Walker Software Weblog

I’ll keep this short. I got leopard, been using it for two days. Not as smooth an upgrade as Tiger was. My iMac did fine. My powerbook “lost” it’s airport card, which a little googling fixed. Overall I’m pleased. Not in love with the new look and feel (yet). Too dark. Glad “brushed metal” is gone.

Stacks doesn’t offer the “fan” option when the dock is used on the side. Spaces is kinda cool in that linux-had-for-years-but-not-completely-kinda-way. I’m sure if the visual navigation used by spaces hasn’t been copied into most linux window managers yet, it will be shortly. Time machine is kinda fun. Making backups fun will hopefully get more people to backup their data regularly. Most everything works, except svnX despite downloading it’s leopard update. Command line svn works fine.

Then there is Java. When the list of 300+ features included ~5 talking about iChat’s tabs and 0 about Java I knew it didn’t make the release. And you know what, I don’t care. I have a confession to make as a Java Developer and a Mac User: I hate Java desktop applications. IF they are done correctly, you may not realize your using a Java app, but 99% of the time you will. File dialogs that don’t jump to a file when you type a letter. Wrong fonts. Text fields that can’t spell-check. Drag-and-drop doesn’t usually work. No working “Services” of any sort. Cut-and-paste is hit or miss. Then there is the memory usage. I mostly use Java as a way to write programs on the OS I like for people who use another OS.

As a Java developer, the only Java programs I use are the ones I write, an IDE, and some tools for database management. Since I switched to mainly consulting, I use Java less. I don’t miss it. When Java 5 came out, I was impatient for Apple to port Sun’s JVM. Java 5 had a lot of language features I wanted to use. When Java 6 was released, I was still writing Java code daily, but the feature list wasn’t impressive. I decided I could wait. I can still wait.

Java 5 on leopard is rough. Leopard, in general, still has sharp edges. These will be fixed. Java will probably take longer than the rest of it.

Please no email regarding Java. I don’t care how upset you are and I already know I’m arrogant, so stuff it.

I was talking with a friend of mine last week we were both lamenting that we no longer draw much anymore. Most of my artwork is all done with computers now. It’s a shame because in high-school most of my best pieces were salvaged mistakes, many started in a completely different direction than the final piece. With a computer, the cost of erasing is so low mistakes never get saved and fleshed out. In a way, creativity thrives on limitations.

In high-school, I rarely ever sketched. I hated normal pencils, hated the sound they make when marking on paper. Coloring pencils never bothered me. I always used pens if given a choice. I’d draw in pen in my sketch book with no pencil lines. Didn’t matter if I was doing cross-hatching or stipple. If I needed color, I use coloring pencils or water-color right in the sketch book. If I liked something in the sketch book, I’d paint a larger version in acrylic on canvas. But most of the time, I wouldn’t bother with a small version of an painting. My art teacher would chastise me for making “finished works” in my sketch book.

Now, I couldn’t do that if my life depended on it. I’ve gotten so used to drawing with bezier lines, my hand drawing skills have atrophied. I’ve decided to get back in the groove and sketch (still in pen though) a small character or object on paper at least one a day. 3 or 4 times a months, I’ll take one of the better ideas an create a more polished version. That way, at the end of a year, I should 52 characters or objects they could be usable for a game, comic, animation, or whatever.