Tag: Mac

Categories
Computer Science

Setting up your DEV machine in ONE script

Photo by Claude Piché on Unsplash

A new computer is great 💻🎉 – It’s a clean slate. It’s snappy. It’s great… but it is missing all the tools I rely on every day! My work requires me to jump around in a variety of tools and technology stacks, hence I need to install a lot of different tools and be able to support different development environments.

Existing package manager for CLI tools

Over time developers load command line tools like people are buying toilet paper these days. From maven, via tl;dr, stopping at kubectl to tmux. We use all of those little nifty tools. Hence setting up a new machine can seem scary task at times, but fear not! For CLI tools we solved that problem long long ago with Homebrew, or as you probably know it: brew
(The windows folks probably know Chocolatey)

You can install maven for example by running: brew install maven

Fear not! The same tool that installs CLI tools can install (almost) all our applications!

me

Brew can do more!

Continue reading “Setting up your DEV machine in ONE script”
Categories
Apple, iPhone, Mac UI/UX

Apple Music improvements for iOS 11

Apple Music is a cool streaming service, which I have been enjoying for a while now. Even though the service is well done, the integration into the Music App on the iPhone could be improved. With WWDC 2017 and iOS 11 coming up, lets look at what could change.

Some of my major issues and ideas on how they could be improved are:

  • In case of a poor network connection I would like to play songs that are on my phone. Therefore: Show which songs are on the phone vs in the cloud. I don’t really need to know if I “own” the song vs or if it’s a cached “streamed” song.
  • The custom stations are great, but sometimes I would like to add the one song. Therefore: Allow songs to be added to Up Next while listening to a station.  Stopping the station, playing the song and then restarting the station provides a bad user experience and is also confusing. Since I can skip songs in the station it would be great to also allow insertion of songs.
  • Nowadays a good search is the goto than browsing through thousands of songs. Therefore: Instead of having the search in a separate tab, just put it everywhere as a global search. Such as putting it next to the title or as pull-down.
  • Some songs are not available for streaming but can be purchased. Therefore: When searching, also include songs that are only available for purchase. It would be very useful to know about available purchasable songs and would prevent users of having to switch to the iTunes Store and search again manually.
  • Make Up Next (or another feature) more prominent.

Design proposal for improvements of Apple Music in iOS 11
Design proposal for improvements of Apple Music in iOS 11

What do you think about my ideas and suggestions? What would you like to see improved in the next version of Apple Music?

Categories
Fun

OS X Leopard – Performance Test

Yesterday I decided to run a small “performance test”, said test wasn’t scientific by any means but, I had my iMac open all 73 applications that were installed at the time.

Do not repeat this at home

Me, September 2009

My iMac is running OS X Leopard (10.5.8) and not the soon to be released Snow Leopard.

Procedure:

  1. Start screen recording
  2. Open applications folder
  3. Select all applications (cmd + a)
  4. Open all applications (cmd + o)
  5. wait… – a lot of it

The consequence was a dramatic wait of 40 minutes while my iMac was desperately trying to open all applications. From time to time I had to click away some warnings and messages, but in the end 73 applications were opened.

The interesting observation are:

  • while the operating system was indeed very slow, it actually did not result in a crash.
  • while the computer was busy opening all the applications it wasn’t possible to interact with any of the applications besides Exposé and Activity Monitor, of which the latter was rather responsive – especially when compared to the remaining 72 applications
  • the screen recording was captured successfully without any missing frames

The 20x accelerated video is still on YouTube to this date (though it has been flagged due to the music it contains). There have been still scenes, where nothing happened, which have been cut out of the video.

Video from 2019, opening 73 applications on an iMac running OS X Leopard

Translated in November 2020 – Article originally from 2009