🔒 Locked

Macs, xcode, and the switch...

Started by Yann L Jun 28, 2006 at 5:46 PM 52 replies 11.7k views

Original Post

Jun 28, 2006 at 5:46 PM

I'm really fed up with both Windows and Linux. Both are mediocre operating systems, each with their very own set of flaws, bugs, inefficiencies and other annoyances that make me go insane lately. And Windows Vista is a complete abomination. So I decided to switch over to the Dark Side (tm), and got myself a Macbook Pro this morning. I've been playing around with it for the entire day. I'm not terribly impressed, unfortunately. It's not bad at all, and certainly better than the other bunch (Windows, Linux) in many aspects, but it's horribly lacking in others. I don't know if my expectations are really that outlandish, or if I'm getting over sensitive lately, but well - I just want a stable, intuitive and powerful OS to work with. And OSX isn't quite there, at least from what I could gather during my first impressions. Anyway, here's a small review from my first experience on Mac OS X. I know that there are quite a few Mac users here, so maybe you can give me some advice on how to tweak OSX in order to make it more efficient, or shout at me when some of these points are due to user-stupidity ;) Notebook: * Really nice design. Probably the best from all notebooks I've seen so far. * Screen: a little too panoramic, and lacks height eventhough it's a 17". Good image quality though. * Where is the HDD activity LED ? It's extremely annoying not to know what your hard drive is doing. * The trackpad lacks the right mouse button. No, single button mice and trackpads are not cool and/or "easy". They're just annoying. * Magnetic power plug snap: funny. I hope this thing is far enough away from the HDD... OSX: * Nice visuals. Much more elegant than the cheap "in-your-face" Vista eyecandy. But still too much at places, and things like minimize/maximize animations cannot be turned off. * Multi display support is excellent. * The entire GUI feels slugish, much slower than Windows or KDE. It's as if there was a slight lag between screen updates and the mouse pointer. Scrolling in Finder windows, Safari or Firefox is slow. Considering that this notebook is the current top of the line product, such sluggishness is simply unacceptable. A GUI must be fast and responsive. * The Dock is the spawn of Satan. PLEASE, tell me there is a third party taskbar-like replacement somewhere out there... * Application folders are cool. And the DMG install process is really nice, IMO (I know many will disagree, but you'll love this after fighting for ages with corrupt MSI packages fucking up the registry...) * Text rendering and antialising is not nice at all. It really doesn't look good, especially on a large LCD. I don't understand this. Apple has always been the platform of choice for publishing and design, how can it be that their font rendering is so inferior to Microsofts or even Freetype ? Is it possible to replace their font rendering engine with FT2 or similar ? * I'm not sure if I like the Finder yet. I find Windows Explorer more intuitive, but that might be mental conditioning. Can anyone recommend a good file manager for OSX ? Some Norton/Midnight commander clone would be nice. Yeah, I know that MC does in fact exist for OSX, but it seem GTk+ based, which is just - eww. I tried Disk Order, which looks cool, but is highly bugged and crashes every two minutes. * How do I change the font used in context menus, the desktop, etc ? * How on earth do I access the OpenGL settings of the onboard ATI X1600 ? * How can I quickly switch to the desktop, if it's covered with Windows ? XCode 2.3: * Mixed feelings so far. Much better than every Linux IDE I've ever tried, but inferior to Visual Studio. * The layout is amost non-customizable, at least compared to VS2005. Yeah, you have three basic layouts to choose from, but all three suck. An IDE where you cannot fully customize the layout is completely unacceptable nowadays. * The debugger IDE is weird. It seems to lack a lot of functionality, or it hides it so well I cannot find it: * Where can I access the stack memory ? * How can I set the instruction pointer to the current cursor position (eg. to skip instructions) ? * "Step into" doesn't seem to work at all, if the function is in a different source file * I've managed to crash it twice while simply stepping through a (rather complex) program. I haven't really tried multimedia options yet. This is where the machine should really excel the PC, so I'm curious. I guess if I'll use it more regularily, I'll eventually get used to some of the differences to Windows. Except for the Dock... Updates will probably follow... :)

bytecoder

Jun 28, 2006 at 5:54 PM

I'm not qualified to answer the other questions, but if you want a dock replacement you could check out DragThing.

edit:
Just to clarify, I don't think it's possible to completely remove the dock, but if you don't use it you could make it really small (drag the separator up or down) and set autohide (preferences -> dock, or in apple menu).

