2006-05-11
It started with a simple problem: A user reported that ImageIngester crashed in the Preferences dialog on an Intel-based iMac. With thousands of downloads, mostly on the Mac, I thought it must be him, so I suggested he download a fresh copy and try again, but it still crashed.
Could he have been the first to try it? I know I didn't test it on an iMac. Maybe very few serous photographers buy iMacs, since there's no native Photoshop yet? Maybe it was crashing for lots of users, but he was the first who cared enough to tell me?
Well, since I want to be in the game, I decided to buy an Intel-based Mac Mini ($600) so I could reproduce the problem and fix it. Then I thought, why get a single-core CPU? And, isn't it better to get 1GB of RAM right away, instead of upgrading later and tossing out the 512MB card? That brought it to $950. I called the Apple store and had them hold one for me.
Scene 2. At the Apple store, I thought some more: The Mac Mini has no screen, keyboard, or mouse. I have spares of each, but nothing small and sleek enough to, say, put out in the dining room where the kids can get to it.
Hmmm.... an iMac is only $1300. Only 512MB, but I could upgrade it to 1GB without tossing out the memory card. Only $350 more. (Actually, I really started at $600, but I was pretending to have started at $950.) So, out I went with an iMac.
Is what Apple's doing with their stores completely legal? I can't get my daughter into a CompUSA when I have to visit one--now it was hard getting her out of the Apple store.
I almost bought a radio for my iPod ($50) while waiting at the register.
Anyway, I found the bug in just a few minutes. Turned out I was releasing an Objective C object that I hadn't allocated permanently. You don't release temporary objects. This has nothing to do with the CPU type--it's just that the iMac system software didn't like it, and the PowerPC software somehow didn't care.
(Thinking about it, I realize that I've known for a long time that testing on the same operating system on different CPUs is a great way to find bugs.)
What's next? Can you guess? Next week I'll tell you about running Windows on the iMac. That's not a joke! I hear the iMac is a terrific Windows computer.
As terrific as a Windows computer can be, anyway...