What's it all about, Alfie?

I couldn't have said it better myself:

While Apple sees only the upside of glossy screens—bright and vivid colors—I see only the negative—myself. Well, myself and whatever else happens to be above and/or behind me. All those vivid colors come at a terrible cost in terms of reflection and glare—there are times when the screen is nearly invisible, due to the glare from overhead lights or other sources of distraction (people walking by behind you and so forth).

I know that if the new MacBook Pro was in 17-inch and had everything else I wanted, I'd probably try to get by. But given that it misses so many of my key points, I'm with Mr. Griffiths - I'll hold off for now.

While I wasn't totally taken by surprise, I was really bummed out that they didn't update the 17-inch MacBook Pro today. While I can understand the merging of the notebook lines into a single, more easily managed product line, I have to say that the fear of losing the 17-inch MacBook Pro is very real to me, now. Very real.

This question made it clear that the 17-inch as it was is not long for this world:

[11:01 AM] Q: Concern about the glossy screens. Are you going to offer another option?

A: Steve: We're going all glass -- we won't offer another version. Phil: You offset the reflection by the brightness, and consumers love it. One of the great things about a notebook is you can turn it however you want!

From this, it's clear - glass all the way. I can understand why they do it, but I have to say that the line about being able to move the screen to remove glare is bunk. If that were the case, then they'd never sell a matte finished screen, which I know is not the case. So they are consolidating the line. Plain and simple.

Normally, I might not mind, but the problem is in the trade-offs. I wanted more in a laptop - quad-core CPU and 8GB RAM -- found in PC laptops should be available for the mobile desktop 17-inch MacBook Pro. The problem is, the 15-inch machine has different engineering trade-offs than a 17-inch where weight, and size, is not as big an issue. I mean face it... if you're carrying a 17-inch laptop, then you have expressed a desire for more features at the expense of size and weight. For the 15-inch, it just wouldn't be the same.

I'll admit, I like the trackpad concept. I can even probably live with the glass screen. But I am (probably) hoping against hope that they are going to update the 17-inch to have the same basic feature set and not discontinue it. Face it... the "Classic" iPod is on it's last legs as well... it's certainly understandable if they drop the 17-inch like they dropped the 12-inch Powerbook. Crud.

I'm still hoping they don't. I'd love to have a new 17-inch MacBook Pro with desktop power and a great trackpad.

UPDATE: I finally got into the Apple Store and checked on a few things. Seems the 17-inch -- even with the refresh, is not going to be around long the speeds available in the 15-inch are 2.53GHz and 2.8GHz while on the 17-inch they are 2.5GHz and 2.6GHZ - clearly a previous generation chipset. It's not going to be long before I know if it's refreshed or dead. Hope it's the former.

The latest rumors I've heard about today's Apple notebook event is that the new MacBook Pro is only coming out in the 15-inch display - and that's no longer available in matte finish - gotta be glossy. The 17-inch model will see only modest memory/disk increases and the speculation is that this model is being phased out.

If so, it would be a tragic turn of events.

For the serious professional wanting a portable machine the Air is nice and light - great for the CEO or someone not needing a ton of power or options. Perfect market. The 15-inch Pro is great for the mid-range developer or a developer with an external monitor at work, and only needs to use the machine as a laptop a fraction of the time.

But the 17-inch Pro was for people like me - no desktop machine, no external monitor - it was the "desktop replacement" and that was all I would need. I don't need the rumored fancy trackpad - but it would be nice... I don't need to have this thing be 2.2 lbs - it's OK at it's current weight. What I wanted was more machine. I wanted the quad-core chip with 8GB RAM and a nice big, bright display. This is my only machine, after all.

So if these rumors are true I'm really disappointed. It means that it's going to have to be a 15-inch Pro for me, and that means that I'll probably never get the quad-core chip as it's just not in the market segment of the 15-inch Pro. They wouldn't trade the power consumption for the processing power because most folks would already have a desktop that is where they do all their really intensive computing anyway.

So I'll have to wait and see what comes of the announcement today. Since they don't stream them anymore, I'll have to wait until it's over and then check the Apple web site and see what they have to say.

It was update time again! This morning I noticed on the web sites that it was time to hit Software Updates again and let it install the latest patches from Apple. I like that they do it as nicely as they do and if I have to reboot, then at least they package up all the updates into as few a number of reboots as possible.

