My brand spanking new MacBook Air arrived a day earlier than expected, shipped directly from Shanghai, but no one was home to receive it. I got an email from Apple midday that FedEx would try to deliver the Air for two more days. I chose the quickest option picking it up at the depot last night. Setup this time was incredibly smooth since I went through the effort with an iMac last week. The process took a few hours of automagic synching between my iMac and the Air, mostly due to being over wifi. I don’t own a firewire and World of Warcraft (WoW) is 20gigs or so, XCode is 3Gigs, and my music and other applications took up the remainder.
When I logged on to the laptop this morning at 5:30 am everything worked. The command line dev stuff was ready to rumble: Ruby Version manager, Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3, soca for couchDB apps. I may need to setup another key for git which I’ll find out later.
All my other apps worked fine: TextMate, Chrome, Chromium, CouchDB*, Dropbox, and WoW. I haven’t run any benchmarks yet, but I’m impressed by how good the graphics are on WoW. Based on the integrated graphics (Gforce 320M) I expected stuttering game play, yet was happily surprised by silky smooth rendering. I haven’t been to Dalaran or a busy area to push it, but the buzz of the fan coming to life when playing is obvious. My quantum dreams of writing a Rick Roll addon in lua are collapsing into reality. If that doesn’t work there’s always custom sponsored gear overlays and tatoos – “Raid with the most hang time, raid with Nike Air boots”.
Notes:
*= I had an error with CouchDB on my iMac twice last week. After setting up continuos synchronization to Max Ogden’s and Tyler Gillies’ couchappspora nodes, it would crash after a few hours. I clipped the error message into a text file for later review. In the meantime I spotted Jan Lenhardt’s nightly Mac OS X couchDB builds. I expect an update will clear up stability problems. CouchDB has run for days on my ubuntu system without so much as a hiccup.