[TriLUG] Laptops

[John Turner]

On Mon, Apr 15, 2002 at 01:55:42PM -0400, Mike Johnson wrote:
> John Franklin [franklin at elfie.org] wrote:
> > 
> > I bought myself an iBook.  I love it.  OS X rocks.  They claim a six
> > hour battery life, it's closer to five.  No PC Card slots, but there are
> > two USB and one FireWire, 10/100, modem.  The airport card fits under
> > the keyboard so you're not likely to snap off the antenna by setting it
> > down at odd angles.  The screen only does 1024x768.  The 14" screen is
> > very readable, tho.  
> 
> Veering dangerously offtopic, I'd like to toss in a vote for an OSX
> based laptop.  I -love- our TiBook.  The battery life is long and the
> screen is just insane (in a good way).  Note that 'normal' iBooks come
> with a 12" display that runs at 1024x768 (very usable - OSX text
> rendering is quite crisp), but that the 'big' iBooks come with a 14"
> display that also runs at 1024x768 (to your text is much larger,
> comparitively).  The batteries on all the current Apple laptops have a
> little button you can press (on the outside) that will light up a small
> LED bar to tell you how much battery life you have left (handy when the
> laptop is asleep or suspended).

I just started a new job and found most of staff were using Apple laptops
and as a developer it took some work, but I got them to get me a new
PowerBook and I love it. I am doing web development (Perl, PHP, Slashcode,
etc.). The OS X development tools (not web development) are the best one
of the best I have ever used (atleast when I used them many years ago
when they were on NeXTSTEP). Maybe if we get enough OS X users in the area
we can start trading OS X apps that we write. I am going to be writing a 
"Kentucky Derby Horse Betting" application next week. 

My personal wish would be for Apple to bring back the Windows Runtime
library that was once called "Yellow Box" and also to start shipping
a Linux Runtime library. It would be great to develop applications on
OS X and have them run on Linux. I am talking about using the OS X API,
but if you want to write OS generic apps you can always do that, but
the development tools are geared toward the OSX API.

John