The weekend after a big exam is always most enjoyable. I have a chance to catch up on email, projects, and best of all, play with my (new) computer. The “MacBook Pro”:http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/ is lightning quick: I setup “MySQL”:http://www.mysql.com/ and “PHP”:http://www.php.net/ to allow me to develop web stuff locally, and in using “phpMyAdmin”:http://www.phpmyadmin.net/ to peruse my databases, the query times were astonishing. Of course, my old 600 MHz iBook did the trick, but with two Intel cores running at 2 GHz, wow!

There have been some reports of display and sound issues. On the first, some have noticed a band of slight darkness near the bottom of the display. I have no such problem. In fact, this display and brightness is absolutely gorgeous. There are not enough superlatives to bestow onto my new computer to do it justice. With every new portable computer I have owned, the display has been brighter and brighter, and up until the MBP(MacBook Pro), there were still instances where it was not bright enough. That is, it did not match desktop LCD(Liquid Crystal Display) displays in their quality or light output. The MBP now claims to be as bright as any desktop LCD monitor, and I find this to be completely accurate.

On the second issue reported, “the sound problem”:http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=286970, I have become aware of it, but only after explicitly listening for it. Apparently, the sound, which is of a whining or high-pitched character, originates from the power supply. The sound is intermittent, but hardly noticeable.

To further test my new computer, I put it through the paces of running my custom-made AppleScript to resize photos from iPhoto and output them for my web site “photo gallery”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/photos/. This entails resizing to two different sizes and applying an unsharp mask filter to counteract the softening that occurs when down-sizing an image. With the iBook, this was a slow, arduous process. The MBP, however, performed swimmingly. Even though Photoshop CS was running under emulation via “Rosetta”:http://www.apple.com/rosetta/ (Apple’s PowerPC binary translation engine), it was still faster than my old iBook.

To round out this mini-review of sorts, I should mention the other goodies Apple gave MacBook Pro owners: built-in iSight camera, MagSafe power connector, Front Row and remote control. For the first, I have found the iSight to be of superior quality to the older, bigger iSights. Next, the MagSafe magnetic power connector is sturdy and works just as advertised: it pulls out when enough force is applied. As an example, just the other day, I was pulling my computer forward on my desk and the plug was stuck behind my desk, yet the MagSafe adaptor disconnected. Nifty. Finally, Front Row, which gives users a full-screen interface into their movies and DVDs, music and photos, is handy and fun to sit back and browse. I have found meda on my computer to which I was completely oblivious before running Front Row. Naturally, the IR remote will be nice during “Keynote”:http://www.apple.com/iwork/keynote/ presentations.

Go check out the “unpacking pictures”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/photos/macbook-pro-unboxing/ I shot of my MacBook Pro.

“Fresh View”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/projects/freshview/ for “Mint”:http://www.haveamint.com/ has been enormously successful. In review after review of Mint, Fresh View is consistently mentioned, and I have been very pleased with its warm reception by Mints users.

Still, software will be software and there is always room for improvement. With most of the kinks worked out with SVG and various small bugs already fixed, I noticed that most support queries (via email and the “Mint Forums”:http://www.haveamint.com/forum/) hinged on a single design choice that I made in writing Fresh View: the need for a writable directory. Granted, there is probably some PHP code that can automatically bestow the well known @775@ or @777@ permissions to said directory, but I did not wish to expend the effort figuring out how. I always felt that the need for this writable directory (to which the dynamically-created SVG(Scalable Vector Graphics) are saved) was clumsy and inelegant and rightly so, as there is no real use for an in-between file-system based copy of the graph. So, I inserted an instruction into the Read Me stating to @chmod@ the directory and the files contained therein.

With this move, I saw many users complain of various problems stemming from not having followed that particular line in the—albeit very simple—installation instructions. I softly urged them to @chmod@ the directory and would rarely hear from them again. I even updated Fresh View to include functions to verify permissions. I went so far to cover it up by adding new routines that I nearly convinced myself that the design problem was OK.

Now, I am pretty busy with medical school, but my perfectionist nature does not like to let users hang out to dry, so I never ignored any support requests. But after answering so many confused users in the forums and by email, the fact of my poor decision made early in the design process became abundantly clear, and a solution was in order.

Clearly, if I could eliminate the need to manually @chmod@ a directory and its contained files, I would stop the steady flux of calls for help. But why not kill two birds with one stone and fix the need to save files at all? This became my task, and “Fresh View v1.10″:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/projects/freshview/ achieves this vision. Using a clever, new combination of Pepper API and code to work around the need to call SVG (similar to placing an image in HTML) as if it were a file on the web server and connect the two (API and external file call) together, I succeeded in removing a burden from users’ proverbial backs (and mine).

There still remains some work to do, as my solution has a few limitations in that one of the following must be true of the user’s setup:

• @CURL@ library installed
• @allow_url_fopen@ must be set to true and PHP > 5.0.0

From reading on the internet, CURL is more efficient to pass a call from my external SVG file reference (a PHP script) back to Mint to request generation and return of the SVG file, but some users do not have it compiled into their PHP setup. So, I devised a backup system that uses @file_get_contents()@ instead, which is the origin of requirement number two above. Given that I must pass headers that contain the user’s Mint cookie (which is required to access the @onCustom()@ Mint Pepper routine), I have not figured out how to open a socket using other more common functions available in pre-5.0.0 PHP setups. If you can provide some advice, please post in the comments below.

In addition to the reworked architectural changes, I added new error messages that are displayed as SVG, which look pretty slick. Hopefully, none of you will ever have to see them.