operating systems

BeOS meets OSX
If you have any interest in BeOS or Mac OSX, you will be very interested in Tales of a BeOS Refugee: From BeOS to OS X (by way of Windows and Linux). Which is a long and thorough article comparing the two operating systems at length from the point of view of a person who was a Be die-hard. It’s excellent. And be sure to read the follow-up, Tales of a BeOS Refugee Redux as well, where the author responds to comments and corrections emailed by readers of the article.

I played with Be when it was still geared toward PowerPC machines, and it was a dazzling OS, really fast at anything multimedia, and now I play with OSX very much, so I really have an appreciation for this article. For anyone technical there’s a lot to like in the article.

Comment: This kind of article / interaction is precisely what the web is about. Commentary that turns into a Socratic dialogue where all participants (and spectators like me!) learn something in the process.

Ancient JavaScript Drawing Experiments
I remember doing lots of experiments with JavaScript when I was first learning it. One I had forgotten about was a drawing program I started in 1999. However, I wanted too high a resolution for what machines could handle then. It would always end up crashing browsers. In 2001 I dialed it back, and made it prettier. Still not really ready for prime time, and I never showed these to anyone. They can now be linked to from artlung.com/portfolio/draw. Recovering these is part of a wider effort to make my portfolio area make sense.

They are really not that impressive when compared to the stuff you can find at the 5k contest. However, I learned a much from these in trying them on different browsers and different operating systems and different machine processor speeds. I think these are a big part of how I am able to intuit how browsers will handle different amounts of scripting and complexity. I’m proud of them. For those which use PHP, I also provide the source code for each. So, check them out if you’d like.