I've been macced

[DAVEM]

Hi all,

I'm posting this message from my MACBOOK! yay!

I got it from "a well known high street retailer" and it's awesome.

I shall be adding pictures to the gallery in due time..now how do I get rid of this awe*edit*full*edit* OS? Lol

Davem

 

[DAVEM]

You bought a Mac Book to not use OSX?

Hmmm, the idea of spending more on a apple laptop is to use OS X, if you didn't want to use OS X then why didn't you save yourself some dosh and get a PC laptop?

Seems a waste to me :/

I love the way they look, the laptop is just for demoing some research work so I don't need it to be very powerful...

BUT... I've been using Tiger for about 1 hour and pretty much love it, why did I ever use windows?

lol

Also just realised that netbeans, R, Eclipse are all available for mac users, result! Now is there a version of maple/matlab for macs???

Running word however is a nightmare, VERY slow loading, is that because the code isn't native? Might me worth running parrells for that reason alone?

DaveM

 

[DAVEM]

I'll just wait abit more for Office:Mac 2007...

yes, it's not running natively, because of the Intel switch over, (Universal Binary) UB version will be in the 2007 edition.

You can always put up for awhile or try Neo-office (an Aqua Open Office) or just Open Office but it'll run under X11 - which some people don't seem to lik.

I don't mind X11 myself, I run it for GIMP (which is basically a free Photoshop)

Cheers actually I think I'll be okay, I'll just convert my word files to PDF's. My new problem is VNC, I've got "chicken VNC" on the macbook and realVNC on my main PC but it doesn't seem to work. When I try to connect I get a "no passoword entered" message even though I give the password?

Cheers
Dave "new to OSX" M

 

[DAVEM]

R, netbeans (ew!) and Eclipse are all cross-platform so will run on pretty much anything. Maple and Matlab are available for Mac, although there are a lot of problems currently running them in on intel macs. Matlab lacks full IDE mode due mainly to the fact it uses its own (compiled for PPC) JVM to display its GUI.

More details here and from the horses mouth here.

Maple I think will run OK via Rosetta but there are plans to release a Universal Binary version so that should result in significant performance increases on intel macs.

Slow down a little bud! Whats Rosetta? I could get away with just using Maple I think. IMO the VOB add-on for eclipse needs a LOT of work, at the moment I can't see a way of doing simple stuff like alligning buttons etc, where as net beans seems to have a lot of advantages for serious GUI development (plus the C++ add-on is nice)

DaveM

 

[DAVEM]

I'm using Eclipse with the MyEclipse plug-in on both OSX and Windows. I used to use NetBeans 5.0 but find that with the MyEclipse plug-in doing Java work is quite a bit easier and quicker. Without the MyEclipse plug-in I'd still choose NetBeans due to the way it can deploy J2EE apps, integrate with appservers etc.

Eclipse runs fine on my Intel Mac Mini. MyEclipse gives the odd memory problem on both Windows and OSX.

Never used IntelliJ but I'm going to take a look.

Jim

I fed up with switching IDE's, I think I'll stick with Eclipse. I'm running paralells at the moment which seems to run quite well, I've not installed MATLAB/Maple yet but I can't seeing it being to bad as the general performance is quite good using general applications.

 

[DAVEM]

Well it's been a day now. And all I can say is that the Macbook is generally excellent OSX is far better than I could have hoped for. Almost everything is easier. Apart the lack of support for Maple/MATLAB everything else is spot on.

In terms of build quality, my last laptop was my trusty IBM Thinkpad T21, possibly one of the best built laptops I've ever used, but this apple at the moment is great, I love the magnetic power cord and the slightly raised keyboard (does take getting used to though!).

I thought I'd instantly install boot camp and convert over to my usual XP pro, but the opposite is true. I'm sticking with R, and I'll probably only use paralells for using Maple and MATLAB.

Also the battery life was quoted as 2.5 Hrs on some forums. I had it on battery power for well over 3 hrs today! Awesome.

All in all great buy.

DaveM via a MacBook!