tibook lust

bgeiger asked if the tibook was worth $500 over the ibook. I certainly think so, but I'd break it down differently. The G4 is only worth the difference if you're doing number crunching or graphics where altivec (and the much better gpu) will make a difference.

The real differential in my mind is the screen, which is much nicer and much higher resolution on the tibook than the ibook. It's not just physically bigger. In fact, I'd avoid the 14" ibooks unless you have poor eyesight; imo the major advantage of the ibook (aside from price) is the much smaller size of the 12" model. The tibook is wide enough you have to think about the bag you're going to put it in. And that of course widens the price gap.

Practicalities aside, I've long argued the 'sexy titanium case' is a perfectly adequite and reasonable justification for the price difference. Nothing to be ashamed of there. :-)

Speaking of, S recently expressed interest in getting one. We have the desktop system now of course, but it's slow, and we've not managed to set it up in a sufficiently ergonomic way. Plus, it would just be fun to sit on the couch together and workk side by side. We hunted around a bit and found a 6 month old used one for £1300, but it was the old model (lower res screen) with no airport (802.11b) card. We really don't like the UK keyboards, mostly because of the return key placement, so altogether a new one was more attractive.

Unless we find a fabulous deal, we'll probably wait until one of us goes back to North America to buy one. The approaching revision the rumour sites have bee n describing sound nice too.

London

We've been going to more shows lately, which is nice. Starting to feel at home even. Ironically, my cousin is here for the fall doing an exchange semester. We've not met up yet, but it should be interesting having family in such a 'foreign' town.

London needs emission controls. Yuck.

ghostscript

Ghostscript is shaping up for the next major release slowly but surely. The DeviceN (spot color and more-than-four-colour-printing) implementation was merged in a couple of weeks ago. That was the major feature we were waiting for for 8.0. (though I still think we should call it 7.5.) The bugs are starting to shake out now, and we're planning a 7.30 test release for the end of the week.

I'm still working on the native font loading, which I hope will go in, but most of this week has been taken up with general MacOS build maintenence stuff. I need to order CW8 as soon as I find my product number for the upgrade...

Nothing new on jbig2dec. I'd hoped the 0.1 release would get us some feedback, but so far I've only heard from one person, who was mostly looking for an encoder. Hopefully I'll have time to add more features soon.