Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) built-in dictation

I’ve been looking forward to trying Mac OS X 10.9’s “advanced” (i.e. not-transmitting-my-life-story-to-Apple) dictation, as a potential competitor to Dragon Dictate.  Unfortunately, it’s – against all odds – even more embarrassing than Siri.  For example: This test, of the coolest names built-in dictation.) Nope, not important. If you’re..Reasonably built night, That was true Samaritan and… Read more

SceneKit & shaders

Note: Since writing this originally I’ve figured out how to get at least some aspects of shaders working.  I’m still trying to flesh out the rest.  I’ll post an update or revised entry at some point. Ugh.  SceneKit supports shaders, technically.  But it’s almost unequivocally unusable.  Let me count the reasons: It doesn’t support geometry shaders… Read more

Quality control of current Mac games

The age-old sore point of Mac gaming has been performance.  Ports from Windows versions would often run significantly slower for no apparent reason.  Interestingly, this seems to be less of an issue as of the last couple of years – whether because the games are being optimised better or Mac hardware is just better able… Read more

iTunes Match

Urgh… the downside of a new iPad is that I now have to put up with the horrible process of getting my music onto it. In the so-called bad old days, I’d sync it to iTunes. It’d take an hour or two and then it’d be done. But that’s not how we do things in… Read more