Witchcraven

Jun 28, 2006 at 5:59 PM

You can quickly switch to desktop. OS X has features in window management far more powerful than Windows IMO. Fiddle with the F keys. Look at Expose in system preferences.

Whats wrong with the dock? I think it is much nicer to show/hide all the windows of an application (like a browser) all at once instead of manage all the windows currently open like the taskbar does. If you need that use the right side of the dock, or Expose can shrink and show you all the windows at once. I just dont think your used to it yet.

I agree, the GUI is unresponsive. This has always been the worst part of OS X IMO. Even on dual 2ghz machines.

Not sure wat you mean by text rendering bad. Maybe it is just what you are used to. I cannot stand how windows does it on LCDs, in any configuration. It took me a few months to get used to it.

You should consider just using Finder for a while more. It is really nice to use once you get used to it. Also OS X relies a lot on drag and drop. Start looking for where you can do it.

There are also a hell of a lot of features you may not be aware of. I have one version behind that had a lot of nice little tricks. The version ahead seemed to me to have a lot of very nice additions, especially in the area of searching.

As for xcode, I like it, a lot. But I have had stability issues, although that was the original beta I was using. I like it more that VS because I dont really know how to use VS (I usually just use cygwin).

I switched Windows XP again though. I think it is the best desktop OS out there. Not to say perfect though. Mostly because there are usually binary packages for windows things, whereas on OS X you need to compile more libraries and things you download. Not so much apps though.

_the_phantom_

Jun 28, 2006 at 6:26 PM

On a related note; I was toying with buying a MacMini the other week, for cross platform code reasons, however the gfx chip looks a little... sucky.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting a top of the range chip but its an Intel intergrated job and as bad as ATI are with their OpenGL support I've heard much much much worse from Intel.

I'm still considering it however, but I figure as we have a Mac thread going is there anyone out there with one? Whats it like? What kind of OGL version/extension support does the chip have? If it lacks hardware GLSL then thats a deal breaker for me... Whats it like for general on and off use? I'm not looking to replace my main machine with it, just something to test cross compiles and get OS X ports of stuff done.

And no, I won't be getting any sort of MacBook, I've seen one up close that an ex-friend had and it looks... sucky...

(hmmm, the word of today seems to be 'sucky'...)

Ravuya

Jun 28, 2006 at 6:33 PM

Quote:
Original post by phantom
I'm still considering it however, but I figure as we have a Mac thread going is there anyone out there with one? Whats it like? What kind of OGL version/extension support does the chip have? If it lacks hardware GLSL then thats a deal breaker for me... Whats it like for general on and off use? I'm not looking to replace my main machine with it, just something to test cross compiles and get OS X ports of stuff done.

The Intel Mac Mini features a GMA 950, which supports Pixel Shader 2.0 but does not support hardware vertex shading or T&L, which means those must be done in software. Fragment shading is in hardware (for some reason) and it is integrated, so it will steal system RAM. It will not run Doom 3 very quickly, but seems to run my other GLSL-based games pretty well.

Consider an iMac.

Quote:
* Where is the HDD activity LED ? It's extremely annoying not to know what your hard drive is doing.

Install MenuMeters. I find the harddrive activity light to be tacky and annoying on my desktop machine. Horses for courses.

Quote:
* Text rendering and antialising is not nice at all. It really doesn't look good, especially on a large LCD. I don't understand this. Apple has always been the platform of choice for publishing and design, how can it be that their font rendering is so inferior to Microsofts or even Freetype ? Is it possible to replace their font rendering engine with FT2 or similar ?

Change your antialiasing settings in the appearance control panel to suit your tastes, and install OS X 10.4.7 -- there was a bug with reverse compatibility in one of Apple's old APIs on Intel machines which has now been sussed out.

Quote:
* How on earth do I access the OpenGL settings of the onboard ATI X1600 ?

You shouldn't have to. Colour correction, performance, etc, will all be handled through the display control panels. There are a couple of apps out there to overclock the card if you wish.

Witchcraven

Jun 28, 2006 at 6:44 PM

Quote:
Original post by Ravuya
You shouldn't have to. Colour correction, performance, etc, will all be handled through the display control panels. There are a couple of apps out there to overclock the card if you wish.

