Here at the International Irreal Headquarters there are lots of new things to explore and play with. First, there is OS X Yosemite, the new Apple OS. I’ve been playing with it for a few days and like it so far. It did take a little grief for its overly-flat UI but that doesn’t bother me. I haven’t really explored the new things yet so perhaps I’ll comment on those later.
Second, Emacs 24.4! At long last. Again, I’ve mostly just got things compiled and set up so any comments on its features will have to wait. In the meantime, you’ve got Artur Malabarba, Mickey Petersen, and the many posts of Bozhidar Batsov to help you explore Emacs 24.4 if you haven’t already read them.
Along with the new Emacs, Bastien Guerry has pushed out a point release, 8.2.10, of Org mode. Org mode just keeps getting better and better and Bastien has done a great job in driving its development.
Finally, the best new thing of all
My old MacBook Pro is still in great shape and is a real work horse but it’s over 7 years old now. The main problems are that the 120G disk is pretty much full making it hard to deal with updates and difficult to store much more data on it. Since it has only 2G of RAM, it tends to get very slow when I have more than, say, Emacs and Safari open. My new machine (Manfred II for now) is a 13 inch MacBook Pro with 16G of memory and a 512 GB SST. I can’t tell you how fast this thing feels. It’s also a bit lighter than my 15 inch MacBook Pro. I considered getting the 15 inch model—mainly to get four cores—but it was heavier and, really, I don’t do enough CPU bound computing to make that an issue.
So all in all, Christmas has come early to Irreal.