Dead Ink Vinyl

My MacBook Pro serves two purposes in my life. First, it is my personal computer — where I email, chat, tweet, and browse online, and where I write documents, edit photos, watch videos, and otherwise stay in touch. I want these functions to just work whenever I open the laptop. Zero hassles.

Second, my MBP is my development computer. Development computers get the snot kicked out of them. They are constantly in flux. Install the new Ruby; install the new Xcode; install the new iPhone SDK beta and the new Drizzle and CouchDB and LLVM. Update the new MacPorts and Homebrew and OpenPKG. Upgrade my git, hg, and svn. Try Erlang, and Haskel, and Hadoop. Then uninstall and reinstall some or all as needed. Eventually, I cross the beams and it’s time for a fresh start¹.

On the one hand, I crave stability. On the other, I’m pushing constant change. On the one hand, I have simple requirements that can be met with a simple, 1.5 pound portable device. On the other, I’m a power user demanding the biggest, the fastest, the most of everything in a 17” form factor.

I’ve tried various schemes to manage the conflicting requirements of these two modes of interaction with my computer. On occasion, I’ve completely lost my mind and try outlandish solutions such as dual booting or running my personal computer as a VM inside my development computer (hey, at least it was easy to backup). These solutions never worked because I often wanted to jump between both worlds quickly and effortlessly.

Then the iPhone came along. It was nearly perfect, allowing me to separate my personal computing from my development — in a package that was eminently more portable than my 17” MBP. However, the iPhone has certain constraints that require me to maintain a personal computing presence on my laptop. I don’t like writing long emails on my iPhone. Certain web sites are so poorly designed they must be viewed on a full computer². I can’t create content (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, diagrams) on my iPhone. Ultimately, the iPhone is a satellite device.

The iPad promises to be my dedicated personal computer. It promises to email, chat, tweet, browse, write, edit, and watch — all while just working. (And, might I add, from anywhere.) That frees-up my laptop to be a dedicated development platform that I can use and abuse without consequence.

I want an iPad to keep my simple personal computing needs separate from my developer computing needs.

¹ I subscribe to the Ripley school of developer workstation maintenance: nuke the entire site from orbit — it’s the only way to be sure.

² I’m not even talking about Flash — I’m talking about sites that screw up HTML that badly.

I got to spend a few minutes with the new MacBook and MacBook Pro in the Oak Brook Apple Store on Saturday. Visually, the new laptops are stunning. When they are closed, they look sleek, yet rugged. When they are open, the screen is brilliant — crisp, with fantastic colors. The glass does have glare, but I was unable to gauge how bad it would be in practice. (In truth, I do very little work on my laptop outside of controlled — or controllable — environments, so the whole glare issue isn’t high on my list of concerns.)

My wife doesn’t like the black keyboard, but I pointed out that it matches the black border around the screen. I only performed a little typing on the keyboard, so I can’t report how well it would feel to use for extended coding or writing sessions.

The “trackpad-as-button” was far more intuitive to me than I expected. My reflex is still to press at the bottom of the trackpad where the button is located on my MBP. All of my existing mousing and clicking gestures worked flawlessly, so the migration would seem to be painless for existing Apple laptop users. I then played with clicking and click-dragging the new way, by just pressing my finger down in-place to click. This worked exactly as advertised and feels pretty natural. I believe that I would find it very intuitive if I were using an Apple laptop for the first time and did not have preexisting muscle memory for these operations. The new gestures enabled by the design feel far more ergonomic and comfortable, so I believe I will invest the time to retrain myself when I eventually get one of these laptops.

Brad Larson of Sunset Lake Software and creator of Molecules gave an excellent presentation about OpenGL ES development for the iPhone at iPhoneDevCamp Chicago this past weekend. Today, he posted the non-NDA-breaking highlights of his presentation online. It’s an excellent resource for anyone starting out with OpenGL development. I find it very inspiring that someone can go from “I know nothing about OpenGL” to finished application in three weeks working only nights and weekends.

UPDATE: With the NDA lifted, Brad has generously released the source code for Molecules!