RSSAs the title says, work has replaced my previous Dell Lattitude D620 with a new 15.4" MacBook Pro.
I’ve only had the MBP for a couple days now so I’m still getting used to OS X. There’s a lot more to learn but my two day impressions are positive. Even the girlfriend likes it (she’s wanted a Mac for awhile now).
I’ve been using Linux for the past 12 or 13 years so I appreciate the ease with which I can open Terminal.app and run the basic gnu tools. All I need now is a nice multi-tab’d terminal application (a quick Google search brought up iTerm, which looks promising).
The past couple of years have been spent developing Java applications in Windows. I used Cygwin extensively and honestly it was pretty good. The JavaVM’s (Sun’s primarily although I usually used JRockit) seemed a bit more optimized for Windows and the application server started/restarted significantly faster. Not the ideal benchmark but an important one given how much time we all spend doing deployments. I should note that JRockit on Linux did perform faster in this regard than Sun did.
I’ve switched from using BlogDesk to Qumana for blog composition. It was interesting to see that Qumana is actually developed in Vancouver, BC.
World of Warcraft installed without a hitch.
Quicksilver (and Spotlight to a lesser degree) provide a suitable replacement for the functionality that I was using Google Desktop for. Namely, the ability to easily launch applications.
I don’t compose a lot of documents so I don’t think Microsoft Office will be a significant loss. I’ve got NeoOffice installed but may decide to use Google Docs instead.
I’ve been on vacation for the past couple weeks so I haven’t had an opportunity to do any actual development on the new machine. That being said, I was able to get my development environment setup without too much of a problem. Fortunately some kind soul has made PostgreSQL binaries available. IntelliJ IDEA seems to work equally well in OS X as it did in Windows. The only downside from a Java perspective is Apple dragging it’s feet around support for Java6. We haven’t migrated to it yet but Mac support is the gating factor.
That’s all I have to say for now. It seems like a good platform for daily development and overall general usage.
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Pet Peeve: Don’t email my password to me in plain text You know the drill.
Signup for some random service on the internet
Receive a confirmation email with your account information
or
Forget a password for some random service ...
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Eclipise Memory Analyzer (MAT) I must say the Eclipse Memory Analyzer looks pretty slick. There is some pretty good material over on the developers blog. Lastly, there was a talk on it ...
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Open-source Web-based Code Review Tool: Rietveld Guido van Rossum, of Python fame, has recently released a Django-based application that enables web-based code reviews... Rietveld.
It supports any language and currently can hook into Subversion repositories. You ...
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An implementation of the JVM in Javascript? Caught this over on JavaPosse Google Groups.
Essentially, some bright fellows over in Japan have developed a bytecode->javascript compiler. There's a demo floating around that took a Tetris ...
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Facebook Chat? So it looks like the Facebook Chat service has finally started rolling out to my network (Facebook Chat has been mentioned previously).
Not quite sure how ...
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Blogroll
Sep 3rd, 2007 at 12:27 pm
iTerm is one of the better terminal apps and gets better as you use Bookmarks and the keyboard shortcuts it provides.
TextMate is a great editor for your coding needs. I prefer it over an IDE.
Parallels is something to checkout out. I run it to get around some of the Apple “modifications” to its BSD core.
Oct 7th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Having got fed up with trying to get a decent *nix environment on a laptop working (without losing functionality or setting fire to my legs from power management woes…) I bit the bullet and bought a Macbook Pro. (we get a nice corporate discount easing the dent on the wallet) Equally the WAF score was pretty high - yes I’m being pressured to get another already.
So far the OS/X experience has been pretty good. Really quick to setup (less than 7mins from out-of-box to surfing…). XCode is pretty impressive tool, Eclipse performance on it isn’t too shabby either. Its quite “interesting” using VS05/08 by day and other IDE’s by night. Since it’s my home machine, I’ve skipped Parallels or boot-camp and tried to keep “pure” - not sure how long I’ll last though.
One thing immediately clear is how astonishing long the battery life is. It sips from power where my other laptops gulp - I’m regularly getting >3hrs out of a single charge even with “heavier” usage such as Eclipse with background compilation.
On the negative side, it’s taking a little while to get used to it’s keyboard quirks, and the lack of right-button on the integrated pad is a bit of chore. More-so since of I’m using pure Windows environments by day.
I’m intrigued what Leopard & XCode 3.0 will do for me later this month.