[markponcelet]

Here's the skinny:

A Java developer friend of mine heard about the new 17" 1.67 PB that I have on order. She's a PC user, of course. Now, whenever she goes to her Java developer conferences, all the people who do presentations also have powerbooks, even though they are primarily PC users. She wants to know why. So she's going to borrow my new powerbook (my baby!) for a few days to do some test builds to see if they'll run faster.

Of course I decided this would be a good idea, as it would give me massive bragging rights to all of my PC-nazi friends who love to give me grief when they see me using my mac.

So here's where I need your help: I want to make this experience the most mind-blowingest cool-fest that she's ever had the fortune to endure. I've already planned to put in a 7200 RPM drive and an extra gig of ram. But what do I put in for software to make it even keener?

I was thinking that a good processor load widget would be both useful and awe-inspiring. If I could find one that also looks really stinking cool, that's a plus. I'm also going to throw in my copy of PathFinder, since that's better than the normal finder.

So! What are the best software widgets that I can put in there to further put across the point that Mac OS is better than sex?

[robco]

I'd point her here. Find out which Java development tool(s) she prefers to use and load 'em up, along with XCode of course. Not just that, but find out what other apps she uses and see if there is a Mac equivalent. I'd load up X11 too and either Fink or DarwinPorts.

The 7200rpm drive might be a little overkill - not to mention you'll be giving up internal storage space. Don't forget to point out how thin and light the PB is compared to 17" PC laptops. And how it instantly wakes from sleep.

[ideasculptor]

Java is dead slow on OS X. She isn't likely to be impressed by performance no matter what you do. I have 2 gigs of ram on my 15" 1.25Ghz and it is a fraction of the speed of x86 hardware, desktop or laptop. Part of the problem is that Java is optimized for processors that store numbers differently than a power pc. Java has to constantly flip numbers around when running on OS X.

Odds are good she uses eclipse 9which is written in Java) to do her java development, and eclipse is noticeably sluggish on os x. It doesn't really impact productivity, but it is noticeable. She'll either fall in love with the OS X experience or not, but java performance isn't going to be the selling point.

[markponcelet]

Originally posted by ideasculptor:
Java is dead slow on OS X.

I initially posted this just to get recommendations for software that would impress her as she used OS X. But this surprises me. If Java is so bad on OS X (which I could understand), then why are so many developers turning to Powerbooks? I'm a PC and Mac tech, so I could go on and on with how OS X is a cleaner user experience. But you'd have to figure that developers would prefer to compile faster more than anything else ... especially PC developers.

Could it be that the powerbook is just that sexy?

[tooki]

[This wasn't a discussion of PowerBooks.

tooki]

[PurpleGiant]

One reason a lot of the presenters are using Powerbooks over PC Notebooks is that they are far more reliable and consistent when it comes to video output, in my experience.

Windows laptops seem to be more hit-or-miss with video-out. Java performance under OS X is pretty **** though.

[ideasculptor]

Originally posted by markponcelet:
I initially posted this just to get recommendations for software that would impress her as she used OS X. But this surprises me. If Java is so bad on OS X (which I could understand), then why are so many developers turning to Powerbooks? I'm a PC and Mac tech, so I could go on and on with how OS X is a cleaner user experience. But you'd have to figure that developers would prefer to compile faster more than anything else ... especially PC developers.

Could it be that the powerbook is just that sexy?

Because many developers are unix/linux users. It has almost nothing to do with the powerbook, and everything to do with OS X. OS X is, by far, the most usable, polished, full featured DESKTOP version of unix to be found, in my opinion. Many developers don't code just in Java, or they are developing server apps in java which are intended for a unix-style platform. But we all have to read email, browse the web, and read powerpoint presentations from the marketing folks, write specs, GIVE PRESENTATIONS, etc, and all of that is far better accomplished on a really good desktop platform. Java's slowness isn't unusable, just noticeable. So if having to choose between a totally unusable desktop platform from Microsoft running on x86 hardware running java at top speed, or OS X on power pc with java running at 80-85% of x86 speeds, most of us will pick os x every time, particularly if we need unix compatibility of our software.

