Coty's Weblog

VT_ZFS in vnode.h!

Trying to capture the deeply geeky excitement of this in the title.

Wes Felter just pointed to this post on AppleInsider that references a new vnode tag type in vnode.h for Leopard.

Wait for it.

VT_ZFS!

Of course, we've known for a while that at least one engineer within Apple was interested in this, but the additional confirmation is still nice. I'd hoped that Time Machine was going to be all about ZFS, but it probably makes sense to let people keep their HFS+ partitions and have Time Machine, too. For me, though, ZFS—even without the eye candy—is more interesting.

I wonder if there is any chance it will be possible to boot off it.

Syntax enhancements in Objective-C 2.0

Oh, yeah! There's an Objective-C mailing list and source repository. Turns out those are pretty good places to look for details about syntax enhancements in Objective-C 2.0. In Objective-C 2.0: more clues, Dave Vasilevsky does a great job of summarizing what he found in while digging around in some Objective-C test cases.

Read the mailing list and peruse the code for complete details, but here an even greater summarization:

• Properties
• Optional methods in protocols
• Foreach syntax
• Weak fields (for GC)

Xcode 3.0 will have DTrace

So I guess I was so caught up in the whole Objective-C 2.0 thing, that I totally missed the inclusion of DTrace in Xcode 3.0:

Many such Xray instruments leverage the open source DTrace, now built into Mac OS X Leopard.

Thanks to Mike for pointing it out in his Xcode 3.0 post.

Sure could have used Time Machine today

How funny that I lose my beloved NetNewsWire tabs the same day the Steve lets the world in on Time Machine.

Wish I'd had it today. Hope Brent can get it integrated into 3.x.

BTW, Brent has released NetNewsWire 3.0d7: Super Early Sneak Peak, in case you missed it.

Anyone know what Objective-C 2.0 is exactly?

So, the Xcode 3.0 page mentions Objective-C 2.0:

So compelling, Apple wrote Xcode 3.0 itself using it. Enjoy modern garbage collection, syntax enhancements, runtime performance improvements, and 64-bit support. At your own pace, since it’s backwards compatible with existing Objective-C source. Write applications more quickly with fewer bugs using Objective-C in Xcode 3.0.

Anyone know details—particularly what the "syntax enhancements" are?

WWDC News: VMWare for Mac OS X - Finally

There was almost no doubt that VMWare would eventually offer their software on Mac OS X once Mac OS was running on Intel. Still, it took a lot longer than I'd expected. Today, however, VMWare officially announced it, and you can pre-register for the beta.

While we were without VMWare, Parallels released Parallels Desktop for Mac. I have heard good things about Parallels, and for the basics, it is arguably on par with VMWare. However, VMWare Workstation features such as snapshotting and cloning really take it to another level. If VMWare Infrastructure 3 is supported on the Xserve line, that could be a real boon to Apple in the enterprise. Support for VMWare ACE on Mac OS could do the same.

I really hope VMWare will go the extra mile and make VMWare for Mac OS do some special Mac-only things. For example, with Leopard likely being released soon, how about supporting Mac OS on a VM? It would be a shame if I could run Linux, Solaris, and Vista on Tiger, but not Leopard. Another nice feature would be the ability to import Virtual PC images. Oh, and AppleScript support for automation would be nice, too.

BTW, if you look at the Dock in the screenshot, you'll see the Parallels icon there.

Tragedy

So, the reason that I use Saft is that I am wont to keep lots of browser windows open. Consequently, it kills me when Safari crashes and I lose all my windows. Saft's crash protection helps with that. (Of course, I get screwed every time there is a Safari update and Saft quits working for me. Hence the pior post.)

Better and more reliable than Saft is NetNewsWire. NNW can keep tons of tabs open for me. It hardly ever crashes, and even when it does, it comes right back up with all my tabs.

At least until this morning.

I don't know how it happened. NNW didn't crash. I did close it yesterday to free up some memory, but it seemed to shutdown cleanly. However, when I fired it up this morning, it opened with the default feed list and some old set of saved tabs. It was horrifying.

Fortunately, NNW does periodically save your subscription list (in ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Backups), and I was able to recover a pretty recent copy of that. My tabs seem to be history, though. I know I would have never gone back to read many of them, but it still sucks.

Leopard Wish List: Proper Plug-ins Please

Ok, I'd really like to see LLVM, ZFS, DTrace, virtualization, and similarly geeky features in Leopard, but I there is something much more mundane that Apple could do that would be much more generally beneficial.

Please, provide stable, supported plug-in APIs for Mail, Safari, and Address Book. No more InputManger hacks, no more SIMBL, no more private plug-in APIs. I am sick of Saft breaking on me after every minor update. It is ridiculous that there isn't any official documentation of the Mail plug-in API. It is more ridiculous that there just isn't a Safari plug-in API.

The plug-ins are out there. Check out Pimp My Safari or Hawk Wings. How about some actual support now?

Boot Camp

Though everybody and their brother has already mentioned it, I feel I would be remiss if I didn't mention Apple's release of the public beta of their solution for installing and running Windows XP on Intel-based Macs: Boot Camp.

If you've been keeping up, you know that the challenge of booting XP on Intel Macs was overcome a while ago. (By some intrepid hackers at Voxify, it turns out.) That was a great for hackers. Boot Camp is going to make dual-boot something just about everyone can do. The Boot Camp feature that really makes it stand out to me as a more accessible solution is its support for non-destructive resizing of your Mac partition to make space for your XP installation. Oh, and the driver support won't hurt, either.

In the long run, though, I do hope that we either get something better than this. Something more like VMWare or Xen. Hoping Leopard might bring this. As Rui Carmo notes in his post, "rebooting is so last century."

NetNewsWire 2.1 Public Beta!

Woo hoo! After a long dry spell, Brent has released a public beta of NetNewsWire 2.1—and it rocks!

Most importantly for me, 2.1 gets rid of any discernible performance overhead for keeping lots of tabs open. I've currently got 448 open, and I'm sure I'd have more if I haven't been forced to prune periodically due to the delays having too many tabs open could introduce in 2.0. I'm sure I should get a grip and let go of tabs opened ages ago that I'll probably never get to, but I thank Brent for letting me work naturally—even if he is probably enabling.

A great new feature in 2.1 is support for NewsGator synching. I'd been getting along with the pseudo-synching available via Bloglines subscriptions in 2.0, but this NewGator stuff is much better. For one thing, you can just set it to happen for all your subscriptions (I've got 541 of those.), rather than just one at a time. I think the .Mac/FTP stuff in 2.0 probably did the same, but I haven't needed to synch. with another NetNewsWire installation. Rather, I've wanted to synch with a web/mobile phone accessible system. I'm still getting used to NewsGator vs. Bloglines both on the web and my phone, but I'm quite pleased with the synching process. I have seen some duplicates get loaded, but I'm betting those will turn out to be feeds without GUIDs.

Another new feature that I've been looking forward to is attention tracking and sorting feeds by attention. Now, it does sound a bit silly to ask an application to let you know what you're interested in, but I think it is going to be handy. I know my tastes change over time, but I don't have the time or the inclination to reorder my feeds based on that. I've flipped sorting by attention on briefly, but I want to let NNW collect a little unbiased information before I start using it in earnest.

Upgrading was a piece of cake. I did backup, but everything moved over without a problem. That has really been my experience with all my NNW upgrades—so much so that it is sometimes hard to convince myself to backup, but Brent always warns so I always do.