Checking the little white manual that comes with the mbp and it say you can boot to an installation screen even if you can’t boot normally. Hopefully i’ll never have to do that (i keep both a time machine and superduper backups up to date. I’ll google around to see about the success people are having with it.) Although OS X is stable enough that i’ve never had boot problems in the three years i’ve been using a Mac.

Anyway, Lion. After watching that guy’s YouTube rant i thought i’d have some major productivity issues. Specifically with mission control and launchpad.

Launchpad. Yeah it’s iPad like but to me it’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist on a mac. ie. launching applications. There’s already a few ways to native ways to launch apps on the Mac and a ton more for free or pay easily available. Having said that i find myself using it all the time. And to address that guys rant (re: alphabetical order) Just move the friggin’ icons around. it’s not rocket science you already do that on the iPad.

Mission Control. I admit i miss spaces the way it used to work. I had a space for the different workflows and used a program called “Docks” (which mostly works on Lion but seems to have disappeared from the weeb, so no Lion update from the googling i did) that let you assign a different dock for each space. For me mission control makes the process a little more freeform.

Oh, one more thing the scrolling reversal. Using the trackpad it’s fairly intuitive especially if you already use an iPad.

Use a mouse though and it’s mind numbingly stoopid [sic].

And yes it’s better than safari, just like it is on the iPhone and Mac.

I’ve known about BBEdit for the Mac for ages and I was considering it when looking for a good text editor. Glad I didn’t. I ended up with Textmate but it falls short (more in a bit). I probably use vim more than Textmate.

I decided I want to give Tcl/Tk coding another shot on the Mac again.

First, time to hit the Activestate site again. ActiveTcl is the package to get (for windows or the Mac). Took way too many clicks to get it but that’s just poor website design.

Second, the part I was dreading. Finding a text editor that had at least syntax hilighting for Tcl/Tk and code folding. No Textmate bundle for the language and I didn’t really want to spend the time to create one (and I shouldn’t have to). I took another look at BBEdit but it didn’t what I needed either.

Back to the Activestate sit again because I know that they have an editor specifically geared for the language (and perl also). And the personal version is a great price, included a debugger also.

Much to my surprise they no longer have that version of Komodo. They now call it “Komodo Edit” and it’s free. They removed the debugger but not a big deal. I can always spend close to $300 to upgrade to “Komodo IDE”.

Anyway too many clicks later and I have that downloaded and installed.

Worth the time to download, it’s a really good editor for Tcl/Tk.

Now the part that really makes me grit my teeth. You cannot double-click on a Tcl/Tk script ie. a fully GUI script, to run it. WTF!?

I had to google to find out if/how it can be done. I think this something the ActiveTcl installer should have set up already. As I type this I still haven’t got it working yet.

Here we have a gui based os with probably the easiest language to write a GUI app in… and it can’t be done. What’s wrong with this picture?

One of the editors I found was Boxer (v3.11 IIRC). I liked it right away. Not because of it’s power because i’d only used it for a few minutes, but because of how it looked: it’s interface. I used it the entire day and found it to be the most powerful editor out of the dozen’s I tried. The only ones that might have been more powerful at the time were brief, multi-edit, vedit, and epsilon. I think all of those were in the plus $100 dollar range, and up here in the Great White North the exchange rate made every purchase from the States require serious evaluation.

I should probably have taken longer to evaluate Boxer but I liked the interface so much that I called the number to register it (and talked directly to the author himself, which was a bit of a treat).

I did the same thing with a Fidonet offline reader called BlueWave. Great interface. My basic reasoning was that I would spend more time in software with a well laid out interface that I like than one that I didn’t. Between those two pieces of software I spent thousands of hours.

Enter the iPad. The opportunity for great interfaces is pretty much unlimited. I registered an RSS reader called “Early Edition” because it laid out RSS feeds in a newspaper style which happens to work really well on an iPad.

I registered a program called “Emerald Observatory” strictly on how it looked. I’m not much of a trekker but I have a few programs with the LCARS style interface.

Another one that really shows off what you can do with an iPad is Holoblog. It has a 3D interface (you really have to see it in action) the author did some very clever things to get it to look that way.

I probably shouldn’t “judge a book by its cover” but I do it all the time when it comes to software.

BTW, I still use Boxer on a windows laptop (when I use windows). There will never be a version of Boxer for the Mac but I know if there were it would stomp all over BBedit and TextMate. The interfaces for those editors are cutting edge… for windows 3.1.

it’s not a free app, but well worth it if you want to keep up on rss feeds.

the selling point for me was that it could import all my feeds from google reader. makes it very easy to add feeds that way even though you can do it though the app itself…

what annoyed me the most was the lack of comic availability. yeah it’s great to read iron man #146 and hulk #382. but #1 of anything forget it… just today i see they actually had hulk #1 for free. which is nice kind of offsets the 36 issues total they had for the hulk character. that’s 36 out of 300+ issues.

the marvel app for the ipad is great, and the comics are a great price, but i’ll have to be patient if i want to pick up an entire series that’s anything over 10 issues.

just the other day the comicbooklover app for the ipad was just updated. it’s a free app and only in version .04 alpha (or something like that) but i would have no problem paying $9.99 for the app right now. they’ve improved the transfer to the ipad process and the reading experience. i have a ton of digital comics (my hard copies are safely stored away).

there are other ipad comic apps, but support for the cbr/cbz is non-existent.

Using safari really IS like using a browser from the early ’90’s.