Glad it's all patched up.

Amazing, but they did it. Apple lifted the NDA on all iPhone developers. Great. I guess the pressure worked. Good enough. I've already heard that the Pragmatic Programmers are back 'on' with their iPhone development book. Nicely done. I'm not in the market - yet, but when I am, it'll be nice to know these guys have a book that I can get as PDF and view on my MacBook Pro.

Well... that's been an unusually awkward period for Apple. I'm glad it's over. The Good Guys are better than that.

This morning I saw that Perian 1.1.1 is out, and I tried to get it. First, through the auto-updater in Perian itself, and then directly from the Perian web site. I was stunned... it took me several hours to get the update, and in the end the auto-updater was the 'winner'.

I was stunned. I've never seen a web site under such load. I may be trying to infer causation in a correlational study, but if they are getting hit this badly from an update, they might need to get a better hoster - or maybe get more donations because this thing is big.

I'll admit, I probably never see it in action - QuickTime just works and the plugin is just that - a plugin. But I have to say I'm impressed. Go get 'em guys!

I was looking at iTerm again this morning as a new version was released and I had forgotten that they had an option to remove the vertical scroll-bars on the windows and still have a scroll-back buffer activated by the multi-touch gesture on my MacBook Pro. This was a nice feature. So I thought - I wonder if it's possible with Terminal.app? Answer: No, not really.

I googled a lot of hits and all said they got it working, but I think they got it working on a previous version of Leopard - not 10.5.5, because everything they mentioned that 'worked' I tried and it didn't work. Not a bit. I looked into the nib file and no lock there, but I think I got a hint at the reason it's not possible any longer: Terminal.app allows the user to resize the window.

If you have that working, then there needs to be some 'area' or buffer on the right side of the window where the resize gadget fits, and if you try to remove the scroll bar, you run into trouble. Firefox 3.0.1 had this problem on Liza's MacBook Air - you need the status bar at the bottom to 'hold' the resize widget or you get into trouble. So the solution would have to be that if you didn't want the scrollbar, you'd have to remove the resizing widget and then the user may not easily know how to resize the window.

But that seems reasonable - and from what I'm hearing on the Google hits, it was working. It's too bad they took it out. Oh well... maybe in Snow Leopard they'll put it back - or at least use a consistent set of scrollbars for all windows.

This morning Apple released a new Software Update for Java on Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.4. For Leopard, Java is now updated to 1.6.0_07, 1.5.0_16, and 1.4.2_18 - all nice updates to their respective major versions. I haven't done any real code tests to see if it's that much faster, but it's an important development platform for me, so it's nice that they stay on top of the updates from Sun.

In the end - it's Java, what can you say?

"Necessary."

I was setting things up for Git and I came across the setting to have the Git 'merge' command actually pull up an external application - and in this case opendiff. I had always used FileMerge.app from my old NeXTSTEP days (it wasn't called that, back then, but it was the same tool), and loved the way it showed my differences in as concise a way as possible. It's really pretty impressive graphics work for a file diffing tool.

What I didn't know about was the fact that Apple had aliased the command-line opendiff to the FileMerge.app! Now I could easily use this diffing tool in all kinds of places. I was really jazzed. I do love working on this platform.

It's an exciting morning for me... I updated Liza's MacBook Air to 10.5.5 last night, and did my MacBook Pro this morning. I'll get to the kid's machines, and my iMac later. The release notes indicate "graphics updates" and I'm really hoping that the ATSUI renderer in MacVim is fixed, but I'm going to have to work with it to know for sure. Also, there were a few updating bugs in the visual appearance of BBEdit 9.0, so maybe these two are related. Be interesting to see.

One of the really nice things in 10.5.5 is the speed that the Terminal.app windows open and get a prompt. Historically, this has been a real stinker in my book. Probably 80% of the time I start Terminal.app prior to this morning, I'd have some - up to 70%, of the windows simply not get a prompt. It's annoying, and I don't understand why they hadn't fixed it. Well... it looks like someone else had this issue and the first restart of 10.5.5 was a perfect launch of Terminal.app. I love it!

I'll be seeing what's up with the changes as the hours and days progress, but what a nice shot in the arm. I can see that Snow Lepoard (10.6) is going to be a nice upgrade when they focus on all these infrastructural components and get them faster, better, and more reliable.