In addition Eclipse doesn't in fact work nearly as well on Mac OS X. Seems you can't move views around on the 2.1 Mac version. That said, I still use it to develop with on my PowerBook.
Screenshots alone would not have convinced me to switch. You're got to play with it as Eclipse's real benifits come from: o being able to navigate through code via a variety of views. o the built in refactoring, renames have never been so easy. o search facilities like "show me all" references to this method. This make re-working interfaces a lot easier.
The first edition of the book addresses this point by noting that initial passes at performance tuning often yield improvements in the 100x speed-up range. Even with Moore's law generously applied not everyone should wait 7 years to get a performance level that can be achieve with a couple hours of tuning.
The first edition was useful in pointing out common performance pitfalls so when the profiler says some segment of code is taking a huge chunk of time you have an idea as to why and better yet, suggestions concerning what you can do about it.
Many of the performance pitfalls mentioned in the book have real benefits, such as String being immutable, Math functions running exactly the same everywhere by not using native implementations, and toLowercase working in other natural languages. Being aware of them allows you to get the benefits without taking the performance hit.
Putting you head in the sand and/or chasing memory bugs in C seems like a poor alternative.
Microsoft would spend their money better if they applied GUI improments in uniform way. The most annoying feature of XP is that the new fatter start menu doesn't stay open when you move diagonally to the right and accidently touch a desktop pixel. This was copied from Macs a while ago for pull-down sub-menus but no one thought: "Hey we should do the same thing if the window opens up instead of down!" I typically have the menu close on me going to the run menu when I don't want to 8-click through to get to something like calc, paint, or cmd. Even Gnome keeps the menus open and doesn't force you to mouse orthogonally.
A similar technique has worked well for indexing accademic articles. The scan is stored as a PDF file and the OCR is used to index the underlying text. This greatly simplifies converting tables etc. The OCR is good enough for indexing and can always be redone/corrected in the future while providing a usfull product almost imediately with far less work then typing/speaking/what have you. Check out http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/ (not all at once) for an example.
This review represents my experience well as I have been trying to get my rh8 box to play video this last week. I wanted to watch mp2 tv shows on my linux box that were taped on a windows box so I don't mess up the taping by watching. I ended up starting with xine since it was listed first on my google search and was already installed.
I ran into the same interface issues, like how do you open files from the gui (:// MRLBrowser), and once I figured it out, the interface was so annoying that I soon abandoned it guessing correctly that I can send them in as command line parameters. So off we go and the video is playing but the sound is all choppy.
Feeling success is near as we have playing video I boldly maximize the window to full screen. Fuck, how to I get back! I go for the escape key which just screams out as a solution to "I'm trapped in full screen mode, what should I do?" ESCAPE!!! escape does nothing; Ctrl-C does nothing; I hit other random keys; nothing. I am forced to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace which at least means I don't have to reboot. Note to self, do not maximize the application until we learn the hot keys which I'll have to look up later as they aren't on the non-existant menus.
Hunt the web for choppy audio xine, etc, try changing the audio channel, again this is difficult at best to decern how to do this from the gui as it might as well be a volume control in xine. Don't tell me either that they already have another volume control since there are two mute buttons prominantly displayed so two volume controls is completly reasonable. Alas this doesn't fix the sound problem.
Abandon xine, look for mplayer rpms (no, I don't compile apps myself), don't find them on the mplayer site. This is usually a sign of a still-in -early-developement app, try ogle.
Now, so many people are quick to point out that ogle doesn't claim to play anything but dvds, but it does play them on my machine, and so well, no choppy sound or video. These are mp2 files, very similar?, yes, but alas no.
Back to xine and a new version which claims to fix some sound bug. freshrpms.net is my friend. oh look mplayer rpms (maybe later) as all we need is sound from xine and this looks promising. Get the new version of xine, install half a dozen other packages including glut which isn't even on freshrpms but we find on rpmfind. Now rpm tells me what I need, in a way that is actually useful. It does not list a specific function that it can't find and leaving me to discern what package that might be in as I suspect gcc might. I'm only guessing from other compiling experiences, but they have not led me to believe that compling apps I'm not working on will not be anything but a big time sink
We're all installed; the video is playing; the sound is good, once I change the audio chanell as suggested before. I'm feeling brave again and want to see if I can play these files over the samba mount to the windows machine, where they get recorded. In theory I can copy them much faster than they play; maybe it'll work? No. What if I start the copy, and play while in progress? No. xine crashes spectactuarly for both and now won't play anything; not even local files that it played before. I delete it's config and it fuctions once again.
Conclusion: JWZ's experience is the norm for most users except that most give up long before we did. I can't recommend linux to anyone who has expectations of functionality similar to windows and doesn't have a ton of time or experience, and probably both. While it has gotten much better, we still have a long way to go before the above is not the typical app install experience.
