[TxMt] G5 (was: Non-project files)

[Allan Odgaard]

On Nov 17, 2004, at 12:59 AM, Drew McLellan wrote:

> (How's the G5?)

It's definitely fast. Most windows open instantly, which they didn't 
use to do (especially not Mail.app windows), some apps even open before 
the dock icon finishes the first bounce, and web browsing also feels a 
lot faster.

A lot of minor "delays" (e.g. when activating universal access / zoom) 
are gone, and GUI transitions, fades, etc. are finally executing as 
they were supposed to :)

For those not following the blog, TM deployment builds have gone from 
30 minutes to 3 minutes and 50 seconds. A full development build takes 
around 2 minutes. So I can finally get around to the refactorings I've 
been postponing :)

I said noise was only half of my previous Quicksilver (in the blog), 
but it's probably more like 1/3 (subjectively of course) -- so it's 
noticeable, but it's at a level where it's not really irritating 
(still, I really wish Apple would produce silent desktop machines, this 
was much of the incentive for me to upgrade my machine!).  Also, the 
quite noisy fan that kicks in with 100% CPU load persists, it's a bit 
weird, it seems that it's each time load goes above 90% or so, and it 
generally stops again after 10 seconds, even if the load continues -- 
so it's reproducible, e.g. I just have to continuously resize a window 
with complex content for a few seconds, and it starts.

Also, this machine has a DVD drive, previously I had no DVD, so now I 
can finally watch all the episodes of West Wing :)

So all in all it was a "required" upgrade, especially for the 
noise-reduction, DVD-drive and x8 compile times -- for the other parts, 
well, primarily I'm using "simple" applications and was actually using 
a 40 MHz Amiga till 2001, so I'm probably not the most hungry person 
for a fast computer, although the simpler GUI of the Amiga actually did 
make several things (including web-browsing) faster than my previous 
Quicksilver, but now the tables have finally turned! :)

But I'll probably grow to love this machine over the next weeks -- 
based on the contents of my Trash, this is what I've currently 
installed:
    AdiumX
    GeekTool
    MplayerOSX
    OmniWeb
    QuickSilver
    SizzlingKeys
    ttf-bitstream-vera-1.10
    uControl
    XcodeTools

Latex and gnuplot are probably applications which will also benefit 
tremendously from the G5, at least the install process should! :)