Apple

iPadOS 26 is great, Liquid Glass not so much

Let’s address the transparent elephant in the room first. I don’t love Liquid Glass. It’s fine on my iPhone. The corners are too rounded on my 6.8 inch CarPlay display. If you have regular icons on your desktop on an iPad Pro, it’s a disaster. The transparency goes too far and the background icons blend into the foreground icons. I tried switching off transparency. It looks horrible. I tried permanent dark mode. Still not great. I made the icons big. That helps a lot, but it doesn’t fix it. I did finally come up with a solution: only have icon groups on your home pages. Then there isn’t so much color in the background to clash with the foreground icons. And now I can live with it. Having solved that problem, I moved on to making my iPad dock closely resemble my Mac dock.

Running Intel binaries in Debian ARM with Rosetta

I’ve mentioned UTM before. It’s a nice wrapper for QEMU that enables you to create ARM virtual machines and emulate non-ARM machines on macOS. It’s a free download from the website, or you can get it in the app store. But one of the features I’ve been looking forward to is being able to use Rosetta to do X64 to ARM64 instruction translation, which is supported in the latest version of UTM on macOS Ventura. I was hoping to be able to install Intel VMs using Rosetta, but for that you still have to use QEMU. What you can do is install a Debian ARM VM, enable Rosetta, and then run X64 Debian packages on that VM. This can be useful if there’s a particular package you need that doesn’t have a native ARM build. Thus far I’ve only got it to run packages, and not individual Intel binaries. There is also a big caveat:

Adobe at 40: impact and alternatives

Adobe is 40 years old this month. Founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke both previously worked at Xerox PARC, where desktop publishing (DTP) was first developed. Adobe’s first product was the PostScript page description language. In March 1985 Apple began selling the first laser printer with PostScript support. In the following July, Aldus released its PageMaker DTP software for the Macintosh. Then in 1986, Eddy Shah launched Today, the UK’s first computer photo-typeset and full-color offset printed newspaper. Every other newspaper in the world rapidly adopted the technology. In 2022, the Saguache Crescent is the last remaining newspaper using the old technology, and its Linotype press is over 100 years old.

Getting started in developer relations

It may surprise you that the field of developer relations has been around for nearly 40 years at the time of writing. It started at Apple with Mike Boich and Guy Kawasaki on the Macintosh project. But it didn’t go mainstream until nearly 30 years later.

Running Xilinx ISE on an M1 Mac

Back in March 2022, I did a write-up of how to run Xilinx Vivado on an M1 Mac to generate cores for the Artix-7 series of FPGAs (as used on the Mega 65). The easiest solution is to run the Intel binaries on ARM Windows under Parallels Desktop. But it’s also possible to use the Linux binaries with UTM.

Managing packages on macOS with Homebrew

If you’re a Linux user, or you read my article on Scoop, you’ll be familiar with package managers. They aim to simplify installing, upgrading, configuring and removing software. A key feature is dependency management: if a package requires software that isn’t already installed, the package manager can install it.

Running Xilinx Vivado on an M1 Mac

I’ve written before about running non-Apple Intel binaries on an M1 Mac. The solutions I discussed work for most general purpose apps, but there was one app in particular that I’d previously been running on Windows 10, that I really wanted to get working on an M1 Mac: Xilinx Vivado.

Running non-Apple Intel binaries on an M1 Mac

Since late 2018, I’ve been developing on Apple Silicon. You can read about it in an earlier article. But that’s using an iPad, and the only native builds I can do rely on an app that’s no longer available. What most people think of developing on Apple Silicon, they’re thinking of M1 Macs. And I’ve been doing that since May 2021.

Running ARM Linux on an M1 Mac

Next week, I’m going to look at running non-Apple Intel binaries on M1 Macs. But today, I’ll go over some options for running ARM Linux on M1 Macs. Specifically, I’m going to cover Ubuntu because it’s the most straightforward install. Why would you want to do this? Well, as good as homebrew is, I’ve found that there are quite a lot of missing packages and my experience of building from source on the latest macOS hasn’t been a particularly pleasant one.

Using an iPad Pro for development

This is my 2018 iPad Pro. It has replaced the Hackintosh workstation I built that I ended up installing Windows 10 on (story for another day) as my main computer outside work hours. The only local builds I can do are under iDOS (MS-DOS emulator, no-longer available in the app store), but I’m looking at setting up a Raspberry Pi Zero hanging off my NAS drive as a build server.