I am a multi tasker. I have a minimum of 5 applications running simultaneously. Exposé offers a beautiful solution to manage this mess. It has spoilt me !! Now I open even more apps and do not bother to close them. Ah the power of OS X in managing memory. These are the applications I was running when I took this screen shot.

Eclipse
Mail
Safari
ITunes
2 Text documents
Terminal
CocoaMySQL
2 Finder windows

Now when I have to switch between apps all I have to do is click my middle mouse button or press F9 or move my mouse to the left most top corner ( my choice ) – and everything zooms out neatly to this ( see screenshot below) – and I just click on the window I need. Fast simple easy.

OS X started small. Jaguar did not have much fancy stuff other than the eye candy gui. With a solid foundation built with Jaguar, OS X engineers started innovating on top of it. Exposé was introduced in Panther. Things are just getting started. On April 29th Tiger is being released. It will be a while before I lay my hands on it. Things are going to get pretty interesting in macworld. Longhorn is no slouch and I am eagerly awaiting for it to hit the market soon. I recently read that the new KDE is having some new GUI effects – linux/GNU developers have caught up with the mainstream OSes( Windows,Solaris,OS X) and now have started innovating. It seems it has a wobbly effect whenever windows are minimized,maximized. Gotto try it out sometime.

There seems to be a shareware app called Winexpose but its not GPU driven – where the graphical processing unit (GPU) takes care of doing such calculations and zooming out the windows. So the movement is jerky and buggy – if CPU load gets high it does not perform as expected. When I am building my java project machine crawls ( its a G3 800Mhz laptop – and ofcourse – its a mac 😉 ) but when I hit expose button it zooms out as if the machine is just sitting bored doing nothing.

Bottomline when it comes to exposé and because of it the productivity levels I reach :

Mac – 1, Rest – 0.

Heres a screenshot.

Starting today, I am going to write about how on a mac you can do more things. Of course you can do the same or even more in Windows – but you have to bend your back. I will examine each of the applications, tricks I enjoy in my mac – also to be fair will try to find equivalent application in windows and linux and review them.

Mac sets you free…!!

UML is like the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) for physicists – only difference is UML has been developed and is being used everywhere. I started this book a few days ago and I am hooked. I will be telling you some of the interesting things I discover in this journey.

As a briefer : UML defines nine types of diagrams

1. Class diagrams
2. Sequence diagrams
3. Collaboration diagrams
4. Object diagrams
5. Statechart diagrams
6. Activity diagrams
7. Use case diagrams
8. Component diagrams
9. Deployment diagrams

Incredibles poster
Originally uploaded by haikvr.

I remember 1992 when I saw Terminator 2 – I thought this is it – we have reached the end of graphics and imagination – nothing else can be made which can top this. 12 years later I want to laugh at that kvr who watched Terminator in awe.

Sangeeta and I went to the 12.00am show on Nov 5th to see Incredibles. There was a sparse crowd so we could choose our seats. The movie rolled and it looked like some ordinary cartoon movie. The movements were smooth, animation was amazing but still nothing ground breaking. You have to wait till the jungle scenes to realize Pixar’s prowess. The leaves and greenery were real. I dont know if they used real shots and mixed it with the virtual scenery – or they recreated it. I gotto wait for the making of Incredibles DVD to know how they did it. The greenery was real. The rocket, the buildings – I had to keep telling myself this is all CGI and its not real. Thats for the graphics and animation.

The story, humour, conversation, the contradictions in character’s minds, the thrill and suspense – this movie can compete with the last second thrill of Indiana Jones, or any James Bond Movie. An intelligent well made movie. I loved it and lapped it up.

So whats bad about this movie? A little bit long – not that I noticed – but I had a kind of itch when the story would drag on the pitiable boring lifestyle of our ex-superhero. My mind was waiting on and on for the action scenes to begin – and when it did I forgave my mini-grudge with all my heart. There were 2 scenes which stand out when I think of the movie. The chase of the kid – who can run sooo fast – and the instant when our kid discovers he can run on water – wow. It was like that instant when I realized am riding the bicycle without any support. The second when our elastigirl gets into a complicated situation. Difficult to describe this sticky situation – am just wondering how the screenplayer, story writer and director sat and discussed this scene.

Incredibles will be in the top 100 movies of my list.