This weekend we drove up to Raleigh for the simple pleasure of giving Apple, Inc. a handful of money. I’ve wanted one for over a year, but the timing or the budget just didn’t line up until now. We purchased an iMac last year as a “Shared Family” computer. Wrong. After 3 days, my wife decided it was hers and the rest of us were never to touch it.  Ever.

First Mac

I ended up getting the 2.53Ghz, with a 320GB HDD and 4GB of RAM.  I also purchased a wired keyboard with the number pad and a magic mouse.  The mouse is pretty good, like magic.  So far it’s been very easy to set up and use.

Now that I have the Mac I hope to take a little time to get to know the platform, try out some Obj-C, PyCocoa, and maybe try my hand at an iPhone app.  I’m very curious to see where this differs from my Linux platform.

If you want the play by play, here’s the Whrrl story to document my experience.

As someone who got the iPhone a couple of weeks after the launch, I was a little in shock when they dropped the price of the phones by $200 the other day.  I was very happy to see that Apple wants to make a concession to the early adpoters by giving us all $100 per phone.  I actually think the move is pretty classy.

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/

Even before the iPhone was available, people were complaining about its lack of an API for developing apps to run directly on the platform.  With the “Web 2.0″ movement already in full swing, I think the iPhone is helping to push the envelope just a little further.

I’ve seen clever implementations of web based remote desktop technology, but each required some type of ActiveX control or Java Applet.  Now take a look at WebVNC.  From the web site:

WebVNC is a modification of the VNC server. Where before the HTTP server in VNC would just serve a Java applet, now it serves an AJAX application that downloads the screen as a set of JPEG images. The application then checks back with the server to see which ones have changed, and reloads them. Input is just another message to the server.

The window list is done with Windows-specific functions, enumerating top-level windows and returning a list of their titles and positions. When you click one the VNC server activates the window and the AJAX app limits its window size to just the one window. 

I am going to try this out next week and see how it works.

Posting from the iPhone (as I am now) requires me to switch to the code view. I’m guessing that there is a lot of work to existing applications to modify the javascript to work with this browser. As far as typing out an entire post, although it’s not too bad it’s not something I would choose to do unless I was away from a machine for a while. My typing is getting decently fast in the landscape mode, so I think that this is a feasible option when I’m out and about.