Has Blocs yet got the scope of Stacks? Last time I looked it was miles off. Not knocking Blocs before the Blocsboys shout at me.
In some cases more and in other cases less. Iām struggling to think of any reason that would stop me from building a website in Blocs right now. Now with the option of exporting designs straight to Wordpress it becomes really powerful.
EDIT: I think we should differentiate between Stacks and stacks.
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Well RW hasnāt moved on and performance since RW6 has got worse. Again it is the innovative 3rd party developers who are creating the life extenders for the ageing mother tool.
The difficulty that I see is that if you build sites for other businesses, the very nature of these sites is that they will need to grow and adapt and often add new features. We as the web builders have no control over this and this is how sites can grow and then become unmanageable in RW.
Ideally, we need a tool that is scalable and doesnāt reach a point of becoming unmanagable by scaling.
Donāt know which subgroup this thread is in, so I wonāt name namesā¦
We currently have two developers churning out stacks one after the other, that on the surface look brilliant, but when deployed add so much code to a page, that the page feels as if youāre wading through treacle.
Obviously, when Iām reviewing stacks, I donāt publish every test page that I build (maybe I should begin to do so with certain developers). However, I do get the occasional support request and itās then that I see the crap thatās being publishedā¦
And the irony? At one of these two companies, developers are slowly abandoning ship and being replaced and, as they leave, their stacks are being removed from the sales pages.
Why? because [I presume] the [missing] stacks were written by hand (I know of a couple for sure!), not copied from someone elseās published JS (or whatever) as such, the rather brilliant hand-coded-stuff is too much of a hassle to maintain ā or what?
As Gary points out ā itās the innovative developers that are breathing new life into an aging tool; but there are a couple of developers that offer pure eye-candy and ruin the whole effect!
Thatās my latest Imac. I added RAM from Crucial and a La Cie / Porsche USBC drive
@aidy Hope your LaCIe/Porsche hard drive lasts longer than mine. Exactly the same story but had to replace the laCie after 2.5 years. Too noisy and becoming erratic.
thinks ā Or was that how my partner described me?
Banter - So feel free to blame anyone.
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LaCie still exists?! At some point, they couldnāt give away their HDs for free ā thatās how bad they were. So, they bombastically named their enclosures after the German automaker (one of the best in the world). I heard some more opinions on LaCie (and Seagate), but I wonāt spread them aroundā¦
La Cie is Seagate now and the Porsche connection is that Porsche, the car maker, designed the housing. Iāve gotten through dozens of HDās, mostly Western Digital including an 8TB one, that was a pisser. Toshiba, Seagate, Samsung, Sonyā¦ They all failed eventually. Never mind wear and tear, some you just had to look at sternly and they shat themselves.
My La Cie is 2 years and I havenāt heard a peep out of it yet. Itās my first external SSD drive and seems to be doing okay. If anyones got more reliable and, hereās the kicker, wallet friendly recommendations Iād like to hear them.
LaCie ā worst quality imaginable!
My Porsche Design Rugged drive up the ghost last month after only 15 years!
Was unable to retrieve more than 95% of the data!
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reporting back after building a hackintosh. hereās a twitter thread about it.
tl;dr:
for about $1150 and 3 days of twiddling with settings iāve managed to build a nice little machine. itās stable, has the exactly same video card as my old mac, catalina compatible, and oh yeahā¦ itās faster than any mac you buy. š±
i was aiming for a bit faster than my current machine ā but it turns out that the $450 Intel 8-core i9 (i think itās the 9900) is ridiculously fast. same with m.2 drives and 3GHz ddr4 memory.
this stuff is all relatively inexpensive (as compared to apple hardware at least) ā so i wasnāt really expecting a great machine.
iāve cut compile times by more than half, photoshop runs with zero delay to just about every operation, and i finally have working bluetooth (which is pretty much nonexistent on old cheese grater mac pros).
so i intended to build a little test box that could run catalinaā¦ but about a week later i just turned off my mac pro. i switched over to full time hackintosh.
i donāt think this approach is for everyone. it requires a lot of fiddling and trial and error to get working. and thereās a lot of old info on the 'net that is useless or worse.
but if youāre willing to put up with some fiddling, and have some basic technical skills, then hey wowā¦ this is f-ing awesomeā¦ it makes real macs look ridiculously slow, full of outdated hardware, and bat-shit crazily overpriced.
i myself had a blast building it. even in the frustrating early stages when i really didnāt know anything about anything it was still kind of fun.
i threw together an amazon list in case you wanted to build one similar: https://www.amazon.com/ideas/amzn1.account.AFWIG7UXIWDXWKU4VHJ6K6VMX3WQ/V45AA834IT8K?ref=idea_cp_vl_ov_d
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This is cool. Iāve always been tempted just as a kind of side project.
