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Currently writing about iPhone Development, GWT, Ajax, Leopard, and Java.
Leopard: First Impressions, Java, GWT
Saturday, October 27, 2007
I had the official Leopard release up & running on my laptop by 8:00pm EST. Short of an early FedEx delivery or mugging Walt Mossberg, I don' t think I could have done it much faster. Install was a breeze - click a few buttons, grab some dinner, and come back to a star-covered desktop.
Leopard First Impressions
Three features immediately help my productivity: Quick Look, Spaces, and Tabbed Terminal. I spent half an hour zipping through old files using Quick Look, finding documents and spreadsheets I'd completely forgotten about. Spaces & Tabbed Terminal are a developer's best friend (although I kept tripping the Spaces hot keys when RDCing to a Windows box). I'm still working on my optimal desktop configuration, with 2x2 currently in the lead.
Network sharing is great, except for a slight lag when populating the Shared list. This causes Places to appear in one spot then jump down 40 pixels. This happens in open & save dialogs, resulting in some whack-a-mole mouse action. (Anyone know how to move Places above Shared?)
Other personal highlights: faster Safari, faster Spotlight (hallelujah), unified UI. The animated iChat backgrounds will make for a nice demo to non-Mac friends. The transparent top bar is ridiculous and the tiny blue lights in the dock are hard to see, but I'll gladly put up with them to get all the other improvements.
Java on Leopard
Most of my third party tools worked like a charm: Eclipse, Smultron, Fugu, RDC. I had no problems upgrading XCode/Interface Builder. Unlike previous releases, the developer tool install does not include the Java Developer Documentation - you now have to download it separately. Log in to the ADC Member Site (free memberships work), click Downloads, then select Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Documentation. As reported earlier, Leopard ships with Java 5 (build 1.5.0_13-b05-237); hopefully they'll release Java 6 soon as a software update.
Google Web Toolkit on Leopard
Unfortunately, GWT on Leopard has some issues. If you start hosted mode, it either exits immediately or brings up the window then quickly crashes with this stack trace:
Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.NullPointerException
at apple.awt.CGraphicsEnvironment.displayChanged(CGraphicsEnvironment.java:65)
at apple.awt.CToolkit$4.run(CToolkit.java:1259)
at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(InvocationEvent.java:209)...
Update 11/6/07: GWT now works on Leopard! View my latest post for more information and links to a test build.
Shrook
(Updated 10/28/07: Shrook is now compatible with Leopard!)
