tigerbears!

As a followup to my post on comparing ’10 and ’11 MacBook Air benchmarks with those from a ’10 MacBook Pro, here’s the scoop on the latest addition to the Mac family at the tigerbears Secret Lair: A Mid-2011 Mac Mini Server.

The role for the Mini is to act as a file, Time Machine and media server (yes, I’m still behind on WWDC videos) as well as a repo host and CI platform. Distributing builds will probably come in handy from time to time as well. Since the ’11 Air is fast enough to replace my old MBP rather than supplement it, the little Mini’s a perfect solution for having extra CPU and bits available on tap.

I went with the Server mainly for the extra CPU juice and hardware for a dual-internal-drive setup. (There’s room for a second drive in all models, but the teardowns I’ve seen show the non-Server models are missing a second drive cable and bracket to keep the second drive positioned properly.) Another configuration would probably work as well or better for the money, but I wanted to put the SSD RAID array from my soon-for-sale MBP to good use.

I was hoping to simply drop in the array and reinstall Lion Server from the restore partition on the boot drive that came with the Mini (from an external enclosure), but that didn’t work out. This was complicated by the fact that the Mini Server comes with a special build of Lion (11A2061) and won’t boot from Lion GM (11A511). Note that the current 11″ Air comes with 11A2063. Hopefully we’ll all get on the same page with 10.7.1, but this may have something to do with the Mini Server having Lion Server bundled with it – Lion Server does not show as purchased in the App Store after completing setup, as iLife does with current Macs.

Immediately after attempting to install to the RAID array, the restore partition got into a state where, upon each reboot, the “Installing” screen would display, followed by an error message stating that I should reinstall. (Either this particular flavor of installer didn’t like that the target volume had a build not OK for this Mac, or didn’t like installing to RAID0? Whatever the cause, “wedged” was the result.) Unfortunately, there was no way to get back to the installer. This was the case even after blowing away my RAID array.

Since the original restore partition was misbehaving, I really wanted to have at least one that would work with this new machine and split the SSDs up into a good ol’ JBOD configuration. But first, I needed to get a good installer. (As nice as the inner workings of the Mini are, I really didn’t want to take it apart again and – gasp – revert to spinning rust after spending cubic $ on silicon last year.)

After earning Comcast’s wrath from repeatedly downloading the Lion installer, I was eventually able to extract the downloaded BaseSystem.dmg, booted from the original boot volume (still in an external enclosure) and used BaseSystem.dmg to successfully install to my new SSD boot volume. Joy! (Using the downloaded InstallESD.dmg as I’d first hoped didn’t work for me, but frankly I don’t remember exactly why. Should’ve taken notes; it was getting a little tense.)

So, after that bit of excitement, how does it run? Uh, yeah. Fast. Nice and fast. NovaBench and Geekbench scores are below. I’ve seen significantly higher Geekbench scores for this model out there; they were probably using the 64-bit version, and this Mini did have a few minor processes running. Again, this is just a basic guideline.

And the good word from Geekbench (32-bit, 64-bit scores are higher):

Same anemic video scores as the previous tests, but I’m not worried about that. Flying through operations while sitting unattended in the corner is the goal, and the new Mini Server is pretty beastly for the money.

There are two things my friends tease me about (to my face): I have abnormally broad shoulders and upgrade my Macs far more often than seems sane or reasonable.

I disagree, about the Macs at least. When you’re compiling code all day, throwing shiny silicon at the problem pays off quickly, so I tend to flip hardware every year or so. (Having recently gotten into Mac development, I do keep some older hardware around for testing on slower gear and an “old” OS like Snow Leopard.)

My typical rig over the last decade or so has been a whatever’s-current 15″ MacBook Pro, though since 2009 I’ve been supplementing that with a MacBook Air to make life easier on my thoroughly jacked-up neck. The ’09 with SSD was anemic but serviceable, while the late 2010 model (I went with an 11″) is a pretty decent machine for most tasks.

That said, having more oomph would have been nice, and 128GB of storage gets really cramped when you’ve been dual-booting Lion and Snowy with all nine thousand versions of Xcode installed.