True. But if I remember correctly, the developer tools come with some advanced opengl tweaking and performance programs of various sorts. Somewhere in the Development folder tree I think, or something similar.

Ravuya

Jun 28, 2006 at 6:46 PM

Quote:
Original post by Witchcraven
Quote:
Original post by Ravuya
You shouldn't have to. Colour correction, performance, etc, will all be handled through the display control panels. There are a couple of apps out there to overclock the card if you wish.

True. But if I remember correctly, the developer tools come with some advanced opengl tweaking and performance programs of various sorts. Somewhere in the Development folder tree I think, or something similar.

Yes, there is CHUD, OpenGL Profiler, OpenGL Debugger and a couple of card-info programs, but none that will let you tweak crap like the ricer panels in the Windows ATI driver.

_the_phantom_

Jun 28, 2006 at 6:47 PM

Quote:
Original post by Ravuya
The Intel Mac Mini features a GMA 950, which supports Pixel Shader 2.0 but does not support hardware vertex shading or T&L, which means those must be done in software. Fragment shading is in hardware (for some reason) and it is integrated, so it will steal system RAM. It will not run Doom 3 very quickly, but seems to run my other GLSL-based games pretty well.

Consider an iMac.

Well, running Doom3 isn't really my highest of priorities, more xplatform testing and lib development.

Which is kinda why an iMac isn't really something I want, aside from desk space and the thing looking bug ugly (imo of course [grin]), its a matter of cost for usage;

If I got a MacMini Core Duo with 1gig of RAM it would set me back around £600.
If I got the 17" iMac with 1gig of RAM it would set me back £950.

The MacMini wins hands down as its costing me £350 less, should do what I need and doesn't take up more of my deskspace [grin]
Plus, the Apple keyboards are no use to me, a non-natural keyboard makes my wrists scream at the very idea of it [wink]

I think I'll see how I'm set around Sept time and make a choice then.. of course, I have to wonder, if Intel bring out a SM4.0 part will that end up in a MacMini any time soon? If so, then I might well hold off, if only for any price drops which might occur...

Thanks for the info as well Ravuya

Ravuya

Jun 28, 2006 at 6:51 PM

The iMac ships with a 17" TFT, little dinky camera, and an X1600; that's worth the extra coin to me. [grin] It's also more upgradable, with user-servicable hard drive and memory (and even CPU).

Intel is coming out with the GMA X1300 within the year that adds PS 3.0 as well as hardware T&L. It'll likely ship with the 64-bit Merom chip in the next revision of the Macbook.

The Merom/Core2Duo is expected to be released around August, and it may be profiled with the 10.5 version of OS X at the WWDC August 7.

FYI, for students: You can get a substantial discount (> $500) on a new Mac if you sign up for a WWDC student developer subscription ($100 USD) and use a one-time student developer discount. I believe that you also get access to testing labs and beta versions of the dev tools, as well as discounts off the WWDC attendance. I also believe Apple is giving out rebates for a "free" iPod Nano if you buy a new Mac before September. Normal people (e.g. not students) can often get a deal on a new printer, or mp3 player or something. John Hattan got a free printer with his Mac Mini.

_the_phantom_

Jun 28, 2006 at 7:01 PM

Quote:
Original post by Ravuya
The iMac ships with a 17" TFT, little dinky camera, and an X1600; that's worth the extra coin to me. [grin] It's also more upgradable, with user-servicable hard drive and memory (and even CPU).

If it was going to be my main machine or used alot yeah, I'd agree, but as it stands its not going to remotely compete with my main machine and I already have a rather sleek 24" Dell TFT on my desk (thus the lack of space [grin]) and next to that, as I've said, the iMac just looks bug ugly [wink]

Quote:

FYI, for students: You can get a substantial discount (> $500) on a new Mac if you sign up for a WWDC student developer subscription ($100 USD) and use a one-time student developer discount. I believe that you also get access to testing labs and beta versions of the dev tools, as well as discounts off the WWDC attendance. I also believe Apple is giving out rebates for a "free" iPod Nano if you buy a new Mac before September.

It looks like you can do the same thing here and a quick shifty says I should be able to get the Mini with 2gig of ram for less than the retail with one gig of RAM [grin]

Salsa

Jun 28, 2006 at 7:50 PM

I was using OSX solely at my graphic design job for the last 2 months until I finally grew sick of it. I just plopped down some change for a Fujitsu Lifebook E8210 with 2 gigs of ram, along with XP (sorry) and modded with styleXP.. to use at work instead. Everyone there thinks I'm crazy and says "no graphic designer should be using anything BUT a Mac!". Consequently, none of them are artists, and my workflow has improved by some 300% (by my estimates).

