Considering Java apps are banned from the Mac App Store, and there is currently no Oracle JDK for the Mac, I find it hard to call his comment decent. In the interest of not being inflamatory I refrain from calling it something else.
Sorry, and maybe it's just me (somehow), but Cyberduck is slow. I'd been using it for years and had been putting up with the 10-second spinning beach ball every time I started it or tried to initiate a file transfer because I assumed that it was my old Macbook at fault. But earlier this year I bought a brand new MBP and the problem persisted, so I tried Transmit. Super fast, no issues. I won't be using Cyberduck again.
I get beach balls all the time on pretty much everything I do on my mac - terminal, macvim, ical, itunes, mail, firefox, safari, chrome, pages, keynote, screenflow, eclipse, numbers, openoffice and more. They all get slow, lock up, freeze, etc. at some point or another, and it's almost always related to the fact that I'm multitasking. (true, yeah, i'm lame, and it's only a core 2 duo 2.1ghz with 2.5 gigs of RAM - I don't know why I expect to be able to run 3 programs at the same time).
If you have the developer tools installed, in /Developer/Applications/Perfomance Tools there's an app called Spin Control that helps diagnose why apps are spinning.
By default it just sits there waiting for an app to spin for 5 seconds, at which point it starts sampling the app's activity (as in sample(1)). You can set preferences to make it watch a particular named app, and can set the minimum spin time required for it to notice and start sampling the spinning app. The app produces a text report of the output so you can see what functions it's spending its time in.
Might be useful. It seems like you shouldn't be spinning that much, even if you're multitasking.
I was really surprised at how much of a bump I got from a 1.8ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of memory to a 2.53ghz i5 with 4GB. My poor Macbook used to choke if I was running more than a handful of programs, or if I was running Flash with anything. Now I can run a bunch of fairly processor-intensive programs (video, VOIP, Flash games, browser with 2 dozen tabs, etc) simultaneously and it rarely chokes.
Since I got such a big productivity gain from this change, I'm looking for other things I can do. I'll be due for an upgrade in another 4-6 months and I think I'll get an SSD.
What's so bizarre with this approach is that 2 years ago the specs on this were near 'top of line', and the software hasn't changed all that much over 2-3 years. I'm not saying it beach balls more now than 2 years ago - it's always been the same. I may do one more mac laptop - a higher end one next time - but I suspect my workstyle - doing multiple things all the time - is always going to end with beach balls, regardless of the mac. :/
I'll bet you'll find whatever versions of Flash you've had have steadily required more and more CPU. I read the crash dumps when my Safari becomes unresponsive and I have to force quit it, and it's always Flash.
I experienced something similar when I upgraded my semi-ancicent MacBook up to 4gb of RAM and a faster hard drive, which had amazing (positive) effects on its performance. I suspect that a lot of OSX's performance problems result from slow IO or limited RAM (leading to paging, and slow I/O again, etc.).
As much as I love Safari, Safari is the worst offender in terms of performance on my Mac. It probably doesn't help that I have a bad habit of leaving more than 50 tabs open at a time.
I almost have to admit that the 9 window limit on the iPad's Safari isn't a bad thing. Forces me to instapaper stuff right away and close the window.
You hit the nail on the head. And "Reopen all windows from last session" feeds the addiction, since you can recover from a flash-crash without losing all your tabs.
Friends and family literally have literally made a novelty of exposing safari when they come by to wonder at how many multi-tabbed windows I have open at once. :)
Isn't the quality of UX less a problem of the platform and more a problem of the producing company not focusing on the experience their software should deliver? It's not as if it's impossible to create bad software for the Mac OS simply because it uses the native L&F.
Oracle actually maintains it's own Java cross platform application that many of my coworkers use all day, every day (I use it periodically for some very handy features) - SQL Developer. It's actually quite responsive and usable considering.
I use it daily too on my Mac and its usability is pretty bad. Copy and paste sorta work, but I can never remember when to use cntl-c versus apple-c in this app. The UI is hideous and very un-Mac like. It also doesn't seem to handle network disconnects very well, oftentimes requiring a Force-Quit if I've switched from wired to wireless networking.
That being said, I still use it because I haven't found anything else free that I like. I suppose if I use a tool every day like this one, I should pay to find one that works better.
I'll concede, it isn't perfect and has quite a few quirks, which I can mostly avoid now. However, in my use case some features outweigh the inconveniences (i.e. exporting data). And it's free while all the alternatives I'm looked at aren't.
Except [on Windows, where I use it] it eats about 600Mb of RAM just sitting there doing nothing with all connections closed. Start opening a bunch of tabs and DB connections and you can easily push it into the 1Gb RAM range and it crawls.
Combo it with JDeveloper and a local instance of Weblogic, and you can pretty easily eat up 3Gb of RAM just opening up the standard set of Oracle dev tools.
It's absolutely astounding how long it takes to open, too. Woe to the person who clicks the SQL Developer icon, 20 seconds later still hasn't gotten any response indicating that the system "heard" the click, and then clicks again.
> I've used Macs for years, and I haven't seen a Java app I didn't hate. They're UI is never native and the UX is much slower than good webapp's?
I have a java app that I wrote for my own use. It was written, using xcode, on G3 and G4 Macs. The day I moved to an Intel Mac, the app's performance improved dramatically. You can slap something together (with java) in a hurry and call it an application. Or you can take the time to look at it, refine your algorithms, and make it perform quite well.
Some of the GUI issues, however, are a limitation. While I don't know what the real issues were, I would not be surprised if keeping the java interface elements, as close to the Mac GUI, was a contributory factor here. The Mac GUI is evolving quite quickly. Perhaps java could not keep it.
How does that make Mr. Jobs' comment more informative or honest?
Anyway, I get what you're saying (even though I've seen many web apps that I hate as well). The question is simply whether the Mac is a software platform or a consumer appliance. If it's the latter, then I understand the idea of Apple curating every single piece of software that goes on those machines. Otherwise, the idea of banning everything you or Mr. Jobs don't like is inconsistent with the purpose of the product.
But why should Apple need to create Java on OSX? If Oracle wants Java used on OSX they can produce it just like on Windows; if they don't something else will fill the gap.
He isn't banning anything. Nobody is saying that Java won't be allowed on OSX, just that there is no longer a need for Apple to maintain the development.
Java apps are banned from the Mac App Store that was recently announced. It may become the main distribution channel for Mac applications, if not the only one.
You're correct. Turns out I've been caught by one of those unknown unknowns where I didn't do any further research because I didn't know I didn't know something. It's too late for me to edit my original post, but thanks for pointing it out