Thankfully, the Mothership delivered this week.

As a bonus for those of us lacking hardware patience, many Apple Stores are stocking the full-meal-deal versions of this week’s new Air variants, so I scooted off to Palo Alto with desperate hopes that the “hot ticket 11″ Air is in stock” and “get home before my BTO order ships” checkboxes in my future were marked favorably.

Success! So, well, what’s new? New CPU, Sandy Bridge, Thunderbolt, larger SSD options, and backlit keyboard are the headlines, but what does all that new shiny get you? With three Macs, all freshly updated to Lion, and NovaBench pulled down from the App Store, let’s play …

I have no idea how NovaBench computes its scores, but we can use them as a loose guide. (Oh yeah, for the purists: I did kill off my various helper apps and any processes I could easily restart without a reboot. I did a few runs of each, the posted captures aren’t exact averages, but are decent representations of an average. Ballpark figures are good enough for these purposes. You may get different numbers.)

First, the 2010 MacBook Air. This is the 11″ model with a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB RAM and the 128GB SSD. Until recently, it was my favorite Mac of all time.

Not shabby for a scrappy lightweight. Note that it uses the NVIDIA 320M GPU.

Now, for the new shiny, the 2011 11″ MacBook Air with 1.8GHz i7 CPU, 4GB RAM and the new 256GB SSD:

OK, now we’re talking. Sandy Bridge is really hauling here. The RAM’s clocked a little faster (1333MHz rather than 1067MHz) but throughput is 3.5x greater. CPU operations are flying, and the SSD is much faster on writes as well. (I don’t have figures on reads handy.)

Note that the 3D performance took a big hit; the integrated Intel graphics is apparently no match for the older NVIDIA gear. Personally, I don’t care about 3D on my Macs, what gaming I do these days is on a PS3. Of course, this means Xcode 5 will go to a 3D interface. In October.

I was expecting a substantial boost in performance, but seeing the figures in person was something else. The improvement was so great that I gave my “main” rig a spin. It’s an early 2010 MacBook Pro (6,2), the 15″ model with 2.66GHz i7 CPU, 8GB RAM and two 240GB SSDs from OWC running in RAID0. (Overkill is my middle name.)

Even though I’ve run these tests on this machine before, I’d forgotten the scores and was surprised to see how comparable the tiny Air was. Sure, the latest Sandy Bridge MBPs positively fly, but this is still a pretty sweet machine.

While the MBP gets a better RAM “score” for having 8GB of glory, it’s still blown away throughput-wise. CPU ops are also a lot closer than one would expect by simply measuring GHz. This shouldn’t be a surprise, of course, but it’s always fun to see results like these.

Do note that the discrete GPU is turned off – I’m getting occasional panics when they’re on under Lion and whatever funk is going on in the video driver crashes NovaBench then as well. (Radars / reports will be forthcoming.)

I also ran all three rigs through Geekbench (32-bit), where the 2011 Air actually came out on top. Here are a few screengrabs:

2010 Air:

The 2011 Air:

And, finally, the 2010 MBP:

Scores are one thing, though, how about working?

Around these parts, work is compiling, and compile times for some relatively small codebases matched up with the above reports. Compiling and running Objectify (An indie’s shameless plug: it’s a Mac app for developers which generates Objective-C source for Cocoa classes based on JSON content) on the 2010 Air takes about 20 seconds. The 2011 Air and 2010 MBP regularly clocked in at 8.2 seconds, give or take a couple tenths. Same project, same fresh Xcode 4.1 install.

Damn.

With these sorts of figures reflected in real-world performance, I’m seriously rethinking my Mac stable. I have a Cinema Display for tasks needing a larger workspace (hello, iPad Simulator), so that works out. 256GB of storage is still relatively cramped with all those WWDC videos in the ol’ iTunes Library, but flipping the MBP on Craigslist should still cover a low-end Mac Mini (as an iTunes host and file/media server) and most of the new Air … my new favorite Mac of all time.

