| Jack Palevich's profileGrammerJackBlog | Help |
|
6/1/2006 I bought a Macbook to run Windows XPI am blogging this on my new Apple Macbook. I'm using Windows XP on Boot Camp beta. It's great! I was thinking about getting a Dell Inspiron 6000 instead, but the Macbook's style won me over. The Macbook is more expensive than getting the Dell on sale, but the difference is only a couple of hundred dollars, so for me it was personally worth the extra money.
So far the issues with using the Macbook primarily as a Windows machine are:
Apple will probably fix the delete key and right-click issues in future versions of Boot Camp.
I will say that I very much enjoyed playing with the included Mac software -- it's quite nicely put together. I especially liked these features:
I think Boot Camp is a two-edged sword for Apple. On the one hand it removes a huge barrier-to-entry for people who need a real Windows machine. Since that's such a large percentage of the public, I think short-term this is a huge win for Apple.
Long term, however, the picture is somewhat bleaker. Boot Camp means there is much less reason for nich or hard-to-port products to be ported to the Macintosh. The clearest example of this is games, because games have a short shelf life, and game users are technically savvy enough to install and use Boot Camp. But it also means business applications. It will be very interesting to see if Apple ever goes to a two-button track pad, as this is the last big hardware barrier to using their computer as a Windows PC.
I ported Dandy to F#I ported one of my old games from C# to F#. The result is here:
The F# code took much longer to write than the original C# code because:
The F# code is shorter, and most parts of it are extremely clear and easy to read and modify. Unfortunately, some parts of the code, that I copied and pasted from sample programs, are a mess of spagetti.
F# suffers from being a second-class citizen -- almost all sample code and documentation is written in C#, so in order to use F# you have to be able to translate from C# to F# in your head. This is difficult to do when you're learning the F# language -- it greatly adds to the F# learning curve.
The next logical step is to write a slightly larger, new game in F# and see if the benefits of F# grow with a larger code base. |
|
|