The Little Things

The thing I love about using Mac OS X is that it constantly makes me appreciate the work it does for me. The operating system does things that just make sense. This happens all the time of course and I don't even notice it or I take it for granted. However, there are moments of brilliance when I encounter something new or through repetition I am enlightened to the wonderful behavior of my computer.

The most recent example of this comes when I was writing an application in Xcode. Keep in mind that this is the free development environment that Apple gives away with every copy of Mac OS X. When writing a new class, one usually needs to provide a deallocate method that cleans up after the object once it has been discarded. If implementing this method explicitly, a well behaved class should call the deallocate method on its parent class as well so that all parts of the object are cleaned up properly. You can imagine how this single line of code, which is pretty much boiler plate, could be overlooked if you are concentrating on other interesting things about your new class.

Thankfully at compile time, Xcode was gracious enough to let me know that I probably made a mistake. In the context of the compiler this warning is a pretty trivial thing to implement. The important thing is that someone thought that a feature like that should be implemented. They decided to change the compiler so that it would throw a warning in this case to bring the developers attention to a probable mistake, even though this code is completely legal. The attention to detail can even be seen in the wording of the error.

method possibly missing a [super dealloc] call

This is a readable sentence and implies that you may know what you are doing, but you probably forgot to include this one call.

There are plenty of other examples of wow moments. The one I remember best was coming home from a trip where the only computer available was a Windows 98 machine on dial up. The computer served its purpose and did what I needed it to do, but it was pretty much hell to use. I must have gotten slightly used to it though because by the time I got home and sat down at my Mac I was in ecstasy for a little while. My friend said it best:

Using the Mac after 2 weeks on Windows 98 is like breathing.