IntelliJ & Spaces, a fix (kind off)
This isn’t exactly new, but some java-apps seem to have problems with Spaces in Leopard, i.e. not changing to the correct spaces when switching program.
I found a pretty easy solution, simply open the help window and put it behind the main IDEA window, spaces works fine (although this is kind of hacky).
Apple seeds JDK 6 to testers
Finally, after months of silence something about the JDK6 for OS X has surfaced. According to Macrumors.com apple seeded Java SE 6 Preview 8 for Leopard yesterday evening. According to the report it’s Java SE 6 version 1.6.0_01, and apparently requires a 64-bit capable Intel-mac. So there is still room for ranting about the support for PPC platform.
I for one think it’s wonderful news to get support for JDK6, not so much for development purposes but for the improved performance and some random goodies included in the JDK.
Update: Apparently Apple also made Java SE 6 Developer Preview 8 available from the ADC site today. Go grab it, and stop complaining..
Leopard trick: Latest App, doc, server etc.
Just a quick tip for the Leopard users out there, to have a stack in the dock which reflect you Recent Applications, Recent Documents, Recent Servers, Favorite Volumes or Favorite Items simply do the following
Fire up a terminal and enter
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }’
Followed by a restart of the dock with the trusted
killall Dock
There should now be a new stack on your dock, change the “mode” by right(ctrl) clicking the stack to change what the stack shows.
No JDK6 with OS X 10.5 Leopard
So what’s up with Java on the Mac? After the initial chock of Apple not mentioning anything about Java 6 support in Leopard, as well as pulling the alpha/beta release from ADC a while ago the future of Java as a first-class citizen on the Mac has been questioned around the blogosphere..
Well having just installed Leopard on my MacBook Pro (The upgrade was painless, 30min) I can say that JDK 6 is not included in Leopard, those of you might remember that JDK 1.5 shipped exclusivly with the Tiger release, and I was really expecting the same this time.
Hopefully (and most probably) Apple will release a JDK 6 sometime, but the real question here is “sometime”, how long can you afford to wait? (For the record Sun released JDK6 almost a year ago at December 11 2006)
So how does this effect you? Personally I am not that effected since I mostly do Enterprise development, but I could use the speedup in JDK6 for running IDE’s and other tools.
OS X “must-have” software, revisited
Following up on a popular, but somewhat outdated list of my “must-have software for OS X”, some applications remains the same and some have been replaced.
Without further ado.
Bonecho (Firefox) – Nothing to say really, Firefox native build, some usefull plugins I use Adblock, Google Browser Sync, Google Gears, PDF Download, Server Spy, Stylish, Better Gmail, del.icio.us Bookmarks )
CoreDuoTemp
Disco
MagicDraw UML
MailActOn
Mailplane
MailTags
MenuCalendarClock iCal
OmniDazzle
Quicksilver
SlimBatteryMonitor
Skype
SpamSieve
SCPlugin
Textmate
The Unarchiver
UNO
Yep
VMWare Fusion
Netbeans, Subversion and Mac
NetBeans has SVN support pretty much out-of-the-box, but on OS X you will be presented with the not so obvious message
NetBeans Subversion support requires Subversion 1.3 executable!
Install Subversion 1.3 (http://subversion.tigris.org) or later,
add it to PATH,
test by running ’svn –version’ from command line, and
finally restart IDE, please
Since I apparently has forgotten how I made it work before here is the instruction for future reference, hopefully this will save me (and perhaps others) from some frustration.
- Fire up a terminal
- Navigate to your Netbeans installtion folder like
cd /Applications/NetBeans5.5.app/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/bin - Open the netbeans file in your favorite editor
- On the first line (after comments) add
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin
export PATH - Save the file, and restart NetBeans
Your all set!
Weblogic 10 on OS X..
Weblogic, being one of the major player in the Java EE app server space released the first fully certified final release last week (although a fully certified tech preview has been available for a while now.).
