Nicolas Richeton

J’ai enfin installé Snow Leopard sur mon Macbook. Première impression : ça va vite. Le système est vraiment plus réactif. Pour le reste des nouveautés, je verrai au fur et à mesure.

J’ai choisi de ne pas faire une mise à jour mais une install sur un disque vide, car j’avais déja fait une mise à jour Tiger->Leopard.

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On Mac OS X, Growl has become the de facto standard for all notifications. There is an opened bug asking for Growl support in SWT/RCP : Bug 209911 – [Mac] Support for Growl notifications.

The best solution would be to have a standard API for notification with support for notification plug ins (including growl) and this is exactly what is discussed on bug 209911 and on the wiki page for Platform UI/Notifications.

But for those wanting to add Growl support to their applications as soon as possible, I’ve just attached to bug 209911 a plug-in which can successfully send Growl notifications.

Growl Action

Growl Notification from Eclipse

The Growl wrapper depends on Apple’s Java/cocoa bindings, so the trick was to add external libraries to the plugin classpath :

Bundle-ClassPath: .,
external:/System/Library/Java

It works, but you should know that :

• Apple Java/Cocoa bindings are deprecated.
• This does not work with Cocoa/x86_64, probably because of the deprecation. There you get the following error :java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /usr/lib/java/libObjCJava.A.dylib: no suitable
image found. Did find: /usr/lib/java/libObjCJava.A.dylib: no matching
architecture in universal wrapper

Hopefully, the Growl wrapper is a really small class, and it should be rather easy to rewrite it with SWT’s internal Cocoa packages for someone who knows Cocoa (I don’t). If you want to take a look at the wrapper, just download my attachment to Bug 209911 and take a look at the class : com.growl.Growl.

Eclipse 3.5 RC3 is out and this release fixes the last issues (Bugs 277539 and 277437) I was seeing when running the best test suite I have, ShareMedia, on the previous 3.5 RC2 Cocoa x86_64 SWT port.

Now everything is working, even the most tricky parts such as custom widgets, Open GL with LWJGL and animations….

ShareMedia running on SWT 3.5 Cocoa x86_64

The new 3.5 release also brings some long-waited features on Mac OS X :

- Java 6 and 64 bits support

- Shell modified hint

Shell modified hint

- Shell sheet style

Shell sheet style

- Program icons are now returned in full size !!!! Program.findProgram("jpg").getImageData() returns beautiful 512×512 icons instead of 16×16, see the following gallery widget snippet :

Gallery Snippet on SWT 3.4

Gallery Snippet on SWT 3.5

UPDATE: Oh no ! this is a cocoa bug, images should still be returned in 16×16. SWT committers, please don’t fix it ! I hope this will help fixing bug 181723.

These improvements make Eclipse 3.5 an absolute must for all Mac users.

The only thing I’m still missing is the Native OSX toolbar (bug 222859)

I would like to thanks all developpers who worked very hard to create this great Cocoa port in only one year and those who keep hacking to improving Eclipse UI on Mac.

Updated to MacOX 10.5.7. No issues so far…

I’ve been very unlucky with my Apple hardware. After a dead superdrive, case problems and dead hard drive on my first MacBook (all within the first year), the battery of my second one just died after only 18 months (not to mention the superdrive is half-dead, reading disks only when the macbook is upside down and the no-longer-detected webcam).

The battery is detected but with 0% charge and is not charging, removing the magsafe connector (easy) make you loose all your work.

I’m going to call Apple to see if I can get a free replacement…

UPDATE : ok, Apple considers that a battery dying after 18 months is totally normal. I don’t. Even more because Apple acknowledges hardware problems in their batteries but it seems that since I use my laptop every day (thus got too many cycles), my battery cannot be replaced as part of the warranty. (I still got a 30€ discount from the customer service to buy a new battery : 140-30 = 110€)

That’s really interesting because none of my 2 macbooks was still fully working after 1 year and they both got a major failure before 18 months. On the other side, my PC laptops are still working after 4/5 years, slowly, with reduced batterylife, but they are still working.

Now I understand why everybody seems to purchase the 3 years AppleCare extension. At least you know that you’ll still be able to use your laptop after 3 years without additionnal purchases (being freely replaced several times during that period).

I’m really asking myself what I’ll choose for my next laptop :

• Apple (nice-looking and OSX, but expensive and, from my personnal experience, low quality)
• Sony, Dell, … (cheaper, better quality but with Windows)