May 17 2003
Anguish
So I recently bought one of those new Apple 17″ notebooks. It is a wonderful machine in most every respect. The screen size is great for my many hours at the keyboard, the industrial design needs no comment, and it has worked flawlessly. This is my first time living day-to-day with Apple OS X, and it has been very solid. Most impressive is the work Apple has done to make the OS and hardware work well together.
I carried a Linux based notebook for several months (Redhat 7.2 notebook install) and it worked well, but there was always a new gotcha…making the modem work properly, switching Wifi connections, bridging to share connections, sleep and wakeup. Let’s call it a “do it yourself’er”. Windows XP is Microsoft (need I say more?), but it worked more smoothly. Mac OS X is the first UNIX based environment that really makes the OS user friendly for the masses. I remember hearing from some people at Sun about how Scott McNealy was on a rampage to make Sun Solaris easy to install and manage. The word was that he just didn’t understand that UNIX was complex. Well, Apple proved him right, but did it for Apple rather than Sun. Just look at the software install process and control panels under OS X and you will see what I mean.
So my Anguish? I’m doing a lot of software development work for phones that use the Qualcomm BREW runtime environment. This is a PC-only development environment. My answer has been to use Virtual PC on my new Mac. I did fine with another product to run XP as a virtual machine on my Linux box. I knew that it would be slower on a Mac because the Mac doesn’t have an Intel processor (as the Linux box did), and the PC-on-Mac is running at about what my old 700Mhz notebook did, except that screen updates are slower. It is a little slow, enough to be annoying and nag at me (and impact productivity a little, more when having to step through code in an emulator). But now I’ve run into a next level of problems. I can VPN into one client site from my virtual XP machine just fine, but not another (which works from a ‘real’ PC). I also need to run an MS Phone emulator to evaluate another product, and that emulator won’t run on my Virtual XP machine. Other Java J2ME and Symbion projects that may come up are likely to have similar issues.
Since I have to deal with Windows, it is nice to have it relegated to the status of one app window on my Mac (with the ability to go full screen when I want to). But I need it to be faster and without the glitches. I hate to admit it, but I was at the Dell site last night looking at the new Inspiron 8500. I feel so dirty. No decision yet…