Yann L

Jun 28, 2006 at 7:56 PM

Quote:
Original post by Witchcraven
Whats wrong with the dock? I think it is much nicer to show/hide all the windows of an application (like a browser) all at once instead of manage all the windows currently open like the taskbar does. If you need that use the right side of the dock, or Expose can shrink and show you all the windows at once. I just dont think your used to it yet.

Expose looks nice, but becomes impractical, if you have lots of similar windows open (eg. lots of editor windows). The Dock is just chaotic.

Quote:
Original post by Witchcraven
Not sure wat you mean by text rendering bad.

It looks like hinting is not active. Not using hinting microcode embedded in the font file (or an autohinter in software patent contrained countries) leads to very ugly antialias artifacts on smaller fonts. I will try to post some screenshots.

Quote:
Original post by Witchcraven
You should consider just using Finder for a while more. It is really nice to use once you get used to it. Also OS X relies a lot on drag and drop. Start looking for where you can do it.

I'll try.

Quote:

There are also a hell of a lot of features you may not be aware of.

Of course there are. It's only a day that I've been playing with it :)

Quote:

Change your antialiasing settings in the appearance control panel to suit your tastes,

They all look crappy.

Quote:

and install OS X 10.4.7

First thing I did.

Quote:

You shouldn't have to. Colour correction, performance, etc, will all be handled through the display control panels. There are a couple of apps out there to overclock the card if you wish.

It's not about overclocking, but about accessing and fine tuning some internal GPU features that are commonly not exposed on an API level. The available settings are not sufficient, unfortunately. What are the names of those third party apps ?

Quote:

True. But if I remember correctly, the developer tools come with some advanced opengl tweaking and performance programs of various sorts. Somewhere in the Development folder tree I think, or something similar.

I tried them, but none of them would let me specify even the most basic GPU features, such as VSync, antialias settings, LOD bias, quality parameters, etc.

The shader designer crashes if you select GLSL and click on fragment program. Ugh. That doesn't look very professional at all, if you ask me.

Oh well, I'll try more tomorrow, it's getting late over here.

Yann L

Jun 28, 2006 at 8:08 PM

I just tried to read an MP3. For some reason, it opened it through iTunes (!), but well, whatever.

Unfortunately, there is a horrible, extremely annoying constant background noise on the audio output signal, some kind of screaching interference. It is sometimes louder than the music itself ! What the fuck ? The sound quality is worse than the one of the (already horrible) AC97 chip on my PC mainboard !

This is really getting more and more disappointing.

Edit: it seems to be an impedance incompatibility between the headphone out and the line in of my amp. And since the Macbook doesn't have a line-out...

Edit 2: I have more or less solved the issue by reprogramming the impedance of my amp (luckily the amp allows this). There's still some noise, but it's acceptable. Can anyone recommend a good, minimalist, but top quality MP3 player for OSX ?

[Edited by - Yann L on June 28, 2006 8:08:26 PM]

Witchcraven

Jun 28, 2006 at 8:30 PM

Quote:
Original post by Yann L
I just tried to read an MP3. For some reason, it opened it through iTunes (!), but well, whatever.

Unfortunately, there is a horrible, extremely annoying constant background noise on the audio output signal, some kind of screaching interference. It is sometimes louder than the music itself ! What the fuck ? The sound quality is worse than the one of the (already horrible) AC97 chip on my PC mainboard !

This is really getting more and more disappointing.

Edit: it seems to be an impedance incompatibility between the headphone out and the line in of my amp. And since the Macbook doesn't have a line-out...

Edit 2: I have more or less solved the issue by reprogramming the impedance of my amp (luckily the amp allows this). There's still some noise, but it's acceptable. Can anyone recommend a good, minimalist, but top quality MP3 player for OSX ?

Look at that macbook pro thread that was up earlier today. It may be a problem with the Intel chip itself. Or if you are too disappointed with the laptop use the sound thing as an excuse to take it back. Also, what is wrong with iTunes? It always worked well for me on mac.

