stressfree - imac

Intel OSX is all go

David — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 09:26:55 +0000

Over the weekend I finished the transition from my PowerBook to the Intel based iMac as my primary development platform. Rather than use the PowerPC only Flock or stick with Safari I have started using an unofficical Intel compiled version of Firefox. Performance is excellent and there are no issues with reliability, Java or Flash.

Installing Rails and ImageMagick turned out to be very straightforward thanks to DarwinPorts, the Rails on OSX wiki and the ImageMagick on OSX howto. Currently there is no Intel compiled DarwinPorts binary but fortunately it compiled from source without issue (once the Apple Developer Tools were installed).
In the process I found a nice Eclipse plugin for Ruby on Rails named RadRails.

The only non-Intel development specific applications I am waiting for are Transmit (FTP/SFTP) and NaviCat (MySQL manager). Apparently a Universal Transmit should ship soon whilst NaviCat maybe a long way away. Fortunately both applications run okay through Rosetta.

First thoughts on Intel iMac

David — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 23:58:11 +0000

My Intel iMac arrived on Tuesday and I have been playing with it ever since. Overall it is working out really well, it is snappy when running Intel/Universal binaries and the screen quality is superb. The extra 512meg of RAM has not arrived yet so it is hard to judge performance but it is very promising. At the moment it kind of feels like you are driving a Formala One car with the tires borrowed from the family sedan, whilst Intel binaries run very nicely Rosetta is very slow especially when two or more legacy binaries are open at once. I have a feeling however that the extra RAM will help a lot with this.

Fortunately a good portion of the applications I use have Universal binary support. Two of my most used applications, Proteus (IM client) and NetNewsWire (feed aggregator) have yet to gain universal binary support. Rather than wait around I have swapped to the very capable (and Universal) AdiumX and NewsFire, both of which are very nice. Apparently Firefox won't gain Universal support until March which is a pain because my new favourite browser Flock is based on it. Eclipse now has Intel support thanks to a SWT patch but Fink will be a few weeks off by the sound of it. This means I can't use the iMac for development just yet because I use Fink for compiling Ruby, OpenLDAP, PHP5 and Apache for testing. MySQL has been quick to come out with an Intel binary which is good to see.

AdiumX and NewsFire running on the new desktop (click to enlarge)

All in all very promising. I am sure in a month most things will be sorted out and by March all the pieces will be in place to complete the transition. Once that is the case the trusty old PowerBook will be put in a corner and used for the odd occassions when I actually need a laptop.

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Intel iMac arrives

David — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 21:08:43 +0000

Eclipse patch for OSX Intel: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=98889

Still waiting on Fink support. Once that arrives in the near future will be able to install developer tools like subversion, ruby, rails, php5 and openldap.

Preordered an Intel iMac

David — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 11:12:52 +0000

With my new office space I was finding that my PowerBook was getting used less and less as a laptop. For a while I was considering getting a Mac Mini/iMac to replace it as it is two years old and sometimes a little slow. Then this week Apple announced their new iMacs based on the Intel processor. It is hard to turn down a major speed increase (my guess running legacy apps through Rosetta will still be faster than my PowerBook) plus it comes with a far better video card, more RAM, bigger hard drive and the ability to plug my 19" LCD display into the side and span screens. All in all a very good upgrade and one that should arrive within the next three to four weeks (fingers crossed).

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