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In addition Eclipse doesn't in fact work nearly as well on Mac OS X. Seems you can't move views around on the 2.1 Mac version. That said, I still use it to develop with on my PowerBook.
Screenshots alone would not have convinced me to switch. You're got to play with it as Eclipse's real benifits come from:
o being able to navigate through code via a variety of views.
o the built in refactoring, renames have never been so easy.
o search facilities like "show me all" references to this method. This make re-working interfaces a lot easier.
The first edition of the book addresses this point by noting that initial passes at performance tuning often yield improvements in the 100x speed-up range. Even with Moore's law generously applied not everyone should wait 7 years to get a performance level that can be achieve with a couple hours of tuning.
The first edition was useful in pointing out common performance pitfalls so when the profiler says some segment of code is taking a huge chunk of time you have an idea as to why and better yet, suggestions concerning what you can do about it.
Many of the performance pitfalls mentioned in the book have real benefits, such as String being immutable, Math functions running exactly the same everywhere by not using native implementations, and toLowercase working in other natural languages. Being aware of them allows you to get the benefits without taking the performance hit.
Putting you head in the sand and/or chasing memory bugs in C seems like a poor alternative.
Microsoft would spend their money better if they applied GUI improments in uniform way. The most annoying feature of XP is that the new fatter start menu doesn't stay open when you move diagonally to the right and accidently touch a desktop pixel. This was copied from Macs a while ago for pull-down sub-menus but no one thought: "Hey we should do the same thing if the window opens up instead of down!" I typically have the menu close on me going to the run menu when I don't want to 8-click through to get to something like calc, paint, or cmd. Even Gnome keeps the menus open and doesn't force you to mouse orthogonally.
A similar technique has worked well for indexing accademic articles. The scan is stored as a PDF file and the OCR is used to index the underlying text. This greatly simplifies converting tables etc. The OCR is good enough for indexing and can always be redone/corrected in the future while providing a usfull product almost imediately with far less work then typing/speaking/what have you. Check out http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/ (not all at once) for an example.
This review represents my experience well as I have been trying to get my rh8 box to play video this last week. I wanted to watch mp2 tv shows on my linux box that were taped on a windows box so I don't mess up the taping by watching. I ended up starting with xine since it was listed first on my google search and was already installed.
I ran into the same interface issues, like how do you open files from the gui (:// MRLBrowser), and once I figured it out, the interface was so annoying that I soon abandoned it guessing correctly that I can send them in as command line parameters. So off we go and the video is playing but the sound is all choppy.
Feeling success is near as we have playing video I boldly maximize the window to full screen. Fuck, how to I get back! I go for the escape key which just screams out as a solution to "I'm trapped in full screen mode, what should I do?" ESCAPE!!! escape does nothing; Ctrl-C does nothing; I hit other random keys; nothing. I am forced to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace which at least means I don't have to reboot. Note to self, do not maximize the application until we learn the hot keys which I'll have to look up later as they aren't on the non-existant menus.
Hunt the web for choppy audio xine, etc, try changing the audio channel, again this is difficult at best to decern how to do this from the gui as it might as well be a volume control in xine. Don't tell me either that they already have another volume control since there are two mute buttons prominantly displayed so two volume controls is completly reasonable. Alas this doesn't fix the sound problem.
Abandon xine, look for mplayer rpms (no, I don't compile apps myself), don't find them on the mplayer site. This is usually a sign of a still-in -early-developement app, try ogle.
Now, so many people are quick to point out that ogle doesn't claim to play anything but dvds, but it does play them on my machine, and so well, no choppy sound or video. These are mp2 files, very similar?, yes, but alas no.
Back to xine and a new version which claims to fix some sound bug. freshrpms.net is my friend. oh look mplayer rpms (maybe later) as all we need is sound from xine and this looks promising. Get the new version of xine, install half a dozen other packages including glut which isn't even on freshrpms but we find on rpmfind. Now rpm tells me what I need, in a way that is actually useful. It does not list a specific function that it can't find and leaving me to discern what package that might be in as I suspect gcc might. I'm only guessing from other compiling experiences, but they have not led me to believe that compling apps I'm not working on will not be anything but a big time sink
We're all installed; the video is playing; the sound is good, once I change the audio chanell as suggested before. I'm feeling brave again and want to see if I can play these files over the samba mount to the windows machine, where they get recorded. In theory I can copy them much faster than they play; maybe it'll work? No. What if I start the copy, and play while in progress? No. xine crashes spectactuarly for both and now won't play anything; not even local files that it played before. I delete it's config and it fuctions once again.
Conclusion: JWZ's experience is the norm for most users except that most give up long before we did. I can't recommend linux to anyone who has expectations of functionality similar to windows and doesn't have a ton of time or experience, and probably both. While it has gotten much better, we still have a long way to go before the above is not the typical app install experience.