I got myself a MacBook (got it three days ago), mainly to be able to work where ever I want next summer. As hardware I really like it. It has lots of nice small details like the MagSafe connector and battery charge indicator on the bottom of the battery. I also like it's size and all in all it's a good laptop. The only thing that didn't quite impress me was the fact that the iSight camera stopped working today. I had to remove the battery and reset something to get it working again. According to some googling I did, this doesn't seem to be a rare problem...

What about OS X then? Well, my first impression using it was quite nice. Power management and connecting to hardware wirelessly work like a charm and installing applications was easy. Otherwise I must say I didn't like it too much. I've been a Linux power user since 2002 and I'm used to having lots and lots of windows open. The fact that OS X makes a big separation between windows and applications was something I didn't like. Expose makes things a lot easier, but e.g. popping up a new terminal, when I already have some open is overly complicated to do via context-clicking.

Coding on OS X is something I haven't done much yet, but I'll say a few things about it anyway. Getting some *nix programs to compile on OS X can be hard.

Ardour was naturally the first one I tried. I started by installing Macports, which made installing some libraries easy. Still, since Ardour is not in Macports, I had to install every library separately, which took time... After a few hours of fiddling, I got the 2.0-branch to build, but I haven't had success with the 3.0-branch yet...

My next attempt was Crumbled Earth, which uses ClanLib. After a moment of trying I gave up. The main reason was lack of motivation, but again I would have had to do quite a lot of configuring and library installing to get ClanLib to compile. If somebody wants to play Crumbled Earth on OS X please tell me, and I'll give it a second shot. At the moment I just don't have the motivation.

As a conclusion I could say that if I had a large package repository for OS X, I would be very happy with it. I'll probably never have it on a desktop, but I might very well keep it on my MacBook. Some things will most likely start to feel more natural as I get more experience using OS X, but then again I'm quite sure some wont ;)

My school c++-project work was a game that uses ClanLib. I tried to show it to my friends, but it seems most distros don't have ClanLib version 0.8.0 available. The next obvious thing to do was to build a package with the libraries in it. I'm not quite sure I did it the best way possible, but at least I got the job done. This is how I did it:

Just built it like always, copied all necessary .so-files to ./libs and made a script for starting it:

#!/bin/bash
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./libs
./binary
(Where ./binary is your executable)

I spent quite a long time searching for examples on how to do this, but didn't find anything. Hopefully this helps someone...

Crumbled Earth is a two player tank game created as a school project work. It was written by a group of three, including myself. It is written in C++, and it uses ClanLib heavily. ClanLib is a cross platform C++ toolkit library with a primary focus on games. I was responsible for coding the sound engine, GUI, player input handling and random terrain generator.