The rants and ravings of a Mac developer

I Love programming, Macs, the iPhone, iPad, Apps & iOS! In my spare time I like Programming in ExtJS, PHP, MySQL / SQLite3 and Apache - in other words a Real Geek's geek. I've tinkered around with programing for iOS in the not so distant past . During the day I work for Motorola Solutions in IT as BSA for our Export Compliance system JPMorgan's TradeSphere. At night I freelance program on the Mac & Web. I'm also a techie who likes Sci-Fi and Horror. Some of my favorite authors include Stephen King, William Gibson and Frank Herbert as well as his son Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson.

But my real passion is for Comic Book Collecting. My current freelance project is writing a web based application using ExtJS for collecting comics books. After I get the web application completed, I will be integrating some portion of the web application into a desktop client for the Mac through the use of web services for all data exchange & transaction. Eventually, the web site & Mac client would also include a social networking component as well as an iOS component.

I started collecting comic books as a kid when my grandfather passed away and we found my father's comic book collection when we were cleaning out my grandfather's basement. There were a number of early issues in that stash, such as Fantastic Four number one, The Amazing Spider-Man number one, number 22 of the Uncanny X-Men... and others. So needless to say, I was hooked.

After high school I stopped collecting - college, drinking and woman took priority (not necessarily in that order) over visiting the local comic book shop. Now that I have 2 kids of my own, I've gotten back into collecting.

Overall, I was satisfied with the Frankenmac. (Note the use of past tense: It will be converted into its official role as a Windows gaming system and a platform for testing cross-platform Mac OS X Hints once it returns from its battery of tests at Macworld Lab.) While it was fun to build the Frankenmac, the truth is that I’m not generally willing to live with the downsides of a build-your-own Mac over the real thing fresh from Apple’s factory.
When I buy a machine from Apple, I know that one warranty covers everything, that all the parts have been designed to work together, that system updates won’t leave me with a non-bootable system, and that as much thought went into the design of the interior of the machine as went into the exterior. Having visited the build-your-own side of the Mac world, I’ve decided I’m more than happy letting Cupertino build my Macs for me—Apple has shown it’s much better at it than I am. And who knows? Maybe one day that mid-range Mac minitower of my dreams will no longer be mythical.

From the MacWorld article: Frankenmac! What’s in a Mac clone?

This pretty much sums up the whole Mac Clone/Psystar vs Real Mac debate… there’s just too many downsides. But most of all, I like my software updates.