Either way, here is a list I googled up: http://www.mp3-mac.com/Pages/MP3_Players-Mac.html

Yann L

Jun 28, 2006 at 8:48 PM

Quote:
Original post by Witchcraven
Look at that macbook pro thread that was up earlier today. It may be a problem with the Intel chip itself.

Well, the noise is not coming out of the notebook, but is an interference on the sound output signal. Lots of PCs with cheapo sound cards or output amps have the same problem - but on a notebook that costed almost $3k, I had expected a slightly better component quality.

Quote:

Or if you are too disappointed with the laptop use the sound thing as an excuse to take it back.

Well, we need it for a project using Final Cut Pro, so it's not lost ;) I was just hoping to replace my PC with a Mac, but I'm not so sure anymore now.

Quote:

Also, what is wrong with iTunes? It always worked well for me on mac.

Bloat. I want a player, not a music store. And from what I just tried, the playback quality of iTunes isn't very good (well, I hope this is the iTunes decoder or filter bank, not the onboard sound circuitry).

Quote:

Either way, here is a list I googled up: http://www.mp3-mac.com/Pages/MP3_Players-Mac.html

[/quote]
Yep, already been there :) But I didn't felt like trying them all, so I thought someone might recommend a specific one.

Ravuya

Jun 28, 2006 at 9:22 PM

Try Audion, it's pretty lightweight. GL Shader Builder has always worked fine for me, but perhaps it hasn't been updated to Intel yet. Remember, you are still on the cutting edge of the Intel transition -- some stuff is probably going to break and it'll take time to suss it out unfortunately.

I don't know about the sound card. I've been using headphones.

Are you running Xcode 2.3? I'm still learning how to use GLSL so I have no idea where decent graphics stuff is going to come from; maybe iDevGames will know more. Might also be worth pursuing a WWDC subscription; they're having a number of OpenGL and game forums at August's WWDC. Of course, it does cost money. I've googled around and it looks like the Windows ATi control panel will work to overclock the card but I don't think it'll do the rest of what you want.

If you've got an IM service, you can give me an IM or two, and I can help you suss out some usability issues. Answering essays at a time is a bit of a pain for me, and it's probably worse for you because you've got work to do. [wink]

Nytegard

Jun 29, 2006 at 1:08 AM

As for the text issue, try Silk

Objectively, Macs have their issues in which Windows is better, and vice versa. The dock bar is somewhat of a pain, but I have a big monitor, so I'm not running into the problem you face with that yet.

I'm still in the process of learning how to get around X Code & Develope in Objective C. IDevGames is your friend on this part from what I've experienced.

Zakwayda

Jun 29, 2006 at 1:14 AM

Just on the off chance that you weren't aware of these options, you can configure the dock size, placement, and zoom behavior. I keep my dock at the bottom of the window, fairly small, and with icon zooming turned off. It's always seemed straightforward and handy to me; certainly not chaotic, but that may just be personal taste. You can also choose to have it only appear when you mouse over it, but this feature seems a bit awkward to me so I keep it turned off.

You can of course choose what items appear in the dock, and right/control clicking an item brings up a handy contextual menu. To re-arrange the items to your liking, just drag them to whatever position you like. I imagine you're already aware of these options, but if you've only been using OS X for a couple of days, perhaps you haven't run across them yet.

I agree that OS X is not as responsive as other OSs; perhaps this will be addressed in the future (I hope so).

In any case, as Ravuya pointed out, if you have an Intel Mac you may have to ride out the transition a bit.

nectarine

Jun 29, 2006 at 7:57 AM

Dude, I feel sorry for you. You've seen nothing. That is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are two Apples. The one you see being praised by brainwashed freaks and then there's the real Apple. Only when you're already inside can you understand how rotten the fruit really is: buggy software, substandard hardware being sold at Mercedes prices. I'm not even going to talk about how all the company looks like a freaking religious cult. They make Scientology look like a little girls business.

OTOH, the best thing about my new Macbook is that I can cook pizza on top of it.

Alpha_ProgDes

Jun 29, 2006 at 8:03 AM

well just a question. why would MacOSX be any better than Windows or Linux. OSX from what I read is Unix* with a Windows GUI slapped on top. So it's one step up from Linux but not as mature (GUI wise) as Windows ([flaming] if necessary).

Sorry for your disappointment. The only other OS I know of is BeOS. But I doubt you'd want to mess with that.

Topic Locked

This topic has been locked by a moderator. New replies are not allowed.