Apple

Last night, I upgraded to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, so I could start using OpenCL (for a school project). After about an hour, it was ready, and all my settings were still intact. Awesome!
I immediately executed a small OpenCL benchmark application I had found on the internet and voila, it worked!

I continued, attempting to build PyOpenCL. That’s a major pain, because I can’t get Boost to build correctly. But that’s another story.

While attempting to build PyOpenCL, I decided to run the other OpenCL demos I had found. And … all of them would oddly result in crashes. Inexplicably, even the initial OpenCL benchmark application I ran, now refused to run. Even worse, the open command now seemed to fail.
What was going on?

After asking around in #macosx a bit, the very helpful user KonaB1end offered some insightful guidance. Creating another account, testing it there, it all worked. So it was my account. Then I figured I could as well try starting a new terminal with an empty ~/.bash_profile file. And that fixed it all!
So clearly, there was something in my ~/.bash_profile that was causing this. But what?

It’s been almost a year since the last Apple Cinema Displays update. And that was just a price drop. So … what’s taking Apple so long?

If you’ve been following all things Apple a bit lately, you’ll definitely have noticed that they’ve been filing a lot of multi-touch technology patents. It’s already on the iPhone, the MacBook Air and on the MacBook Pro soon.
More interestingly however, it appears they’re planning on bringing it to the desktop too!

The last piece of the puzzle is the resolution independence technology. It was already available in Tiger, but only in preview(ish) state, i.e. very incomplete, buggy and unsupported.
In Leopard on the other hand, it’s an official feature. It’s not being marketed yet though. The reasons for that are two-fold: