"a mac is like a bimbo". It looks good and shiny from a distance, you think you really want to try it. But once you do, after 2 weeks of "doing it" you are bored, bored to tears. Tired of everything, the pretty animation stuff, the big tatas, the transparent look and feel, the big tatas, the genie bullshit animation, the big tatas, the stuff that is different from windows "just to be different", the big tatas and the empty brains.
Nowadays, I am the one who daily (hourly) complain about how clunky and inappropriate is Mac OS X for Java developers. People around me roll their eyes and probably assume I just hate it because I am French too, and French people hate everything.
But, boy, since I started to use this platform professionally, how much do I find Mac to be a hindrance to my development activities! How often the OS gets in my way and pulls me out of the state of flow I am in...
Here is a non-exhaustive list of my grievances, so you can decide if it is mere ranting or if there are some valid reasons for my grumbling:
- Bitter Java: official JDK support is way behind other OSes. For example, the Apple JDK 6 was beta when I was on Tiger and disappeared on Leopard. Sure I could follow the great work of Landon Fuller with Open JDK, but I honestly do not have time to invest in such endeavors.
- Keyboard support is a joke: even if I am using QuickSilver, I constantly have to grab the mouse to click this, highlight that or dismiss a pop-up. The last one really drives me nuts: why is it that the escape key does not always cancel a pop-up dialog?
- Focus messy: there is always an application that steals the focus out of my working window. Maybe this is the fault of badly behaving applications, but it is the first OS where this happens to me so often that I get annoyed by it. Is this OS making it easier for applications to become focus-rude?
- Prompt to freeze: the UI freezes very easily, to the point I can not even switch applications or invoke the task killer. It seems that a badly behaving application can very easily mess-up the whole user interface, hence the whole OS.
- Hidden BSD: it is hard to say this but as far as the overall stability is concerned, OS X reminds me of Windows ME sans Blue Screen of Death. I have to do hard reboot at least once a week, whether the screen saver locks me out for ever or the UI freezes to the point I can not do anything except sitting on the power button. I have not seen this in any OS for almost a decade. And having this kind of behavior on an almost newly re-installed machine, with minimal applications running, is a plain disappointment.
- Finder sucks big time: for an OS that is supposed to be all about user experience, I find the Finder to be a complete disgrace. Try to create a new directory: it never ends up where you want it. Try to shift-select files with the keyboard: going up and down performs some counter-intuitive file selections. Then use the mouse to drag the selected files: they might end-up where you drop them, or not. Instead of adding a new view in Leopard (cover flow), if only Apple could have fixed the existing ones so they become really usable (who uses the insane column view?).
- Flaky AirPort: I am constantly losing connectivity with my Wifi router. Maybe my cheap D-Link router is the issue, but then why my other non-Mac machines have no problem maintaining their connections up and running for hours?
I will not mention Eclipse that dies unexpectedly on Leopard while it was stable on Tiger (yes I have configured the JVM memory parameters, thank you). I will not mention the disgrace that is Entourage, because it is a Microsoft product and Apple can not be blamed for it. And I will not mention that my MacBook Pro hard drive fried just after a year (bye-bye guarantee), which is the first time something like this happened to me for the past ten years that I have been working on laptops.
Nuf' said! So what are my platforms of choice for Java development? In order of preference: Kubuntu, Windows XP and... Mac OS X. But at home, I am very happy with the little white Mac Book we use for browsing, e-mailing and managing photos. For this kind of home activity, having an OS that shows off is acceptable. For professional usage, the less the OS gets in your face, the best it is.