Today’s one of the most-anticipated days of the year for a Cocoa developer: WWDC was announced. The annual meeting of the minds (and livers) is a touchstone for the community that gets a lot of us thinking like Ralphie from A Christmas Story. The excitement, lack of sleep, good cheer and wonder at what Steve will leave for us under the New API tree is our Red Ryder BB gun. (The WWDC app is the compass in the stock.)

It wouldn’t be a community without a little kerfuffle, though.

@SteveStreza: And don’t spend $1600 just to go see the keynote. If you’re not a developer, this isn’t the event for you. #wwdc

Colin Barett has an excellent followup.

I’m with Colin on the topic of inclusion. Your pass, your purpose. We’re not well-served by litmus tests or their ilk, and WWDC doesn’t stand for Won’t Waive Developer Criteria. We don’t have a place discouraging anyone from learning more about our craft as developers.

While a pure marketing head probably isn’t so interested in the details of a new API, there have always been sessions they could find useful, and getting a summary of the new hotness (this is not always just on Monday) could prove valuable to them. That goes triple for a product manager.

Similarly, there’s a great opportunity for cross-pollination of ideas. It’s a cornerstone of Mac and iPhone development that a good developer needs to understand design, product development and marketing1. I’ve found it’s just as important for good designers, product managers and marketers to have a good understanding of engineering and development. WWDC is an perfect opportunity for those who wish to take advantage of this.

That said, though, the folks who descend on Moscone West just for Monday (often just for the keynote) take up spaces for later in the week that someone else could have used. (WWDC sold out in just about a week last year.)

OK, I finally got around to updating tigerbears.com so that it reflects my iOS consulting business rather than a particular app. I certainly wouldn’t call it ‘done’ (what site is?) but at least it’s more accurate now. Frankly, between client projects and getting married I’ve just been far too busy over the last 18 months to have given it the attention it deserves! Ah, the life of a hired gun …

There’ll probably be some noticeable design discrepancies between the blog and the main site until I can spend the cycles on tidying things up around here.

I’m still evaluating whether to make this blog visible from the main site; the ol’ calendar for the next six months or so is shaping up to be quite busy as well, so I won’t yet commit to keeping this blog updated in the near term. I’m leaning towards not doing so because almost all of what I’m working on at any given point is covered under one NDA or another, and I’d rather err on the side of staying silent rather than accidentally telegraph what a client may have in store for future releases.

OK, everyone and their Mom has a great set of WWDC tips out there. Three of my personal faves are from OG’s Jeff LaMarche, Marco Arment and Jiva DeVoe.

Michael Jurewitz also recently tweeted, “Hey #wwdc attendees: Bring your development iPad/iPhone and provision it with your MacBook/MacBook Pro. This cannot be emphasized enough.”

The small additions or reinforcements to the consensus I’d make are few, but they helped me a great deal last year.

SubEthaEdit. Worth repeating. Note-taking was actually fun and other contributors could fix / explain any errors you may have made. (There’s usually one or two folks just trying to capture as much info in as possible, and the rest clean up.) A few times, someone would ask a question in the notes, and another participant would chime in helpfully as a little backchannel. Even if you’re not familiar with the particular APIs, or even programming in general, you can earn your copy of the notes by helping with formatting and other bits. Invaluable.

Be cool about power. Bring that long extension cord for your MB*’s power brick. Outlets are a scarce resource, and you don’t want to be the guy taking up three plugs with your shiny white wall wart. You’ll also be in range of more power strips. Note that the layout and availability of power strips may change from time to time.

Say hi to and thank the presenters. They’ve put a lot of work into making WWDC a great experience for us. Since we’re all very polite and considerate people, I’m sure we’ll all do our best to show them love when given the chance, but remember put a little extra effort into doing so at the end of a session that hit the little red “turbo” button on your brain.

Prep to go wired at times. Imagine that Apple releases some software during the event. Let’s say … development software. Maybe it’s a beta and you will not want anything in the way of trying out the new hotness with everyone else.

