[Pythonmac-SIG] Re: the iBook's irresistible charms

[Konrad Hinsen]

On 06.01.2004, at 17:35, Alex Martelli wrote:

> Oh yes!  And, in my case, preferring it to other laptops because the 
> screen is crystal-sharp, the low weight makes it comfortable on my lap 
> as I curl up in my favourite armchair,

That is exactly what I am doing now ;-)

> than walking over to my study...!-)  [[now what I _really_ need is a 
> good port of OO.o 1.1, with PyUNO scripting and all... 1.0.3 just 
> doesn't cut it, and I sure ain't gonna splurge on MS Office X...]]

I am waiting for that as well...

> until a few days ago my sights for "a future 64-bit-CPU machine" were 
> firmly fixed on AMD-64 boxes, right now a Powermac G5 _is_ starting to 
> look very alluring (even though _its_ price/performance ratio vs cheap 
> AMD-64 boxes isn't really all that good...)!

I still prefer AMD boxes for number crunching, but those noisy beasts 
needn't be on my desktop.

> Of course, such things are also contagious -- the many brand-new Mac 
> laptops I saw in use at various conferences and pypy sprints in 2003 
> (WAY more than I saw in 2002) was

Me too. SciPy was full of iBooks.

There is a nice tool that I found for use with Python on the Mac (to 
get back on topic...), although it isn't really advertised as such. It 
is called VoodooPad (at www.flyingmeat.com). It is best described as a 
Wiki for local use, but it has some nice extras, one of which being the 
possibility to execute a page as a script, also in Python.

This won't replace an IDE (no way to write modules for example), but I 
find it great for throw-away scripts that I do want to keep for 
reference ("What did I do three months ago?"). Keeping the scripts in a 
Wiki-like environment makes it possible to put them together with 
explanations, other scripts, output, graphics, etc., which I find a lot 
more attractive that dozens of files with names such as "run2.py" that 
can easily get lost.