Friday, May 8, 2009

MacOS X first impressions

By occasion I had to develop stuff for iPhone whole this week and therefore used MacBook as a primary computer. I've never used MacOS before except that once I've tried to install Hackintosh on my laptop but I could not used it because it didn't support neither wifi nor ethernet.

So, well, MacOS X. It seems very hard to use in default configuration. Like, MacBook screensize is 13.3" (or something like that, lazy to check), considering that it's weird that the dock consumes so much screen space. I don't know how is it supposed to be usable, because the menu bar + window title + dock in default size consumes almost 1/4 of the screen space, it's weird. The only option is to set it's size to minimum and make it auto-hide.

Window manager also seems to be kinda unusual. The first strange thing is how spaces (or whatever it's called) are implemented. I wonder why "Alt-Tab" shows me windows from all spaces instead of windows from the current space only. I was told it's possible to configure it, but I don't spot such option in the preferences. I also cannot find how to move a window from one space to another.

Next disappointment is xcode, and first of all, it's editor. It feels like notepad with the only difference that it has syntax highlighting. For some reason, in the default configuration when you hit 'build and go' button it doesn't just to the first error/warning line in the sources. Seems to be kinda weird as well... Other stuff made me curious as well, for example, I wasn't able to find an easy way to rename a project.

I don't know if xcode is positioned as IDE, probably is, but it looks like it's missing a lot of useful features available in other IDEs, for example I wasn't able to find any refactoring stuff there, while e.g. Idea has great support of various refactoring stuff.

As for hardware, keyboard is weird in macbook. The thing that makes me feel uncomfortable is the "fn" key located in usual place of "ctrl" key. Space between the keys are also kinda large and it's unusual as well.

Now I have an impression that OSX is not OS of my choice, I'm happy with freebsd/openbox or linux/openbox at least and the only interesting thing to me in osx is their API, esp. the UI part of it, because it looks like it's way better than for example QT or GTK+. ObjC is also quite interesting, I think I'll play with it in the future.

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