[wallinbl]

I think I'm going to end up getting an iBook (unless the mysterious iTablet turns out to be too fantastic to pass on). I really want a PowerBook, but that's just too much money. I mostly want it for the screen resolution.

Most of the time I do website development (PHP, ASP). Most of what I do is coding. I'd like to learn to use the Macromedia products at some point. I also want to start doing Cocoa development. Is anyone using an iBook for development? How do you like it? Do you find the screen too small?

[-Q-]

I use an 800 iBook for developing web sites and it can get a little cramped with all the toolbars and windows in Dreamweaver. Using BBEdit to tweak the code has never been a problem tho'. The screen resolution is sharp and I've had a noticeable decrease in eyestrain with the iBook screen.

The nice thing is, you can enable monitor spanning on the iBook (requires a hack and is not supported by Apple) so you can move your toolbars to another monitor if you'd like...

[wallinbl]

Originally posted by -Q-:
it can get a little cramped with all the toolbars and windows in Dreamweaver.

Do you hide the dock?

[Griggsy]

Originally posted by -Q-:
The nice thing is, you can enable monitor spanning on the iBook (requires a hack and is not supported by Apple) so you can move your toolbars to another monitor if you'd like...

Do you notice a slow down on the spanning? as would like an inbook as reckon an 800 would be faster than my G4 400 sawtooth, only thing is in real world terms would the 32mb gcard in the ibook beat the g4 in lighwave with its 16mb rage anyone know??

[Nyuni]

I have an iBook 700 with the 16mb graphics and the spanning hack enabled, and I'm quite pleased with the performance while using dual monitors.

I use my iBook for XML development under Apache Cocoon, as well as HTML and PHP. The 12" screen at 1024x768 alone is horribly anemic for using Dreamweaver or Photoshop, but most of my heavy work is done on my G4 Desktop with dual heads. The iBook is more than adequate for coding using BBEdit, though.

[Gul Banana]

I use my iBook 800 for coding; Cocoa, C++, perl, PHP, Scheme, Haskell, Java, HTML and other things. Combined with wireless networking, it's a great machine. Although I am quite short-sighted, I can read things on the screen; When at home, I do often find myself using my Sawtooth instead for the larger screen, comfortable chair and desk, full size keyboard etc, but the iBook is perfect for anybody who moves from location to location a lot. Compile times are good, except of course for heavily templatised code:/
One note of warning: Windows is really the only viable development platform for ASP...

[andersbk]

I use spanning on my 800 iBook

And it works great

The iBook screen is very clear, and it's actually crispier and more comfortable to use than my 19" Proview monitor

[ShotgunEd]

Originally posted by andersbk:
I use spanning on my 800 iBook

And it works great

The iBook screen is very clear, and it's actually crispier and more comfortable to use than my 19" Proview monitor

I'm using Macromedia Studio on my iBook 500 and I'm loving it. True enough, dual monitors would help a lot but the MX versions of Flash and Dreamweaver are so intuitive, its entirely feasible on my 15 month old iBook.

[wallinbl]

Originally posted by Gul Banana:
One note of warning: Windows is really the only viable development platform for ASP...

We run the ASP on Windows servers. I would just need to write it on the iBook. That only requires a text editor (except for COM development).

[lagarto]

Just went from a 600 with the old mobility to an 800 radeon + monitor hack + 512 MB. It's a great dev machine, best Unix desktop I can imagine, all the Java & Apache stuff works fine, Apple dev tools (the old NextStep stuff) are good, and loads of other stuff is getting ported all the time.

Can't imagine developing on anything else - hate having to use NT at work. Do wish Apple and Sun ported the J2ME Wireless Toolkit (somebody else has done it I think). Also, with the external monitor running at a slighly higher res. the fan does come on occasionally, and it's noisy! Otherwise brillian machine!!!

[juanpacolopez]

Originally posted by wallinbl:
I think I'm going to end up getting an iBook (unless the mysterious iTablet turns out to be too fantastic to pass on). I really want a PowerBook, but that's just too much money. I mostly want it for the screen resolution.

Most of the time I do website development (PHP, ASP). Most of what I do is coding. I'd like to learn to use the Macromedia products at some point. I also want to start doing Cocoa development. Is anyone using an iBook for development? How do you like it? Do you find the screen too small?

I'm doing some Cocoa development on a 1Ghz Ti, and here are my impressions.

I also own a 600Mhz iBook. The app I'm currently working on (a native Cocoa version of TetriNET) can do a full (clean) build on my Ti in a few minutes (4 or 5 maybe)...

Building the same code on the iBook takes (conservatively) 2.5x as long. Granted, it's only 10-15 minutes on the iBook, nothing terrible; but if my app was larger/more complex I could imagine it becoming an issue.

If you're just looking to the iBook (especially the newer, 900Mhz jobs) as something to get started LEARNING Cocoa development on I think you'll do just fine... if you really start getting into it/trying to make money off of it I think you'll end up craving more speed.

[ae86_16v]

Hahaha. . . this thread is close to 9 months old.