OSX 10.5 on a intel mac..

I’ve been very strongly resisting buying a intel mac for a whole host of reasons – the biggest one being that almost everything I do with my mac is music-related and I have literally thousands of dollars of software that I’ve purchased that will all have to be upgraded. However, one of my clients has loaned me a MacBook Pro, and I think probably I will indeed want to buy one of these, and upgrade all said software. OSX 10.5 is just sooo much better than 10.2 – and a Core 2 Duo does rather beat the pants off a G4.

I will, of course, have to make sure there are drivers available for all the obscure music hardware that I cable up to the thing. Since all of it is 4+ years old, the odds don’t look too great.. on the other hand, MOTU still sells the MTP AV, so at least that probably will be good to go. I don’t know about the 896es…

The biggest difference I see is actually thermal – where my G4 gets rather toasty, this machine stays cool as a cucumber most of the time. Of course, part of that might be that the things I’m doing with this machine aren’t CPU-intensive, where applying realtime EQ to 12 channels of audio at once probably is. 😉

Other things that I really like about it include the integrated 802.11n, the gigabit ethernet port (which my PC laptop doesn’t have – I keep meaning to pick up a gigabit card for it but it’s that new weird standard instead of PCMCIA)

Speaking of that new weird standard, does anyone know of ANY expresscard bluetooth adapter? My PC laptop doesn’t have integrated bluetooth, and I hate dongles sticking out of the side because you can’t throw the machine in the laptop bag with them still attached 😉

I also get to try to figure out how to load up my laptop bag with *two* 17″ laptops. Or perhaps I’ll just get another, identical bag.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand – OSX seems to be turning into a mature operating system. I’ve been learning about Xcode and objectiveC – and I’m starting to wonder several things:

1) Is every language migrating towards being event-driven and data aware? 😉

2) Is there a objective-C compiler for windows?

3) How long will it take me to master this language, and will I be given that time?

I’ve written things on my mac, but they’ve always either been console or tk. The idea of actually writing mac gui apps scared me – I’m resistant to change – but apparently it shouldn’t have. The mac gui framework seems to be *extremely* well documented. And while ObjectiveC clearly isn’t C, it also clearly is understandable – though I need to find a really good document on delegation on objectiveC because it’s clear that it’s going to be important, but for some reason the first docs I read on it failed to make it completely clear to me

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