You'll find a pretty large number of developers who use IBM hardware that is at least on a par with a powerbook. Those folks either haven't discovered or don't need the OS X platform. If I was writing software for windows, I wouldn't be using a powerbook to do it, even if Java were truly cross-platform.

--sam

[The Godfather]

Originally posted by ideasculptor:
So if having to choose between a totally unusable desktop platform from Microsoft running on x86 hardware running java at top speed, or OS X on power pc with java running at 80-85% of x86 speeds, most of us will pick os x every time, particularly if we need unix compatibility of our software.

That's a very, very optimistic statement. Windows is not an unusable platform, and Java on Macs runs at 50% or less than on the equivalent PCs.

[goMac]

Java is insanely slow on Mac OS X. I just finished a course last semester in it. People in the class were joking that the lecture classes Pentium 3/733 with 64 megs of RAM could run Java faster than their brand new Powerbooks.

OS X is strong in Cocoa, but definitely not in Java.

[The Godfather]

Originally posted by goMac:
OS X is strong in Cocoa, but definitely not in Java.

So, you could say it is a decaf double chocolate?

[ideasculptor]

Originally posted by The Godfather:
That's a very, very optimistic statement. Windows is not an unusable platform, and Java on Macs runs at 50% or less than on the equivalent PCs.

It is unusable by me. It offers a terrible command line environment, no native scripting environment, a godawful user interface, and software I write in windows has be structured totally differently to run in a unix environment.

As for java speed, we benchmarked much of our app, and came up wih numbers that were right around 80-85% of intel hardware, so I don't see where your 50% number is coming from.

--sam

[hayesk]

Originally posted by goMac:
Java is insanely slow on Mac OS X. I just finished a course last semester in it. People in the class were joking that the lecture classes Pentium 3/733 with 64 megs of RAM could run Java faster than their brand new Powerbooks.

OS X is strong in Cocoa, but definitely not in Java.

Java on my 1GHz PowerBook seems to run just as well as on my 2.4GHz P4 at work. I don't run benchmarks, but who's writing performance critical software in Java anyway?

[macintologist]

Why do you people develop in Java anyways?

Why not just program in Objective-C (Cocoa), php, perl, Flash or something else which is better?

Why develop for something which isn't native on any platform?

I'm of course making javascript for web development the exception...

...unless of course that's what the majority of java development is done for....

[goMac]

Originally posted by hayesk:
Java on my 1GHz PowerBook seems to run just as well as on my 2.4GHz P4 at work. I don't run benchmarks, but who's writing performance critical software in Java anyway?

Try Eclipse (http://eclipse.org). Maybe they've made improvements since I last checked. I try to avoid Java on any platform.

[Scifience]

Originally posted by macintologist:
I'm of course making javascript for web development the exception...

...unless of course that's what the majority of java development is done for....

Repeat. After. Me.

Java != JavaScript

They are two entirely different things!

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally posted by Scifience:
Repeat. After. Me.

Java != JavaScript

They are two entirely different things!

correct, but C, C# and C++ are identical ;-)

[Scifience]

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
correct, but C, C# and C++ are identical ;-)

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!

*faints*

[itistoday]

Mmmm... don't over do it. If you install too many fancy gadgets then she could be turned away by the complexity and clutterness. I would suggest keeping the Finder instead of Path finder (unless she's a hardcore Linux geek... I somehow doubt that). Install "Desktop Manager" and have it set to have the desktops shown in the menu bar (it's the best virtual desktop thing for OS X). Install Adium if you haven't already done so and get some nice themes from http://www.adiumxtras.com . Install jEdit (jedit.org) as the java source editor and install plugins for it and customize how it looks visually. What else... oh yes, install "MenuMeters", this is an excellent Sys Prefs plugin that puts vital information into your menu bar. Keep her away from Firefox as it is pretty slow and lacking on OS X, and instead have her use either Safari or Camino as the web browser. Show her the Terminal, explain to her the fundamental differences between OS X and Windows (like how menu bars work), and show her Expose. Also, remove the bouncing icon "feature" in the dock, as it's annoying and slows things down. Maybe explain to her how quartz extreme works (show her a demo of a transparent Terminal window over a Quicktime movie; MenuMeters will show the amount of CPU being eaten up in the menu bar).