Did you manage to get iMessage and features like handoff to work?
Hackintoshes are the dogs! Tonymac is a great site to use to pull one together. The only downside I had with mine was arsing around with all those kext files every time I did an NVidia driver update. Mine are built to do serious CGI heavy lifting and thereās no option but to use NVidia cards for that.
I havenāt built one for a while as I have a threadripper PC with 3 x 1080i GPUs in it now and my old 2010 modded mac pro is working fine (with two Titan X cards).
Iām tempted to have another go. Hey @isaiah, could you do a pcpartpicker.com list for me to have a look at? Easier than Amazon to swap bits out and get compatibility issues sorted.
Cheers
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Nice on @isaiah. I second @rojharris suggestion to do a PCParstpicker build, its very good for costing the parts as even though youāll specify it in the US with US prices/suppliers Iāll see the list with UK prices/suppliers.
Hereās the parts list of my new 3D rig: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Q4twNQ
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@Norm
all iCloud and Apple stuff seems to be working. it seems to depend on unique and properly formatted IDs for the motherboard etc. iMessage and FaceTime both appear to work normally.
I didnāt get a wifi card ā I never use wireless. So I think that means handoff and airdrop are a no-go. But Iāll be honest, Iām not 100% sure. The cheese grater Mac Pros Iāve used since 2008 have the first gen wifi card ā so handoff and airdrop didnāt work on that machine either. Consequently, Iāve never actually used those features before. So maybe they do work and I just donāt know how to use them? ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ LOL
@rojharris
I have 3 cheese graters. One is a 2008 ā so itās stuck at 10.11 (itās my Time Machine server). The other two are 2010s. One has an RX 580 the other is my headless build server. But none are able to run Catalina. I built the hackintosh just to try to get any sort of catalina compatible system ā I honestly wasnāt expecting to use it as the daily driver.
There isnāt really any great way to get great GPU performance from macOS right now. The iMac Pro is the best ā but a top of the line Nvidia beats it handily at a fraction of the price. We sort of have to wait for there to be drivers for better GPUs before we can use them in macintoshes or hacked mac pros.
as for my amazon list ā take it with a pinch of salt ā aside from the processor i just went through the Tonymac site and picked the cheapest of everything. iām sure youād be better off making some more intelligent choices. now that iām using it every day iām really kicking myself for not buying a faster GPU ā i think RX Vega 64 are supposed to be as pain free as the RX580 and have 2x the performance.
@paul.russam
Thatās a nice system Paul. Iām very envious of that video card. I donāt think it would be macOS compatible, though. But hey, kind of a slow M.2 drive. Sure you donāt want to spend 50-100 quid for a 2000MB/s NVME for your boot drive? Might really cut down on the startup times.
But ā donāt trust me ā Iām very new to this PC building thing.
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@isaiah, the only issue with Nvidia GPUs in macs in no Mohave. Not an issue for me, Iām happy with High Sierra and I can run my super fast NVidia GPUs no problem. The only pain is having to swap out the card for a basic mac one when I want to update drivers, which takes about 20mins total from shutdown to swap to update to swap-back. This is on my 2010 Mac pro, not a hackintosh. I have no desire to go down the AMD card route as it would be a waste of time for me. Iām very tempted to build a hack againā¦ Thereās no way Iām shelling out for a new mac pro at the price they are.
Cheers
@isaiah Iāve just joined a new company and I specās and built the comp I was to use (theyāre mac users). As Iām new there I obsessed about the $$$.
With hindsight, I skimped on the M.2 but whist there are faster oneās the one got is fast enough during boot/app opening.
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