Symphonious

The rumors of Java 5 being horribly broken beyond all usability on Leopard are, quite frankly, bullshit. It's faster, has better integration with the OS, the Aqua L&F is significantly improved, it has full support for 64 bit and a huge raft of bug fixes and miscellaneous improvements. Everyone's pointing to an uninformed rant on JavaLobby which as it's key example actually highlights a major improvement to the Aqua L&F - the JOptionPane icons should use the application icon, not some obscure artwork that's not used anywhere else in the system. The new dialogs actually allow you to look more like native app, not less. It's even explained in the release notes - heck, the old implementation was probably reported as a bug against Tiger.

Radar #4858198

JOptionPanes did not match the native Mac OS X dialog appearance

Description:

Default info JOptionPanes now use the application's icon, as per the Aqua User Interface Guidelines instead of a message bubble icon. Warning and error JOptionPanes now show the application's icon badged onto the warning or error icon as per the Aqua User Interface Guidelines.

Resolution:

This problem is now fixed in Mac OS X 10.5.

The graphics pipeline has changed in Leopard which means that if you've optimized for the Quartz renderer, you should specifically request it or you may find that suddenly things start going much slower. In most cases the Sun 2D pipeline is faster than the Quartz pipeline - particularly if the code makes Windows specific performance assumptions (most Java 2D code does whether the author knows it or not). So while some applications may run slower by default, most applications run much faster and those that do run slow can switch back to the Quartz pipeline. Change isn't always easy but it happens - stop whining and start coding.

You can complain that there's no Java 6 yet (though all those people complaining aren't getting anywhere with porting their own and there's no excuses now), and you can complain about the lack of information but Java 5 on Leopard is a significant improvement and the engineers at Apple deserve to be congratulated for that - not insulted.

My first thought when I heard that the Leopard blue screens being were by Unsanity's APE was "and that's why only fools use hacks like that". So it was with some surprise that I read John Gruber's article on the issue this morning and discovered that the Logitech driver installs APE. Moments before I'd installed the Logitech driver…

Turns out my decision to do an archive and install to get rid of left over cruft from all the software that I've tried was a pretty wise one - I've had the Logitech drivers installed for quite some time, so most likely I would have run into the "blue screen of foolishness".

Needless to say I've gone through the Logitech .bom file and deleted everything it put in place again. Going to have to find another way to get the media buttons working….

I was silly enough to open my work email this morning, only to discover that the Apple Java-Dev list had broken out into the age old Java on OS X argument. First up here's what people have reported1:

• Java 6 is not included with Leopard.
• The previous Java 6 DP which was pulled from ADC a while back does not run on Leopard.
• Upgrading to Leopard from a system with the Java 6 DP installed can cause some frustrating issues with switching Java versions.
• Apparently Java 5 is much faster on Leopard.
• Java 5 looks different with quite a few tweaks to the Aqua L&F.
• Some fonts don't look right in Java 5 on Leopard because it uses the Sun 2D graphics pipeline instead of the Quartz pipeline. The Sun 2D pipeline doesn't support sub-pixel antialiasing. You can override the default and there's a few other conditions that trigger the Quartz pipeline to be used by default.
• Java 5 supports 64bit on Intel Core 2s (but not PPC). There seemed to be some problem with it when using the Java tools in /usr/bin though - can't say I followed that discussion too carefully.
• Lots of documentation is coming, but not much is available yet.

Pretty sure that's the Java on Leopard wrap up, the other 150 emails to the list were just the usual gnashing of teeth about Apple abandoning Java and how Apple will lose so much business if they don't get Java 6 out yesterday etc etc etc. Of course, Apple's doing better than it ever has before and JavaOne was full of people using Macs - without Java 6 - so it would seem it's all just talk and insignificant numbers of people are actually leaving OS X. As a fresh twist, this time round people are talking of porting OpenJDK to OS X themselves and finally freeing themselves from the evil clutches of Apple! Apparently no one has told them that Java 6 isn't available from OpenJDK either - it will become Java 7 and is quite some way from that yet. I think it's a safe bet that Apple will have Java 6 out long before even a reasonable uncertified port of OpenJDK is available for OS X.

Oh well, time to put my flame proof underwear on - nothing gets people going like Java on OS X posts, for those who subscribe to the comments feed, this one's likely to drown out the Back to the 80s nonsense for a fair while….

Got my MacBook Pro back from service today, all fixed up. Total repair bill would have been $2500 if it wasn't under warranty. So all up it took three and a half days to get fixed which isn't too bad actually. I still think it's a shame that Apple don't offer guaranteed turn around, on-site support - it would make buying Macs for businesses a lot nicer, but I can understand it's not their primary target market. I'm still impressed at how easy it was to switch to a backup machine and back - keeping a full clone of the system around is definitely a good idea.

My MacBook Pro has acquired insomnia and it's firewire ports have given up the ghost so I've had to part with it while it gets repaired. It's always annoying when problems emerge with new things, particularly when you depend on them to get work done, but it hasn't worked out too badly. With Carbon Copy Cloner I backed everything up before putting the laptop in for service and commandeered the mac mini we have for testing so I'm up and running like normal - just a lot slower and with a tiny fraction of the RAM.

It is impressive that it's so easy to create a fully bootable back up like that though. If you only back up the data you spend a lot of time setting things up the way you want them again, but with a full clone of the system everything's just like it always was. It's also nice to know that all my work stuff is stored on a server somewhere, either via IMAP, hosted web apps or in SVN so everything's safe anyway and easy to transport between computers (my home PC is already set up for work if I need it).

Anyway, we'll see how fast the repair shop can get it fixed. It's a shame Apple don't offer a guaranteed service turn around time - it would make it a lot easier for businesses but that's not Apple's target market. I'm far more productive with my Mac than anything else so that makes up for the longer service times on the rare (hopefully only) occasion I'll need to put up with it. I doubt I'll be this patient and understanding after a few days so I thought I'd blog now while I sound rational instead of just ranting and raving like a true blogger.