funkatron.com

And sometimes I got written up.

My new middle name is Seymour.

I like my Mac a lot. I use PCs all the time too, but I really enjoy my Mac more. I think it’s the combination of an elegant (although still flawed) GUI and UNIX guts. I think it also helps that it’s a laptop, so I can carry it around the house with me. My XP box in the back room doesn’t get used nearly as much, even though it has a fancy 19” LCD (a Samsung 191T — it totally rules).

Anyway, I decided to look into some GUI app dev on OS X. I had an idea, and tried implementing it in several different languages:

• Applescript Studio: This actually worked pretty well. The language is SUPER verbose, but eventually I got my head around it. It’s really easy to build GUI apps with it. Problem is, the app was pretty unstable — it would just crash without any clear reason. This may have been improved in newer versions, but it was unusable at the time
• Pure Java: I actually got a command-line version of my app going. That was great. But I got lost quickly with the Swing stuff. It didn’t help that all these layout frameworks and shit for Java just seem stupid. Who would lay out a GUI with something that makes your buttons fill all the available space?
• Java->ObjC: Total disaster here. I never got this shit working.
• ObjC: What the hell is this crap? I thought it was C, but the damn syntax looks like some kind of Little Orphan Annie Ovaltine code. A line of code should never start with a -.
• RealBasic: You know, there are things I don’t like about RealBasic, but of all languages, this was by far the nicest to work with. The IDE is really smooth and nicely integrated (the autocomplete on user-defined properties and methods is great). Programming is fun again!

Oh yeah, I got the comments working. Looks like a silly bug with Hostrocket’s suexec wrapper.

I wish I had one of these.

I did a new site design for the CIRDB site. I just did the design, so don’t give me any credit or blame for the code or content. It’s simple, but I like how clean it looks.