Stephan Schwab - mac tag

Update to Leopard

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 20:31:38 GMT

My own update to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) has been almost smooth so far. On an end-user machine, a Mac Mini at home, it was without any difficulties. Just slide in the DVD and wait for some time. I'm not sure how long it took, as I left it alone, but it might have taken an hour.

On my MacBook Pro I found VPNTracker 4.9 not to work with Leopard. That's a fact that is as well advertised on the vendors homepage. They are working on a new version 5 to be compatible with Leopard. In order to get my IPSEC VPN to work I looked around and found the free IPSecuritas, which even gets me a menu bar icon to start and stop the VPN. So I switched.

The Letterbox plugin for Apple Mail and Mail Act-on have been disabled. For Mail Act-On there is an update available.

Java and Mac OS X: it's all about priorities

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 05:04:07 GMT

To most users Mac OS X is a desktop operating system. It has Unix under the hood, but the most important part that distinguishes Darwin (the FreeBSD variant) from Mac OS X is the user interface and the applications one can build by using libraries such as Cocoa and others.

Now apparently Apple has done a number of improvements for the Java 5 VM and JDK libraries to allow Java developers to write equally compelling desktop applications in their language of choice. That makes sense and is a good thing.

Server side Java developers and people interested in the bleeding edge can always use tools like Parallels or VMware Fusion to run another operating system (Windows, Linux or Solaris) to get access to the latest Java VM whether it is experimental or short after Sun releases a first production version. So it's not a matter of whether Java gets abandoned by Apple or not. It's simply a matter of where the priorities are. To a desktop application developer it's more important that his applications can be run on a solid and well equipped environment. Apparently Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) is such an environment. I've always been happy with its predecessor Tiger (10.4) and I don't feel a big urge to use the Java 6 VM. For a current server side project I need to use Java 6 and I do that with Ubuntu Linux running on VMware Fusion. There I have the Sun Java 6 VM. It's a huge difference and I would love to keep working on OS X as I don't have to restart Eclipse so frequently.

Java on Leopard - enough complaining

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:13:11 GMT

This is definitely a comment worth sharing.

Stale Java for the Mac Faithful

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 20:22:57 GMT

Now that Apple has released Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.0) many blogs start talking about the missing JVM 1.6. Here is a quote from one of them:

Om Malik's Broadband Blog in Stale Java for the Mac Faithful:

Mac releases of Java lag those for Linux and Windows, and release 1.6 speeds up applications considerably, something Java needs in its fight with Adobe (ADBE) and Microsoft. Apple teased Java developers at its worldwide development conference with details on how Leopard would work well with Java and the community got its hopes up.

Part of the problem is that Apple insists on developing the JDK for MacOS. But another part is the company’s attitude towards innovation: That’s Apple’s Job.

As a company that makes both the hardware and the operating system, Apple has imposed more restrictions and regulations on its products than other computer manufacturers.

It’s possible that giving developers tools and open access to platforms will further reduce Apple’s control over the desktop. But by limiting development tools Apple is playing a risky game that may send developers looking for more friendly development platforms.

Currently I'm using Java 1.6 for a project on Ubuntu Linux. The IDE of choice is Eclipse 3.3 with a small number of plugins (Subclipse, M2Eclipse and Spring IDE). My experience so far is that Eclipse crashes arbitrarily with the latest JVM 1.6 upgrade 3. It's probably two or three times per day. That never happens with Apple's JVM 1.5 on Mac OS X (Tiger). On OS X I never close Eclipse throughout the week. I simply close the lid of the MacBook Pro, go home, use the laptop to surf the web in the evening and when I open it the next day I simply keep using Eclipse at the point where I left it.

So from my point of view I'm not so eager to use JVM 1.6 at this point in time. Speed improvements are one thing. But developer's productivity decreases drastically, if the tools are not stable. It's cheaper and easier to buy more powerful hardware, than to find skilled developers. I like to focus on my development problems and not on solving problems with the computing environment. In the end that saves a lot of time and money.

Write emails on Apple TV soon?

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:51:10 GMT

From my last trip to the US I brought home a brand new Apple TV and connected it to our big screen. It instantly found my WiFi network and started sync'ing to the Mac Mini that was connected to the TV before and now has moved to the home office. The Apple TV fulfills its duties as a big video iPod quite well and my wife loves it to not only watch movies and TV shows we download from iTunes, but also to fill our living room with Salsa rhythms. Sure it's a bit unusual to switch on the big plasma TV when all you want is listen to music. But on the other hand the cover animation used as a screensaver is nice and makes us switch to another track because we remember it by seeing the cover of the album it is on. So all in all the Apple TV is a nice addition and it just works.

Now reading my feeds I came across this:

Alasdair Allan in The Daily ACK: The new iMac:
Want to make a bet that that that refresh for the Apple TV that Steve hinted about during the Q&A yesterday means that you can use this new lap-friendly lightweight keyboard to do a lot more than you used to be able to do with the Apple TV than you can now?

Here is an image comparing the two keyboards:

The prospect of using a wireless keyboard with Apple TV is compelling. Maybe that "video iPod" gets extended to include at the very least Safari to browser web pages on the big screen. Then such a small keyboard and a wireless both would make great sense. Unfortunately the technical specifications for the current Apple TV doesn't list Bluetooth and I doubt a bit that it's already integrated, but deactivated. We'll see ;-)

iPhone is a tablet computer

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 18:58:09 GMT

Dave Winer in Scripting News for 7/3/2007:
This idea snuck up on me. I was watching an Apple ad on TV, while washing dishes, so I caught it at an angle, and lost the sense of scale, and thought the iPhone was a tablet computer. Then I realized that it is!

Indeed. The only thing that hides this fact is the form factor of the iPhone. If it simply were bigger, let's say A4 or Letter size, then it were completely obvious.

That phone runs Mac OS X and therefore it would be capable of running every app out there for the platform. The only question left is the old problem of text input. The phone has a virtual keyboard on screen and maybe that would be ok on a larger tablet as well. I can imagine typing on such a on-screen keyboard. You would lay down the tablet on the table and, if the keys are of proper size and have proper spacing, then it would not be that different at all. Of course the feedback of real keys would be missing, but that might be ok for short texts such as an email. I guess nobody expects to be able to write a book on a tablet computer. But it would be great for research, browsing stuff, to control other devices in the living room, at a work site or elsewhere. So why not?

Another interesting use case for such a tablet would be for a small group of developers during sprint planning. Instead of having a bunch of people with their laptops open (too much distraction) they would pass around a tablet. Maybe teams using Savila will do that in the future?