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WWDC2011
By a happy coincidence, I was notified in time that tickets for WWDC 2011 had become available, and booked one – they were sold out in less than 9 hours! Even though Brazil now has an online Apple...
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Re: WWDC2011
My flight to San Francisco and WWDC 2011 leaves tomorrow night and I should arrive early in the afternoon on June 2nd. Friday and Saturday are mostly reserved for taking care of some private business,...
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Re: WWDC2011 (part1)
Whew. It’s over. This year’s WWDC was certainly one of the most intense – and one of the most promising – that I can remember. It started on a somewhat sad note: Steve Jobs was clearly unwell, moving...
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Re: WWDC2011 (part2)
If you missed it, here’s part 1. Now, as I said, hardware details are becoming interesting only to developers – and even we don’t need to care overly about what CPU we’re developing for, now that we’re...
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Perspective
A couple of friendly publications have asked me to write about the very recent passing of Apple’s former CEO, Steve Jobs. I refused. While some of the stories published in the past 24 hours are moving,...
View ArticleNew Cat in the Sandbox
In a surprise move by Apple, Mountain Lion (aka Mac OS X 10.8) was announced early and in an unorthodox manner. Their new infrastructure seems to be working well – I downloaded and installed the beta...
View ArticleRe: New Cat in the Sandbox
I had just published my previous post about Mountain Lion and Gatekeeper when Apple announced the third postponement of the sandboxing deadline for the Mac App Store, this time until June. This was...
View ArticlePlease stand by…
…while Apple catches up with sent-in FAXes. Yes, you read that right. In the meantime, RB App Checker Lite is momentarily off the Mac App Store. (It’s still normally available from the product page, of...
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Boom!
In keeping with recent meteorological themes – iCloud, Thunderbolt – yesterday Apple introduced the new “Lightning” connector for its mobile hardware. This will be the replacement for the venerable...
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Boom: A Follow-Up
This is a follow-up to my post about Apple’s new Lightning mobile connector. Thanks to all who linked or commented. Apple has since published mechanical drawings of the iPhone 5, iPod nano 7th gen, and...
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Boom: Teardown
This is yet another follow-up to my posts about Apple’s new Lightning mobile connector. The cool folks at iFixit have now published their comprehensive teardown of the iPhone 5. (Hopefully the other 2...
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Boom: Pins
This post has been updated several times (last update was on Feb.8, 2013); be sure to scroll to the end. One central feature of any connector/plug is the pincount. The ubiquitous AC plugs we all know...
View ArticleThe Mac Turns 30 (part I)
30 years ago, when the first issue of MacWorld Magazine came out – the classic cover with Steve Jobs and 3 Macs on the front – I already could look back at some years as an Apple user. In the early...
View ArticleThe Mac Turns 30 (part II)
[continued from part I] In 1983 I’d started working at a Brazilian microcomputer company, Quartzil. They already had the QI800 on the market, a simple CP/M-80 computer (using the Z80 CPU and 8″, 243K...
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The Mac Turns 30 (part III)
[continued from part II] This, my first Mac, consisted of: • a system unit with 128K of RAM, 64K of ROM containing the system toolbox and boot software, a 9″ black&white display (512×384 pixels), a...
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Interlude
I wrote the three posts below (The Mac Turns 30, part I, part II, and part III) on the road in South Africa. Here’s my updated map of visited countries (66 now): Connections underway were...
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Boom: Final Follow-Up
My 2012 series of posts about Apple’s Lightning connector was (and still is!) the most-visited material here on the Solipsism Gradient: over 120 thousand visits so far, and counting. Most comments...
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The Mac Turns 30 (part IV)
[continued from part III] So, here I was back in Brazil with my brand-new Mac 128. Of course, the first thing I did was to disassemble it — a tradition I kept up for almost three decades, until Apple’s...
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Swift: First Impressions
Over two weeks ago, Apple at WWDC announced something entirely unexpected: thousands of new APIs and a brand-new programming language, Swift. No hardware, of course; it’s a developers conference,...
View ArticleSwift: a simple Future
While doing research for my next Swift article, I implemented a very simple future class, which might be of interest: import Foundation func PerformOnMain(work: () -> Void) {...
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