These packages can be fairly large and would make the WiFi network cry plaintively in the corner. My memory is too hazy to recall if these downloads were blocked over the air last year; but be prepared for that kind of situation. I’ll likely be toting an Air and will be double-plus sure I’ve got my USB Ethernet adapter. (That Apple has mentioned this as well is a compelling argument on its own.)

Lunch and munch with randoms. Maybe you have a posse rivalling Gruber’s or the legions surrounding The Palmed One™. Probably not. You, too, can be awash in exuberant developers, even if you’re starting from scratch. (Hot tub not required.) Just about everyone will be cool, and this is probably the best chance of the year to have your mind blown by a brilliant new friend. Try not to use up all of those opportunities by working quietly in the corner unless you really really prefer to chill that way.

Hydrate and medicate. Water, amigos, water. Wash yer mitts. Vitamins. Electrolytes. Get some sleep. Your brain and your body will be taking a substantial toll over the week and you don’t want to peak too early. Sugar bombs all week long probably won’t help you much … but personally, I can’t resist the brownies.

See you at WWDC – and introduce yourself if you spot me running around. I usually wear a tan LaRue Tactical ball cap and will be smoking too much between sessions.

After over six months of off-and-on development, Tallies, my first public iPhone app, is available on the App Store!

Details about Tallies are available here, or you can go right to the App Store. It’s $2.99.

On the surface, it’s a fairly simple app that, surprisingly, lets you keep running tallies of pretty much whatever you want. There have been a number of similar apps in the wild for a while, but they were all missing a critical ingredient: history.

What I really wanted to be able to do with these apps was to not only know the current total for a tally, but I also wanted to know when it had changed, and by how much. I also wanted to be able to start a tally over, but not throw away the old information. For example, I wanted to keep track of my various medications – how much I’d taken so far that day, and at what times I’d taken them – on a day-to-day basis and compare one day’s results with another’s.

I figured I couldn’t be alone, so, well, now there’s an app for that. Customer feedback has already been absolutely fantastic, and I’m looking forward to the next releases!

Big thanks to all of you who have used Tallies. Please don’t be shy about sharing your thoughts. I don’t think it’s possible to write great software without great user feedback, so any ideas you have would be a great help.

Cheers,

Bill

Development Notes:

Early on, I made the decision to go with a SQLite database rather than just a bunch of plists. This added quite a bit to the development time, but I think it’ll be worth it in the end. I have a lot of ideas about how to evolve the history features of Tallies, and the database should make that go a little easier. Plus, hey, it was good experience.

I’m sure a few folks would look at the development time involved and wonder how a counter app isn’t just busted out over a weekend. The answer, my friends, is iteration. The release version of Tallies is probably the fourth iteration of the app! This may be a holdover from my time as a web developer, but I’m a big believer in rapid iteration, and I applied that approach to Tallies. It’s assuredly cost me sales (it would have been nice to release months ago!) but I traded that for a much higher-quality release and learning some great stuff.

Hey everyone,

tigerbears.com is rising from the dead! Is it the Solanum virus? Did an asteroid pass too close to Earth? Are we in the Matrix with George Romero and Max Brooks at the helm?

No. But after working on Tallies for iPhone (and iPod Touch, natch) for the last several months, and with its imminent release, I wanted to update things here. I also have a few things to share about that development experience that I hope will be helpful to other developers.

I’ve taken the opportunity to update the About page. Just to save you a click, here’s the contents:

After a brief burst of activity in 2007, this blog fell into disuse. “There are many like it, but this one is mine.” 

Once upon a time, I was a primarily a front-end web developer. Javascript and Java, all day long. I spent about nine years as senior UI engineer at Netflix and quit in late 2006 to do the indie consultant thing. Unfortunately, after just a few weeks, I ran into a few medical snafus that slowed me down for over a year. (Don’t let your neck get screwed up, kids, because collecting MRIs sucks.) 

Now, nobody *really* likes the old lemons-into-lemonade spiel, but this is one case where it came true. It was a great opportunity to put things into perspective and look for a new path.

Apple provided that path by releasing the iPhone SDK in 2008. 

