Macuarium: Why do you use Mac and not PC? Do you think of yourself as a Mac fan?
Jo Meder: The glib answer is that I have three Macs and no PC. I originally bought a Mac so I could use a boat design app that only ran on the Mac, if it had run on PCs at that time I would probably have got a PC. Since that time I?ve become definitely become a full on Mac user. I have 3 Macs, my original PowerComputing PowerTower 166, a G4 533 desktop and a G3 500 dual USB iBook. The next computer I buy will probably be a PC, but that?s because I do/have done porting work as well as writing Terragen plugins for both the Mac and Windows, and I really need a real PC with a 3D card so I can use OpenGL etc. at a decent speed. I use Virtual PC now, which is excellent but unfortunately it doesn?t support graphics cards. The PC will probably end up running Linux most of the time anyway, so I can use it as a CVS server.
Macuarium: Based on your personal point of view, define these words to us:
Jo Meder:
- Apple: Style, in all things. Well, I'm not a blind Apple fan, but I certainly appreciate good design, which I don?t see coming from the PC world.
- Mac OS X: The first thing I think of when I think of OS X is "blue". The next thing I think of is versatility. I can run Classic apps. I can run Carbon and Cocoa apps. I can use command line tools like CVS. I can run more traditional UNIX apps via XFree86. I can run PC apps on Virtual PC. It's true I can do some of these things on OS 9 as well, but not more or less all just out of the box and seamlessly. Lastly I think of power, through better virtual memory, responsiveness under heavy load and protected memory.
- 3D Design: That's a tricky one actually. I come from a 3D CAD background, and not a 3D graphics/CG type background. They're quite different things really. I haven't come across a 3D graphics app, such as LightWave or Cinema4D, which I feel comfortable with, I much prefer the CAD app I use. My ideal 3D design application is something which had modelling tools like CAD tools ( certainly no polygon modelling tools as such ), and rendering tools like LightWave etc. The CAD app I use, MicroStation ( unfortunately no longer developed for the Mac ), had very good rendering tools but they always lagged behind 3D graphics apps.
- PC: What can I say, mundane and boring. The fastest PCs may very well be faster than the fastest Macs, and there may be more games on the PC ( the most common things you hear about PCs vs Mac apart from cost ), but a ) I don't lose any sleep over that and b ) I don?t have any time to play the games I've got already. So, overall, mundane. Developing on the Mac is much more interesting than developing on the PC, I feel.
Macuarium: Do you feel satisfied with the current Apple hardware?
Jo Meder: I do think it's about time Macs had faster memory/bus speeds. I think this is at least as important as faster processors, and probably more achievable in the short term. The latent power of the current G4s is held back by the bus speed. Overall though, I like Apple's current hardware. I think the portables are particularly good. I have a 12" dual USB iBook and although it would be nice if it were faster ( is there anyone who doesn't think that about their computers ? ), for me it's pretty much the perfect portable computer.
Macuarium: What do you think Apple must do to catch up with PC processor speed?
Jo Meder: Although I do think that the "megahertz myth" is largely that, a myth, there is also a certain degree of truth to it. Although I think that for an equivalent clock speed Macs outpace PCs, which is borne out by the fact that Terragen Mac is faster than Terragen PC on an equivalently clocked PC, PC processors have pushed out to 2.4 - 2.8 GHz now, and they are faster, "megahertz myth" or not. Multiprocessor machines and AltiVec/Velocity Engine does help, but unless you've specifically designed an application for those things it can be very tricky to support them retrospectively. For example, I've been able to accelerate some parts of Terragen using the Velocity Engine, but it's hard to apply it to much, at least not without some dramatic changes.
I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of the politics involved, but I can't help feeling that Motorola dropped the ball somewhere along the line. The recent PowerPC announcements from IBM are encouraging. I think things will get straightened out in the end.
In truth, the whole processor speed thing doesn't bother me that much. Yes, it would be good if Macs were as fast or faster than PCs. It seems that a computer is never fast enough, you always want them to be faster. However, I certainly couldn't afford to buy a new Mac ( or PC for that matter ) every time a faster one came out. I'm still paying off the G4 533 I bought last March, and now there's a 1.25 GHz DP machine that is theoretically over 4 times faster. My 604/166 based machine, which would seem ridiculously out of date, is still used for commercial illustration work every day, and it handles it well.
Macuarium: What do you expect from Apple during the next months? And about MacOS X? What would you like to see from them?
Jo Meder: I personally think the most interesting thing that Apple seems to be doing is making a move into the high end CG industry, with the acquisition of Nothing Real and Shake and the release of things like Cinema Tools for Final Cut. It will be very interesting to see what develops, and how far Apple can move into that market.
I think OS X is well on track, and Apple are slowly ( perhaps too slowly for some ) but surely moving things along, particularly from a developer's perspective. I got OS X 10.2 as soon as it came out. Not a madly exciting release really, but a pretty solid improvement all round. The best feature I had no idea was in there is the ability to share the internet connection from the built in modem with other machines on a network. I fail to have much sympathy for those ( still! ) complaining about the price of 10.2, it is a little expensive ( and I hasten to add I don't have much money myself ) but worth having I feel.
As a complete pie in the sky wish, what Id like to see from Apple, along with pretty much everyone else I'd imagine, is the introduction of a multiprocessor G5 ( or IBM PPC 970 perhaps ) with high memory bandwidth/bus speeds. I'm not holding my breath, but it would be nice, you have to agree.
Overall, as a developer soon to release a Mac application, I'm pretty happy with the way Apple is going.
Anyway, for more info about Terragen for Macintosh, please visit: http://www.planetside.co.uk/terragen/mac/
