mercoledì 31 ottobre 2007

Leopard: things I like and things I dislike, a developer perspective

It's more than a full day working on Leopard right now. So, here are my first impressions on what I like and what I don't like from a developer perspective.What I like:
  1. Time Machine. Easy, almost everyone paid lip service to TM. But it's still impressive when you look at it
  2. Dtrace and Instruments. This is a joy for developers. More on this in next posts, in the meanwhile have a look at Bryan Cantrill blog,  dtrace creator 
  3. Spaces. Another easy one. Bye bye buggy Virtue Desktop, welcome pre-organized spaces (yes, you can assign applications to predefined spaces)
  4. Terminal. You won't need anymore iTerm to tail logs in tabbed windows.
  5. Calendar icon now shows the real date and not 17 of July!
  6. Ruby/Rails out of the box. Very nice to have ruby/rails integrated. Well, I would have preferred a java 6 virtual machine, but it's nonetheless a nice feature. Not as much as the Calendar icon, but a good one :). Jokes aside, is nice that ruby apps on apple are also Dtraceable
What I don't like:
  1. No Java 6. No workarounds: but java 5 looks very fast, and rumors are that we will see java 6 very soon. (hopefully with fast opengl rendered Swing, working Java Sound and a lot of dtrace probes)
  2. PostgreSql from MacPorts failed to compile, and I still hadn't had time to see why
  3. The 3D Dock looks ugly. Easy workaround:  simply type "defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES" and then a "killall Dock" in the command line
  4. The tranlucent menu looks ugly too. This isn't easily and completely solved right now
  5. Skype works only the first time! This happens because Skype self-modifies itself after the first launch, and the app signing mechanism break. Either wait for Skype folks to solve it or reinstall with the firewall disabled. More info here
  6. Intellij Idea 7.0.1 can't be assigned to a space :(

1 commento:

  1. Hello Ugo,
    luckly for us, java6 just got a nice workaround available.
    Yu might be already aware of it, but just in case:

    http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/macosx/MacOS_Java_16_Developer_Preview_1.20071120.html

    RispondiElimina