September 15, 2003

odds & ends

Well, long time no blog, here's some junk that's on my mind:

• I've been enamored with apple machines for a while ever since I heard about rhapsody, but I've never actually bought one. Now that I feel I'm ready to actually lay down some cash for a G5 when panther comes out I figured I'd go through 'em. There have always been these little things that bug the hell out of like why does apple maximize window not take up the full screen like windows maximize does? I've read posts where apple people say its actually better human interface because it doesnt take up any more space than it actually needs blah blah blah but i can't help getting annoyed with this bit of functionality. I think that I can get past it though with time.

  Another minor quirk that always annoyed me was that there was a really poor alt-tab'ing interface. I alt-tab like mad, thats just the way I do things and the apple implementations prior panther are junk. Panther has finally fixed this admittedly petty gripe for me with expose and a real ctrl-tab functionality like I'm used to on windows.

  I've spent my fair share of time at apple stores, trying to get a feel for os x and one of the other short comings to my taste is the lack of feature control i see in their control panel type thing. I like to be able to turn off and on things like showing window contents while resizing and moving because they slow crap down even with quartz+++ on g4's I havent really seen a g5 yet. I like fine tuning these aspects of my ui, and os x seems to lack this type of fine grained control. Are OS X configuration settings stored in flat files in some /etc structure? if so then that wouldnt be so bad. I think I can get over this however as most of the choices apples make for you seem pretty decent.
  



• Ok this next bit let me preface with I'm an IDEA junkie, have been so for the past 2 years but my company is big into IBM and we use WSAD, Websphere, and they got rid of DB2 for Oracle a couple years ago. Now one good thing about using an IDE and an App server from one vendor is they usually have good integration, which in this case is true. The integration is pretty tight and if I'd never used IDEA, I'd say that IBM did a pretty slick job with their eclipse plugins on 5.1 and be loving it. The integrated debugging with WS5 is quite good, the perspectives thing is pretty cool and SWT has been fine for me, the struts integration is a little better than just struts console, and the CVS integration is pretty good. With all that said here are my petty gripes that keep me from the eclipse platform and firmly entrenched as an IDEA lover: keyboard shortcut configuration is weak, no anti-aliased fonts, the project is not in sync with the file structure without manually refreshing, ctrl-o which gives you a uml popup of your class has way too short of a column count, no code folding, template system is weaker, code inspection is weaker, IDEA's code formatting engine is much smarter as far as line wrapping, quick javadoc is weaker, no monospaced font like in IDEA, syntax highlighting is weaker, weaker code intention insight, open type, open resource dialog include every library and possible file in the project, I'm only interested in my own code 99.99% of the time, context menus inside a file are missing team features like commit,update,rollback, i wish i could create a mouse shortcut to close a tab when middle clicked...