Its just a computer...

As you may know, if you've read these pages in the past, I have an iPhone which I think is now my most used piece of hardware.

I have a project in mind which may be totally spurious but, if I'm lucky, might prove to be a commercial success despite my Portugese pal's misgivings.

Whatever the situation I find myself owning not only an iPhone but also a Mac Mini upon which I have just installed the iPhone developer kit.

When I suggested this to some of my friends, the sharp intakes of breath were heard more than once and some suggested I had been enticed to the Dark Side while others suggested that I had instead gone to the Light Side. Well, my philosophy is that it's just a computer. It is a processer, a bit of memory and despite all outward appearance is practically identical to what I am used to using since many years.

My only misgiving is that the whole project is a bit of a distraction for me because I am also well aware of the fact that I am behind the curve on the WPF and Silverlight front; two technologies that my graphical leanings have made dear to my heart, and that as suggested by Conan Doyle via the proxy of Sherlock Holmes, I think that brain capacity is a finite resource with which we must be organised and not fill up with unecessary information.

My current attitude to the whole Mac side of things, remembering that the original Macintosh inspired me to become a professional freelance programmer and hardware designer in the first place, and remembering that I have also owned an IMac in the past, is one of pragmatism. I need one with which to fulfil a specific need, ergo I have one. It's no more nor no less than another sink in which to pour my intellectual resources, such as they are, and I have long been agnostic about far more philosophically important things than a few logic gates in a pretty box.

I can report that the out of the box experience has been excellent. Nineteen minutes from unsealing the machine to having it live on my network and configured for my e-mail. I also like the fact that it is small and very very quiet; which is not a huge bonus considering that this room has five other PC systems humming away in it.

Looking at the Objective C++ development system I can see I have a lot of head scratching to do. I will just keep in mind that the Program Counter is advancing over the machine code in much the same way as I would expect it to.