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Women and Dreams
- Thread starter mmphosis
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Eh, I read it. Not anything that hasn't been hashed out over the last 14 years that we don't already know or hasn't been covered a thousand times on YouTube videos & blog posts every time somebody gets one off eBay or from the thrift store. Then entire write-up can be summarized as follows: The G5 was short lived, it used a lot of power relative to todays computers, it was heavy/well built, and isn't the ideal computer for use today. I guess I just don't see why somebody feels the need to "review" old Macs every 3 months simply to inform people that technology has advanced significantly in the last decade and a half.
A bit of an odd write-up considering the review is mostly coming from the negative end of field. Considering the sheer length and detail of the write-up it's clear the reviewer is a closet PowerPC fan. Finding a way to publicly put it down, essentially calling it a useless piece of tech, but clearly admiring it in the process.
Why would you spend so much time writing about 14 year old hardware if you had no interest in appreciating it and how much attention are you going to get in an attempt to flame old tech with a 0.000001% computing user-base?
Why would you spend so much time writing about 14 year old hardware if you had no interest in appreciating it and how much attention are you going to get in an attempt to flame old tech with a 0.000001% computing user-base?
Seems like their logic was something like 'I love these machines, better write an article bashing them so less people will buy them and there are more for me.'
Holy shazbot that was long winded. Reminds me of a wife complaining about her husband after eating all the chocolate cake.
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I think all the negatives listed just make the industrial overdone nature of the machines all the more interesting. The liquid coolers, massive heatsinks, and air chambers make them so much more interesting than any other computers of the era. And that's my subjective opinion, maybe I'm just not under any delusions of what the machines are.
Agreed. The way they’re engineered is what I find fascinating about them. I’ve never seen another computers guts put together like a PM g5 is put together anyhow. I kinda wish the MP kept the clear plastic airflow thing even if they didn’t need it.
Coolest room heating cheese grater I own
Coolest room heating cheese grater I own
My 14y/o 1st gen “Flagship” G5 is kicking along well to this day. I’ve been coding on it extensively and moving my Xcode projects between the G5 (Tiger) and my Mac Pro (El Cap) is a seamless experience.
Nothing wrong with the G5 at all in my opinion, it all comes down to how you intend to use it.
This particular Mac has undergone several major transplants (logic board, GPU, CPUs and RAM). But it’s still alive and well
Nothing wrong with the G5 at all in my opinion, it all comes down to how you intend to use it.
This particular Mac has undergone several major transplants (logic board, GPU, CPUs and RAM). But it’s still alive and well
Was meaning to ask you Aphotic, I've tinkered with coding in the past. Mainly C stuff, and a bit of Linux kernel hacking but nothing to serious. And I know this is seriously off topic but are there are good coding tutorials for PPC era Xcode and such, or even books. I've always been meaning to dig into some stuff and tinker a bit.
I previously had a career as a solo indie web developer between 2005 and 2011, where I taught myself the usual web based scripting languages. Most of my work was with procedural PHP and Javascript, with some C and Python experience, so Object Oriented Programming (OOP) was all new to me.
After more career changes, I decided earlier this year that I wanted to expand my programming skills and become a real Mac OS X developer. Here's what I read to get me started (in order):
- Learn C on the Mac: For OS X and iOS (2nd Edition) - Dave Mark
- Learn Objective‑C on the Mac (1st Edition) - Mark Dalrymple
- An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming (3rd Edition) - Timothy Budd
- Cocoa Programming (1st Edition) - Daniel Steinberg
- Cocoa and Objective C Cookbook (1st Edition) - Jeff Hawkins
- Programming in Objective C (5th Edition) - Stephen G Kochan
- Cocoa programming for Mac OS X (4th Edition) - Aaron Hillegass & Adam Preble
I know Swift is supposed to be an easier entry-point, but at this stage and considering my interest in supporting PowerPC, I felt it was necessary to learn the fundamentals (Objective-C) before migrating to a more modern language. Plus, much of Swift makes sense once you get a handle on Objective-C. Apple have done a great job evolving these languages and bridging the learning gap.
The good thing about the printed books (and some select eBooks), is if you get something published between 2008 to 2010, you'll find they mostly cover Tiger and Leopard. However, more recent ObjC books can be mostly adaptable to previous generations of Xcode and vice versa with old code on the newer platforms. You'll find that the Objective-C editions are also very cheap now that much of the industry has moved across to Swift.
There are lots of useful online guides and tutorials, I found this one handy for Panther and Tiger-specific topics:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming_Mac_OS_X_with_Cocoa_for_Beginners
Depending on the scope of your ideas, there are many subjects to learn beyond the basics, including Core Image, Core Animation, Core Data, Core Audio, OpenGL/Metal and then there is of course iOS. Get a handle on Cocoa and you'll be able to work with any of it.
Finally, with every version of Xcode, Apple have done a commendable job of documenting every aspect of Cocoa and Objective-C. If you have Xcode installed, go into the Documentation (from the Help menu) and get started with the Objective-C primers, Human Interface Guidelines and many, many other topics covering how to make things work as Mac users would expect.
-AphoticD
Thanks, I know there are a lot of books like this for sale from the local public library since most of these are considered out dated. So I'll look there and then Amazon since it's amazing how many used books are there.
I know it takes lots of dedication, when I used to code for hobby I was constantly reading something new or working on things to push my knowledge and skills.
I know it takes lots of dedication, when I used to code for hobby I was constantly reading something new or working on things to push my knowledge and skills.
@AphoticD is there a specific reason why you didn't go for the 1st edition of Learn C on the Mac ?
Just wondering wether I should buy the newer one, the older one or both
It wasn't much of a conscious decision, other than being the cheaper option (Amazon) at the time. Just browsing through it, the 2nd edition is updated with references to Snow Leopard, the Mac App Store, Xcode 4 and other things post-Leopard. I had no trouble adapting to it back to Leopard and Tiger though as the teachings are mostly universal for OS X and Linux/BSD.
I followed on with Learn Objective‑C on the Mac 1st edition, which was Leopard-centric as it was the new OS at the time of publishing, so there's a real push for Garbage Collection over manual memory management. Garbage Collection was since deprecated in Mountain Lion and replaced with ARC, along with LLVM/Clang over GCC since Xcode 4.2/Snow.
Personally, I preferred the idea of learning manual memory management and then sticking to it. At least this way I feel I have an idea of what's going on with the allocation/retention and deallocation of objects. The way I see it is like learning to drive stick / manual over automatic, you can always switch to auto at any time, but you'll have an understanding of what's going under the hood and won't treat the automatic transmission recklessly
I'll take a look too. Thanks