David Stone's Blog

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Cool things: Eric Gunnerson, String.Format, and the Mac UI

The template strikes back...  This is an awesome improvement. All that useless crap that every C# developer ditches immediately, and now we won't have to delete it manually! w00t! Thank you Eric!

Also, I wanted to say that String.Format is waaay freaking cool. I had another one of those “Duh!” moments today as I realized that the method I was writing to change a string of numbers like 1234.56 into $1,234.56 was already written for me. String.Format(“C”, 1234.56); String.Format is waaay cool and can do a lot more than that as well. So remember, if you ever wind up thinking that you're doing too much work with string formatting, you probably are.

In totally unrelated news, my best friend is going off to college and just bought a 12” Titanium Powerbook running Mac OS X Jaguar. Now, I am by no means a Mac lover. I've been born and raised on the PC and I love Windows. However, I must say that the Mac OS GUI kicks some serious butt. There are a few things I would change, but I was very impressed. I can see why Sam has been dying to play with it. (And run Rotor on it) And he's right, Aqua “makes the outdated Windows UI look silly.” I can't wait to see some actual-beta-release Longhorn builds and compare the UI...but from what I've seen, it looks like Longhorn is gonna be totally awesome on the UI side.

Actually, it was also a blast from the past because about 6-7 years ago, we used to play these games called Boom, Greebles, and Mortal Pongbat(which, as it turns out, is being ported to the PC over at Sourceforge) on his family's old Mac...and he had them on his laptop. Quite fun! (I highly recommend Boom...what an awesome game).

Posted: Aug 18 2003, 10:56 PM by David Stone | with 4 comment(s)

Comments

James Avery said:

It is all about looks though. Try and use the damn thing. :)

-James
# August 19, 2003 8:41 AM

Bap said:

When you call:

String.Format("C", 1234.56);

it just actualy calls:

1234.56.ToString("C");

so save yourself a method call and call the ToString method.
# August 19, 2003 8:48 AM

Sam Gentile said:

Its not about looks James. It is a very powerful (FreeBSD Mach kernel) with a very usable UI (much more fucntional than Luna). O have tried to use the "ddamn" thing and I am far more productiive than Windows - 4 or 5 command line compiles while buring a CD from music through ITunes, all at the same time as a whole slew of other things. Thats not to mention that most things are better thought out and match what users do, not what engineers think they should do
# August 19, 2003 11:36 AM

David Stone said:

I'd actually tend to agree with Sam. I found it really easy to navigate around the OS and do stuff. Everything was layed out where I would expect to find it. I didn't have to go hunting for anything. Pretty nifty.

Note: this doesn't mean I'm going to switch. I'm still a hardcore Windows fanatic. And from what I've seen, I really do believe that Longhorn is gonna kick some serious UI butt.
# August 19, 2003 12:33 PM
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