Apple to turn x86. Rumors are flying that Apple will switch to x86 and my prediction (which might turn out to be wrong; it's a prediction after all) is that they will. Sooner or later they'll have to because PowerPC cannot keep up with the volume and speed of improvement done to x86 architecture. Motorola (one of the makers of PowerPC chips) is in trouble. Apple cannot afford to be like SUN and work on chips as well. They would be spreading themselves too thin. So they'll port. And it's going to be tough, but tough is Apple's middle name. They already switched processor once, they know the drill. PowerPC will have the same problem as MC68xxx had (unable to compete with Intel's endurance despite having much better architecture; in the beauty vs. beast contest beast won). This time around there is no viable alternative to x86 and whatever will replace it (since 64-bit is inevitable) will have to have emulation built-in (AMD's McHammer or Intel's whatever-it's-called-this week).

What will that mean? Many angry Mac users that will have even less reasons to feel special. Apple finally catching with PC's price-to-value ratio. More Unix people converting to Mac OS X. Microsoft stops developing for Mac - Mac-on-PowerPC is not a threat, Mac-on-x86 would be too much.     

To Groove or not to Groove? I said that Groove is not going to last. Justin is more restrained in stating his opinions, but the core of his message is similar: don't force people to stuff applications inside Groove. Instead let them integrate Groove-like features into their apps.     

Pepper, your friendly text editor

I've been playing with a new, programmer-oriented text editor called Pepper. And I like it so far - to the point that it'll probably become my default editor for a while.

The interesting thing is that apparently one can still earn some money in a tiny software business (from the looks of it, Pepper's author is just one guy working after hours) and in a most crowded, unimaginative category of software you can imagine. After all, what can be more un-innovative than a text editor (file managers (especially those Norton Commander clones) come close) ? Yet I did register it ($55 for one person, multi-platform (i.e. Mac, Windows, Linux) edition, it would be only $35 for one person, one platform). I've tried tons of text editors in the past, many of them available for free. I used Emacs a lot (and still usually configure other editors to Emacs-like keybinding), which is much more powerful that Pepper. I've recently tried a few free, open-source editors (SciTech, AnyEdit) but Pepper seduced me with its elegance and simplicity. There's something powerful about having "just the right" set of features without the clutter. Of course there are a few features I would like it to have (spell-checking is something I miss the most) but having a perfect editor will have to wait until I write one.

I will keep doing my C/C++ coding in Source Insight, truly the most powerful programmer's editor and a life-saver on big projects (when you count the number of lines in hundreds of thousands), but Pepper is my favorite for editing text files, small HTML documents or small Python/Perl scripts.

(Accidentally I just discovered that there is another, completely unrelated Pepper (Pepper Personal Knowledge Manager). Boy, are Java-based GUI apps ugly).