Oh, and perhaps most importantly, show her what happens when you close the PowerBook's lid. Many windows users simply don't understand what Sleep is because they think it is the crappy "Standby" feature on Windows (which takes almost as long to wake up as it does to startup the computer). She'll be amazed at how it instantly wakes from sleep. And finally, just let her use OS X for a while to get used to it.

Edit: Oh, almost forgot! Tell her that Macs don't have virus's for them, and there's close to no spyware as well.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by macintologist:
Why do you people develop in Java anyways?

Why not just program in Objective-C (Cocoa), php, perl, Flash or something else which is better?

Objective-C has no good tools on Windows, and although GNUStep is progressing nicely on Linux it is not ready for prime time yet. Also, many programmers dislike Objective-C's syntax, mostly because they're not used to it and don't want to be bothered learning something significantly different.

PHP can be used for client-side development, but it was not designed for this and isn't suited to it. In particular, there is only one GUI which has ever been made available to PHP: namely, the Unix toolkit GTK.

Perl can be used for client-side development, and although it wasn't designed for this task it has grown to the point where it can do this decently. Furthermore, most GUI toolkits have been made available to Perl, such as the cross-platform wxWidgets. You can even program in Cocoa using Perl. However, Perl suffers from something of a stigma, because it's not a compiled language (as does PHP, but PHP isn't at the point where that is even a concern yet). There are no major apps for Windows or Mac OS written in Perl (though such apps are fairly common in the Unix world). The first one is always the biggest hurdle.

Python can be used for client-side development, and has many GUI toolkit bindings -including Cocoa- just like Perl. It even has a major application out there on almost all platforms: BitTorrent, which was originally written in that language. However, it suffers from many of the same stigmas as Perl; it compiles to a form of bytecode similar to Java, but this doesn't count as "native" in the minds of most. Furthermore, parts of the Python syntax are controversial, not unlike Objective-C: programmers either love or loathe them. Truth be told, Python is my favorite language, but many others don't see it that way.

As for Flash... um, no. Just no.

Why develop for something which isn't native on any platform?

Because "native" by most people's definitions is outright meaningless.

...unless of course that's what the majority of java development is done for...

Actually, you're not that far off. JavaScript and Java are completely unrelated, despite the similarity in names. However, just as JavaScript has become standard in client-side Web development, Java has become extremely popular in server-side Web-development. Apple's own WebObjects is written in Java, they are far from alone: many servers and dynamic page systems are written in it. You can even find databases written in Java, such as IBM's Cloudscape (which was recently Open-Sourced as Apache's Derby).

[itistoday]

Originally posted by macintologist:
Why do you people develop in Java anyways?

Why not just program in Objective-C (Cocoa), php, perl, Flash or something else which is better?

Why develop for something which isn't native on any platform?

I'm of course making javascript for web development the exception...

...unless of course that's what the majority of java development is done for....

The main reason is cross-platform compatability. When I make a Java app, it instantly works on any OS with a JVM.

[DeathMan]

One of the big turn-offs is going to be that Java 5 (Tiger) won't ship till OS X 10.4 (Tiger). Anyone digging the newest Java stuff won't want to dev in OS X till then.

However, a very hard-core Java programmer at my company loves to program on his OS X machine, but sort of remotely to a linux set up. He's using Eclipse, and loves it.

And to macintology:

You're an idiot if you think Java and Flash are even in the same solar system as far a development goes. Same thing for PHP, or anything else that you've mentioned really.

Don't make yourself look dumb. If you don't know what you're talking about, its best to just keep your mouth closed. Especially around here.

[olePigeon]

Cuz PowerBooks are the shiznite and very developer friendly.

Besides, if you're going to be doing stuff in Java (that's suppose to be platform independent) why not do it on a computer that looks great?