Develop on Windows or Mac?

[Alex Rice]

On Nov 5, 2003, at 9:17 AM, Roger.E.Eller at sealedair.com wrote:

> More productive, and faster?

Oh come on. Step acting incredulous that someone's manner of 
productivity can be different.

I'm way, way, way! more productive on OS X than on my Windows 2000 
machine. There are many aspects to productivity. For your line of work, 
you are faster in Windows, and that's fine for you.  For a 3 year old 
OS, Mac OS X *kicks butt*. Especially 10.3. For a long time I used a 
G4/350 and G/466 with Mac OS X instead of a Pentium 600 with Windows 
2000 that was right there on my desktop. The Windows machine was faster 
for certain tasks, but overall that wasn't the biggest factor in my 
productivity.

A lot of advances are coming from Apple. Rendezvous, Expose, XCode, 
Darwin, and promoting open-source utilities like Apache, Samba, SSH, 
and X Windows. Microsoft is touting all this 
Aero-rendering-compositing-display system they are releasing in 
Longhorn in 2005. Well guess what? OS X has that _today_.

>  I work in a mixed environment of PC's and
> Mac's, and that is not the situation here at all. On OS X, put about
> 10,000 files of any kind into a folder (write a repeat loop to create 
> them
> as a test), then open the folder in the finder. Put a stop-watch on 
> that
> pretty colorful spinning ball. Do the same on a Windows PC... the 
> folder
> will open with all files listed in about 2 seconds.

Yes, the Mac OS Finder truly was slow from 10.2 - 10.2.8. In 10.3 it's 
totally rewritten and is much faster. Nonetheless the old finder never 
did cause me major grief.

But I don't often have 10,000 files in a folder. If I ever did, I would 
probably drop to the Unix shell, which Windows does not have 
thank-you-very-much, and use a command like mv, cp, ditto, etc.

> Another - Rev specific speed test. Write a repeat loop to create about 
> 200
> Rev objects on a card. Distribute them all over the card. Make it a 
> mix of
> buttons and fields, and a few imported small gif files. Now, using the
> selection tool, select all of the elements by dragging around them. How
> long does it take for the selections to catch-up with what you 
> selected.
> Do the same on a PC. OK... Any Questions?

Were you running the Rev look and feel: OS X appearance manager for 
this test?  I usually run Rev in Mac OS emulated L&f, because it is 
faster.

If you were in appearance manager l&f, you were dragging 200 Aqua 
eye-candy gum drops being rendered by the OS. Appearance Manager has 
the luxury of handing off rendering to the OS to get it's widgets 
drawn.

On a G3 or an older G4, without a graphics card supporting Quartz 
Extreme, that's going to be slow. On a G4 you'll benefit from Altivec. 
With a newer graphics card, it's faster still because it will use the 
OpenGL hardware on your card.

The basic rule of thumb is: to make OS X fast, you can't just run some 
old low-end iMac or powerbook. You need throw $ at the problem and give 
it > 500MB RAM and a new graphics card that supports Quartz Extreme.

BTW wonder how a G5 would do in your tests? The world's third largest 
supercomputer is now the G5 cluster (off-the-shelf G5s bought from the 
Apple store) at the University of Virginia 
<http://news.com.com/2100-7337-5095026.html>

Alex Rice <alex at mindlube.com> | Mindlube Software | 
<http://mindlube.com>

what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable  -Ani DiFranco