July 30, 2009
No Mac anymore… and therefore no widget-development. :(
Hi all,
this is a quite sad post for me. My old iMac G4 has died and as I didn’t have the money to buy a new Mac (and wanted to give Linux a try anyway) I bought myself a (relatively) cheap PC and put Ubuntu on it.
So far, my experiences are not that bad. The amount of software is surely impressive and all of it for free. But, quality isn’t the same as quantity and (while I have only used this Ubuntu PC for a few days now), I think many of the Apps I have been using on the Mac are far, far better in terms of usability than what I have found on Ubuntu. Not to speak about OS X itself. While I highly disliked some aspects of OS X, the user-experience (imho) is far, far better than the one with Ubuntu, as well.
At the moment I am a bit biased. I want to give Ubuntu a chance and see if I can get used to it. Though I have a slight problem with that approach. On OS X I felt “at home”, things “just worked” 99 percent of the time. Linux/Ubuntu, as much as it may be advertised as that, just isn’t in the same league, imho.
To be honest, I do miss OS X (and all the great software available for it), more than I thought, while using Ubuntu. Maybe enough that I will save my money to get a cheap macMini sometime, I don’t know.
That brings me to the main purpose of this post. No Mac means no widgets, meaning at the moment I am unable to develop (or better: to test) my widgets, so for the time being, there won’t be any new versions. There are apps that are said to be able to run Dashboard-widgets on Ubuntu, but so far I didn’t get any of them to work right.
That’s all, folks.
Mike Van said,
January 28, 2010 @ 12:47 pm
I love your ByteCalc Widget and you will be pleased to know that it works well on Mac OS 10.6.2 Intel. Keep up your coding and maybe try to sell some of your stuff for like $2 to start..I did that years ago and my first little app..an addon to QuarkXpress sold like crazy for $3.50…so don’t give up and get a good intel Mac..I use an imac..latest one 24″..8Gb. ram and the drive I replaced with a 10,000 rpm 250gb. as os x pages alot and used alot of virtual memory. I don’t like large drives as a few smaller ones are safer for data back-ups..hard to keep backing up a Terrabyte drive that will fail long before a smaller drive. I also use SMC fan control so I can contrll the fans to run the machine much cooler as the default apple setting cause temps of over 80c for the power supply and over 70c for the drive..way too hot…specially here in Miami!
admin said,
January 28, 2010 @ 1:17 pm
It’s nice to hear that one of my widgets is still working flawlessly on the latest OS X-version, thank you for this positive response. Though I will think about your suggestions about further development and maybe actually “selling” the widgets, there is more into the whole issue of getting an Ubuntu-PC than I have written about here. It’s not only about money, but several issues I have with OS X, certain things that I just do not like at all and which won’t get changed by Apple because it obviously just isn’t what they want to do. As it stands now (despite having a less-than-good experience with Ubuntu) I do not really feel like getting back on OS X. That may change over time, who knows, but at the moment I will stay with Ubuntu.