Apple, Thou Art A Bitter Fruit

 

After upgrading my early 2015 era Macbook Air to Apple's newest OS Big Sur I tried to download Godot to play around with it. Imagine my surprise when I wasn't "allowed" to open Godot because of Apple's over-zealous security measures.

I ended up having to go into the system preferences just to let Godot run.

I find this totally unacceptable. IMHO this is clearly an attempt to funnel all third party software through their app store and/or their developer program to "certify" that this software is okay to run.

Godot is a free and open source alternative to Unity and many people use it do develop indie games over Unity because it is free.

I know there are workaround for this sort of things and people may argue that I should do "X" or "Y" or "Z" but to me that's not the point. If I choose to distribute a game I make on itch.io, for example, and the game refuses to run because it may not be safe then Joe Normie is going to think I, and itch.io, are pushing some sort of Malware.

I'm not. Itch.io are not either. It's silly.

I'm very close to deciding that Apple and it's customers are not my target audience anymore. Which is sad as I used to be a big fan of Apple back in the day when they were the underdog. Back before OS X.

What's even more sad is that Microsoft has been going this way too. Download an open source project off the web and get all kinds of warnings that the software might not be safe. Again, IMHO, another veiled attempt to get you to go through Microsoft approved sites.

Maybe it's time to become a Linux only dev?

Resurrecting A Macintosh Quadra 605

Quadra 605

A while back I inherited an old Macintosh Quadra 605 from my uncle. He was in the process of moving so he needed to get rid of it and another old Mac. More on the other Mac in another post. I was a little leery of taking it as it was sitting on the floor, upside down in his closet when his basement flooded some earlier time. Looking at the machine you could see a bit of water damage so I thought the thing was shot and almost passed on it. I'm glad I didn't.

The Macintosh Quadra 605 is a damn cool machine in my opinion. First off it has the stylish "pizza box" design that I liked back in the early 90s. It is a cool form factor and I really, really wish it had never gone away. Unfortunately the desktop paradigm went the way of the dodo and the massive tower became the norm. I really never got that. The CPU in the Quadra 605 is the Motorola 68LC040 and it's clocked at 25MHz. The 68LC040 is a "l"ow "c"ost version of the 68040. What makes it low cost is the fact that it doesn't have a Floating Point Unit (FPU). It comes with 4MB of RAM but is expandable up to 36MB officially. It is possible to expand it up to 132MB. Video memory was 512kB but was expandable up to 1MB. All in all it's a nice little computer.