Being a longtime Weblogic user (my current project using Weblogic 9.2 to name just one) I decided to give it a spin.
Since BEA doesn’t support OS X I start out by making the beast run on my preferred platform, fortunately its quite easy, and I have previously blogged about it. So here is a quick recap for WLS10.
Firstly download the HP-UX Itanium release (server100_generic.jar)
Start the graphical installer by running
java -Dos.name=unix -jar server100_generic.jar
One installed, go ahead and create a new domain (or upgrade an existing if thats your game), use the wlserver_10.0/common/bin/config.sh to start the wizard.
Voila, your ready to go. Start the new domain and start playing around with WLS10.
And of course, running Weblogic on OSX is not supported by BEA in any way.
My next step is to evaluate the WLS10, to get to know it a bit better. Ill take a existing Java EE app and make it run on WLS 10 (The app is currently in production on JBoss AS, and I’ve previously “ported” it to Glassfish). So hand around for my observations.
Note, by using this approach you will miss out on the platform dependent optimization (namely using native libraries, but this method has served me good in the past).
to be continued…
Update: It has come to my attention that the console may freeze (and the CPU jumps to 100%) when trying to login to the console (I didn’t run into it since I had made theese changes anyway). Change/add the following to bin/setDomainEnv.sh
USER_MEM_ARGS="-Xms512m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m"
Clean looking bag for MacBook
It seams that I forgot to mention I picked up a “BlackBook” when I were on vacation to Florida recently, I can’t believe how much cheaper the hardware is”over there”. This far I am really impressed, it is plenty fast (upgraded to 2gigs of RAM) and perfect size. Finally I can use a laptop on the weekly flights.
But one thing is missing, I picked up a Incase Neoprene case at the same time I bought the computer (only thing available at the Apple Store, and only in not so nice ugly Red). But I really want a clean looking bag to go with it (no crumpler) preferably in black leather. I can’t seam to find a decent looking shoulder bag; the ACME made is pretty nice but not what I’m looking for.
Any tips on a good looking bag/case?
Mounting .mac iDisk on Ubuntu
I tend to keep some files that I need access to from different computers on my .mac iDisk account, when on a windows computer Apple has a utility to mount the file system, but when using Linux (Ubuntu in my case) your out of luck.
But luckily iDisk is just a webdav share so mounting it is pretty easy.
Firstly do a
sudo apt-get install davfs2
This will install the required utility to mount webdav file systems.
Then fire up your favorite editor and edit
/etc/davfs2/secrets
And ad a entry like this
http://idisk.mac.com/username USERNAME PASSWORD
to mount the file system manually type
mount -t davfs http://idisk.mac.com/username /mnt/idisk
That’s it, your ready to go.
If you like to have it automatically mounted when booting you have to edit /etc/fstab and add
http://idisk.mac.com/username /mnt/idisk davfs user 0 0
Go with Pro, or…
I’ve been looking into replacing my now somewhat aging 17” powerbook (1,67Ghz, 2GB RAM), although the Pb is really nice (big screen, reasonably fast) it suffers from a couple of drawbacks.
- To cumbersome – I have been air-commuting for the last year, and the 17” is a bit to big to use and to carry around.
- Development Performance – Using it to as my development machine of choice, the performance has begun to lag behind. It has really started to get on my nerves, mostly the compile/deploy cycle of Java EE development (Netbeans/Eclipse, JBoss AS/Weblogic)
- Slow Virtual PC – I still need to access/use some windows software, not that often but the VirtualPC performance is sub par.
So my plan is to replace it shortly after Christmas, I were dead set on replacing it with a 15” MacBook Pro, but lately I have been beginning to wonder if the MacBook would fit the bill (I plan to hook either on up to a 23” Cinema Display and keyboard/mouse when developing at home) and recent blog post such as this added further decision frustration to the mix.
Any suggestions/recommendations? Is the MacBook good enough, or should I pay the extra premium to get the Pro?