funkatron.com

Now I am certainly sad to hear that this guy was stabbed, but didn’t they think that this might have been one of those rare times when packing heat would be necessary?

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.