Not having a C or Objective-C background meant that I had some catching-up to do, but I have to say I haven’t been this excited about slinging code since my first forays into Java back in the day. (That was using the Cocoa-Java bridge, even … maybe on OSX 10.0 DR3? Later?) Learning Cocoa was something that has called to me for a long time (when it was NeXTStep, even) and I’m stoked to have finally taken the plunge.

Now that Tallies, my first public iPhone app, has been submitted to Apple, I hope to have a little more time to share some of these experiences. *cough*

Besides code, I’m into film, zombie fiction, and motorcycles. My bikes may be trapped in the garage for now, but your spirit never really leaves the racetrack.

Cheers,

Bill

Pete Forde’s presentation on Jester is blowing my mind. I am totally going to steal his approach.

More to the point, this is a incredibly cool technology, and the presentation is coming with a great implied mini-tutorial on a few Ruby basics. Most appreciated was the realtime code demo. Seeing the database get modified by simple commands in Firebug’s Javascript console was a real “Aha!” moment for a bunch of us who like to see things before we believe they’re easy. :)

I think Jester will work well for this game idea I have. Definitely one to research and try out.

Something else that I thought was interesting was when Pete noted that we, as developers, often “aren’t creating for people anymore.” I’ve had a few conversations like that around here in the last day or so, and it’s about time that we start taking that idea even more seriously. Fortunately, it seems like more and more of us are at least thinking about it, but I think there’s still a lot of unrealized opportunities out there.Hm. More on that when I’m not posting via iPhone. ;) Thoughts?

Did I miss something in the opening talk, or is there no WiFi available … at an Ajax developers’ conference? I was looking forward to posting and reading more live updates. At least Bill Scott’s anti-patterns talk is interesting, and his book based on it will be cool, I’m sure.

Day One at Laguna is done; I won’t be back until Sunday for the main event, but thanks for putting up with a few fairly sorry photos, a sketchy post format and a lot of noise if you’re not into the bike thing. I wanted to get some practice with my mobile-fu before TAE next week, when the pendulum will swing towards geeks with stars in their eyes, closures on their minds and drinks in their hands.

Mobile posting with my iPhone via Postie worked out pretty well for quick ‘n dirty stuff, though I made a few mistakes while trying to post to multiple categories. The iPhone’s camera isn’t exactly a swanky Nikon, so it took a lot of practice to time my shots to compensate for shutter lag. Not easy when your target’s only visible for a couple of seconds before your shot, and is often at a very different speed from the last time you saw them!

With the crowd at Laguna, I think the cell towers were pretty overwhelmed, at least from an data standpoint. I talked to the guys at SanDisk, who were having trouble with their broadband cards, so I wasn’t alone. I had plenty of signal, but it took a while before I could get the messages sent. Fortunately, I was able to grab a seat in the shade at the Ducati Island hospitality booth so I could geek out for a few minutes in comfort. Bonus: I can type much better while I’m sitting; walking just sends my fat fingers everywhere on that keyboard. Don’t even mention the jostling or risk of knocking over a $20,000 custom bike. OK, so I missed the fashion show, but I’ve seen bored two-bit models prance around awkwardly on a makeshift stage before. I’ve even done that myself, once, so call it professional courtesy.

One frustration was that it took the iPhone a while to decide that it couldn’t send an email, and couldn’t try to send another one while it was making that decision. After iPhone realizes it can’t send, the first outgoing message would be placed in a queue for later transmission. It’s only at that point that you can try to send your second message. It’s easy to understand why actually trying to send that second message while the first is still outbound wouldn’t work. It would be much nicer to at least be able to add that message to the outbound queue and, thus, save your work.

The messages managed to arrive at their destinations out of order, which was a little unusual. Otherwise, the process was fairly smooth, and I like that it’s simple to send a picture via email.

To get the iPhone to sync its onboard Camera Roll with iPhoto, I had to connect the iPhone while iTunes wasn’t running. (iPhoto was, but I didn’t check to see if that was a requirement.) I don’t understand the reasons for it, but that seems like a good candidate for streamlining the user experience.