth a read.

Apple Finder

Posted by Nando:

colpa wrote:

While Apple jobs are prestigious and important, I could imagine working at Apple and wishing I was out on my own where I could work on any project that suits me. And so we are!

Funny you should say that, I just read the Audion story and Cabel got to the same conclusion as you. Thinking of it, I don’t know if I would take a job at Apple either. As an icon designer in my case, but even so. I think I like being able to do my own stuff. I’d love to build an amazing carreer on my own, and not hidden behind a big company.

Posted by colpa:
While Apple jobs are prestigious and important, I could imagine working at Apple and wishing I was out on my own where I could work on any project that suits me. And so we are!

A couple of days ago I managed to finish off most of my remaining offline problems and, since I’d seen news that the ADC Compatibility Labs now had the new iMacs for testing, applied for a couple of days at one of them.

No, I’m not going to Cupertino, but rather wanted to try out Xcode’s Remote Debugging.

As a result, I now can confidently say that XRay 2 will be fully compatible with the new Intel Macs. I’ll also be licensing the new Universal logo.

It’s rather late in the day, but tomorrow I’ll post technical details…

Mac Debugging

Nando wrote:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

This of course disqualifies me…

Maybe it’s time you learn something ‘old’ and get one of those positions at Apple. I don’t know of anyone more prepared than you.

Thanks for your vote of confidence; 10 or perhaps even 5 years ago I’d have been interested. Now, I’m more interested in learning more about Cocoa. I suppose Steve Gehrman of Path Finder fame would give you the same answer, and he’s way more “prepared” for writing a new Finder than I am… now, if they’d specified Cocoa and telecommuting, that’d be another story.

Apple Finder

Posted by Nando:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

Preferred experience:

5+ years of experience developing software.

Experienced in using STL, Boost.

Shipped shrink-wrapped products.

Knowlege of Core Graphics, HIView and Carbon, Core Foundation.

This of course disqualifies me; I’ve carefully avoided most of those so far. Hmmm…

Maybe it’s time you learn something ‘old’ and get one of those positions at Apple. I don’t know of anyone more prepared than you.

Some posts ago, I mentioned a white paper on FW800; now James Wiebe has written an update:

f you are making storage decisions based on rollouts of FireWire 800 technology, your purchasing priorities are sadly out of order. Apple was the only champion of FireWire 800; a task it seemed to take reluctantly. Now, Apple is making marketplace moves that are absolving itself of FireWire 800.

Worth a read.

In other news, there’s no news on progress to make the new Intel iMacs boot anything else. There’s even a reward posted; I’ll be very surprised if someone collects it anytime soon (or even, at all). As the Apple/Intel FAQ notes, some people have suceeded in rendering their iMac unbootable by trying to change the EFI parameters. As that page also notes, it appears – despite some reports to the contrary – that the Core Duos Apple is using do report the VMX flag, which stands for Intel’s virtualization technology.

There’s a somewhat alarmist article out, regarding the Core Duo’s current 34 erratas, only one of which is slated to be fixed in subsequent production runs. Of course the number of such erratas is proportional to a chip’s complexity; both PowerPCs and older Intel chips have comparable numbers. I’ve looked over the list and couldn’t find anything immediately alarming, as nearly all of them have a software workaround and/or are not revelant to user code. Also, some of these seem to be inherited (and never fixed) issues from older Intel designs, meaning they’re considered harmless. All in all, you shouldn’t worry about this.

Hm, Apple’s searching for a Software Engineer to work on its next-generation Finder:

The Finder team is seeking an energetic, motivated software engineer to help develop next generation versions of the Finder, the notorious file browser for Mac OS X.

You will be responsible for developing new features of an application that is often perceived by our users as the “face of the system”.

But it seems the new Finder will still be a Carbon app, probably to the dismay of many:

Preferred experience:

5+ years of experience developing software.

Experienced in using STL, Boost.

Shipped shrink-wrapped products.

Knowlege of Core Graphics, HIView and Carbon, Core Foundation.

This of course disqualifies me; I’ve carefully avoided most of those so far. Hmmm…