Coding on the Mac
I've been busy in the passing week, since I started coding a prototype for my product. I really had to start doing something that shows some immediate results, so I decided to go ahead and code.
My machine is working really well. I'm so glad I decided to switch over. Just to give you a sense of what's running on my machine right now:
- I'm running with an external 20" monitor, at 1680X1050. I don't think you need a larger monitor for programming.
- My network is wireless, my keyboard and mouse are wireless (Bluetooth) as well.
- Currently running:
- 2 Eclipse instances running, one 3.2 and one Europa
- Firefox with about 20 tabs open - I use the tab counter plug-in, I can really lose track of things if I don't.
- iTunes - playing a radio station from the Internet.
- iCal & iGTD for tasks and calendar.
- Freemind - a mind mapping software in Java, that's another JVM (about 1.5GB allocated).
- NeoOffice - an Office application in Java, that's a 4th JVM (about 1.6GB allocated).
- Adium & Skype - instant messaging applications.
- Preview, showing me about 3 PDFs and an image file.
- Dashboard, with about 9 widgets running.
- More background apps - Quicksilver, Mozy (backup), SideNote, Google Notifier, ...
- My machine works perfectly. That's insane. The most amazing thing about it is the memory management. Windows is always busy with swapping. Even if you have 2 gigabytes. Here, I can switch to an application which wasn't active for some time and it will respond, no waiting.
- I'm starting to really appreciate the Apple JVM. The performance seems to be great and they're very stable.
I will try to do a head-to-head comparison between Eclipse instances running on Mac and Windows in the upcoming days.
