My First NetBook
So I’ve been fascinated by the NetBook craze. Actually, I loved NetBooks even before they existed, being fascinated by the early Toshiba mini-notebooks in the 90s. But I’ve never owned one, until now. With prices close to $200 for a decent machine and my love of gadgets, it was just a matter of time.
I decided to go with the Asus eeePC since it gets the most attention and I wanted something popular to increase the chance of information and hacks being widely available. I got an older 900 series because I wanted to go small — and it looks like the newer ones are a little bigger.
For $219 I got 1GB of memory and 20GB SSD drive. Of course, I went with the Asus version of the Linux OS, and not Windows XP. I was tempted to go with XP, just because I could probably run Flash and Director on it, but I really wanted to use Linux. I may install eeeBuntu, but for now the Asus OS seems just fine.
So my first impressions are that it is indeed small and light. Perfect. I will be able to take this on short trips rather than my MacBook Pro, which is three times the weight. After all, while traveling, I just need email and Web access. I don’t really do any development while on the move.
The OS is a collection of apps, of which Firefox is the big one. That’s all I really need. It does have an email client, but I’ll probably never touch it. It also includes Open Office 2.0 which may come in handy for taking notes at conferences. A lot of the other applications are actually just Web links to email, Google Docs, Wikipedia, etc. But there is an instant messaging app and even Skype.
The hardware includes a camera and mic. And there is a video recording application that may come in handy. There are also headphone and a microphone input jack, as well as 3 USB 2.0 jacks and an SD card slot. Completing the ports are an ethernet jack and a VGA output to run an external monitor. OK, I can see doing presentations on this thing.
At first I thought that the trackpad was going to be a problem. Not the pad itself, but the hard-to-press button below it. Then I realized that you can tap on the pad to click. So the button is really just for click+hold and right clicks. In fact, the track pad responds to two-touch for scrolling. The keyboard is small and hard to type on, but is still so much better than iPhone typing that I don’t mind.
The best app, for me, on the thing is one that isn’t even shown in the interface. By pressing Home+T I can bring up the terminal window. Then by typing “krdc” I can run the KDE Remote Desktop. This is the Linux version of Mac’s screen sharing, or VNC. Without a problem I can share the screen of my Mac Pro. That’s pretty much what I do with my MacBook Pro anyway.
So I’m pretty pleased with the NetBook so far. Combined with the fact that I now use a Mac Pro as my main machine, this might mean I don’t need to get a new MacBook Pro when my old one gives out.
Update: I got tired of the toy-like Asus OS. Plus I wasn’t able to install any additional applications for some mysterious reason. So I installed eeeBuntu standard. A real OS. I’ve used Ubuntu before, so it was all very familiar.
I love this little device even more now. Firefox rendering of pages is much better in this OS. It looks just like on a Mac or PC now. And I am able to add applications galore. It comes with a built-in VNC client that I don’t like, but I installed the krdc application without a problem. I was even surprised that my Sprint USB modem worked without any issues. So now I can use it pretty much anywhere in the U.S.
iPhone App Development, Finally
So I just started building apps for the iPhone. This may come as a surprise to many, since I probably should have been building them from day one. But I was wary of the business side of things: complete control of the app store by Apple and the process of app approval. And I won’t deny that XCode and Objective-C were barriers as well. A quick look last year told me that they were a far cry from AS3, PHP and Lingo, the languages I’m best at.
But I got over it all and plowed into Objective-C a few weeks ago. It was slow at first as the book I was using put a heavy emphasis on controls and switches. After struggling with it, I realized that these were just like components in Flash, and I don’t use components. So I looked elsewhere.
I found a whole world of iPhone game developers using Cocos2d for iPhone to make games, and skipping all the NIB/XIB file stuff. After I gave in and decided it was OK to use a framework, things went a lot smoother. I was able to make things happen and got my first game all ready to go.
I worked out a lot of different things this first time around, like building menus, animating sprites, timers, etc. So the next game should go even faster.
Now I’m in that limbo of iPhone app approval. I submitted last Wednesday night, the 20th. So this is day number 8. I’m trying not to work on any more iPhone stuff until I see my first game in the store. I really want to get an idea of what it is like to have a game out there. Not only how much revenue comes in, but how much customer support is involved.
Google Releases Shockwave 3D Competitor
We may finally have a legitimate Shockwave 3D competitor. Google has released 03D. You can read about it at the Google Code Blog and visit the 03D homepage here.
Basically, it looks like the programming is done in JavaScript and the rendering is through a browser plug-in. In the past, this may have not seemed like a serious platform, but with JavaScript getting faster and faster as browsers compete, it certainly is viable. And the whole things is cross-cross platform in browsers and OSes, even Linux.
Plus, it looks to me like development won’t require any investment. Just code away using Web development tools or even a text editor. Models can come from Max, Maya, Google SketchUp, and possibly anywhere.
You can see some demos which show that it can compete in the game space.
3D gaming on the Web might be getting interesting again.
Massive Hard Drives Are Cheap, But Not Easy
Ever since consolidating my office and moving to a Mac Pro, I’ve been taking advantage of how inexpensive hard drives are. I’ve got two 500GB drives in the Pro, a Drobo with 4 1TB drives, an external 1TB drive, a 500GB drive hooked to my Airport Extreme, and several sub-500GB external drives.
This is great. I can store videos all over the place, load up lots of music and audio, have everything everywhere.
Then I start to think of backups. How do I back up all of this stuff and store it off-site? Almost impossible. Even if I have more drives to do it, it still takes a long time to backup 1TB of data, let alone multiple TBs. And a lot of the stuff on the drives is junk, render files and scratch files and duplicates. Backup programs don’t make it easy to do a selective backup.
OK, so new plan. I’m cleaning it all up. I want to end up with my two internal 500GB drives, one Time Machine drive, and one off-site backup. That’s it. Gotta sort through it all and organize. Gotta figure out which one is the Drobo — probably the Time Machine drive, though that is a waste. Redundant backup of my backup? Which also has an off-site backup? I’m not that crazy. But I’ve got the thing, so I should use it.
Director 11.5!
Once again, those that thought that Director was dead get proven wrong. Adobe just announced version 11.5 of the software, which seems to be a pretty major update. You can check out the official press release.
Highlights seem to be:
The price is $999 new, $299 for an upgrade. Due out at the end of March.