Mac User Survey (happy with 6 or not?)

Mac User Survey

- I was wondering how many Mac IDEA 6 users there are out there?

- How many are using it on Mac Book Pro?

- Most importantly, how would you characterize your expereinces with it?

Thanks in advance.

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16 comments

I've been using IntelliJ on a Mac Book Pro for about the last four months. The transition is odd, learning new key commands and all, but overall it's been very nice. Very responsive, and only one serious UI glitch, which I just found today (selections in the datasource tree view, I'll submit a JIRA).
Note that the only time I use anything other than an EAP version of IDEA is when there are no EAP versions available, so my tolerance for instability may be higher than yours.

--Dave Griffith

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I'm just a regular Mac user (I like my development computers to be over powered).

So far, it has been mostly fine. 6.0.0 locked up my computer twice but I haven't seen that since 6.0.1 came out. The 6.0.2 EAP (6043) quit on me once.

There are also some dialogs that do not have default buttons (the new CVS commit dialog that I otherwise love) and there are some key combinations that are overridden by OS hot keys (F9 - bah!).

Overall, though, I have been very happy.

Donald

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I've had a PowerBook (17") and now the MacBook Pro (also 17" - bigger IS better!).

Good experiences with both - although I did remap the Command and Control keys to each other and tell IDEA to use the PC keymap, so that I don't have to switch finger memories between work and home.

Douglas Bullard

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I am using it on a 12 inch iBook and its great. The navigation bar, for
example, is very nice on the tiny screen. And the Quaqua look and feel
is beautiful, but I had to patch quaqua.jar otherwise I couldn't open
files after opening a project.

Bas

Spencer Marks wrote:

Mac User Survey

- I was wondering how many Mac IDEA 6 users there are out there?

- How many are using it on Mac Book Pro?

- Most importantly, how would you characterize your expereinces with it?

Thanks in advance.

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My one problem with IDEA on Mac is the default keymap. There are way too
many assigned shortcuts that are actually taken by OSX and won't work,
unless you change them.

-- Marcus

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So far so good on my MacBook Pro 17. Keyboard mappings do overlap with the OS ones a bit. Overall, I don't feel much difference against older versions. Is there supposed to be better Mac support?

I just added a second monitor, however, and I'm seeing some old mulitple monitor problems from years ago. If I put my Idea window on the second monitor, popup menus (ie - right-click context menus) show up on the other monitor. Changing look and feels doesn't help.

I also wish there was a way to change the editor window font. My second monitor is pretty low-res compared to the MacBook screen, and antialiasing glitches are a lot more noticable. It would be nice to use font that lloks better without antialising.

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Found the answer for the mulitple monitor problem. There's an Apple VM flag you can use to disable the "feature" that keeps popups and dialogs on the primary monitor:

-apple.awt.window.position.forceSafeProgrammaticPositioning=false

Idea should do this out of the box. I just created a bug for this.

As a workaround, you can add this parameter to Idea's launch config file. In the Finder, open the Idea package and open /Contents/Info.plist in PropertyListEditor. Inside the Java group, there's an entry called VMOptions. Append the parameter there.

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I've been using it on a mac for at a few years now. It does get better with every release, and I don't have much to bitch about, surprisingly.

There are a couple of minor annoyances with 6.0 (like apple-click in the plugins manager not multi-selecting, but then the plugin manager is a bit of a red haired step child in IDEA anyway) but it's pretty solid.

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Well, I just started using Idea 6 on my MacBook for a couple of days and
so far it works just fine. The different hotkeys compared to the windows
version I also use are strange but I got used to them quickly. Nice to
have a Mac OS X version supported!

Ciao

...Jochen


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Mac User Survey
...

Thanks in advance.

Well, it seems that not everybody is happy with 6.0.x and MacBookPro.
E.g. this one, is pretty visited (Appfuse is a top 5 dev.java.net project):

http://raibledesigns.com/page/rd?entry=idea_6_on_os_x

Ahmed.

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I've been using it for years and bumping up the memory is something
that I do for each new version of IDEA that comes out. It's just a
minor thing but it makes sense if you're working on huge projects.
Generally IDEA 6 works great on the Mac, also in conjunction is major
plugins like clover, yourkit and vpuml.

O


On 2006-11-03 13:52:09 +0100, Ahmed Mohombe <amohombe@yahoo.com> said:

>> Mac User Survey
>> ...
>> Thanks in advance.

Well, it seems that not everybody is happy with 6.0.x and MacBookPro.
E.g. this one, is pretty visited (Appfuse is a top 5 dev.java.net project):

http://raibledesigns.com/page/rd?entry=idea_6_on_os_x

Ahmed.



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This isn't about bumping up the JVM parameters, this is about a leak that means that even doing nothing will end up sucking up all your memory. I'm seeing this problem, too, on my G5. Leaving my IDE up overnight to come back to OOM error in the morning. I have several third party plugins and I suppose it could be one (or more) of them, but this wasn't happening before (nor during EAP...at least as noticeably).

I am generally happy with 6.x and will keep looking at this. But if it is in IDEA itself, than it is more than a minor thing.

--Tim

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I had the same issue - turned out the "Problems" plugin had a massive memory leak. I removed it, and now 6.0 is stable on my Mac (had the same problem on the PC, too)

Try removing your plugins in groups and see if you can narrow down which one might be a problem.


Douglas Bullard

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Well, I started this thread a while ago to see if anyone had any of the same issues I was encountering.

So far I have to say I am surprised as no one really has. In general, I think the performance is not adequate on the Mac. I have MacBook Pro with 2 gigs and the fast 7200 RPM hard drive and performance is subpar. Once in a while I get a complete lock up too, but that doesn't happen all that often. I have a feeling my woes related to the project structure that is mandated. ANT changes it out from under IDEA and IDEA take a long time to come back to life afterwards. However, I am not alone even if I am on this thread, as a coworker moved to 6.0 but has reverted to 5.x for performance issues. I am glad it is not a general issue though. Although it seems like some of the folks over at "http://raibledesigns.com/page/rd?entry=idea_6_on_os_x" have had similar issues. I personally haven't seen the out memory issue.

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I love IDEA and primarily use it on an 20" iMac and a MacBook when I'm on the road. COuple of notes:

Am I the only one not using the Quaqua theme? I just find it so incredibly ugly and bloated. They made a good effort to mimic the native Cocoa GUI style but the Alloy theme is so much better. Cleaner. More compact. I need some eye candy too.

My biggest annoyance with IDEA on the Mac .. command-click to select multiple items does not work in themes other than Quaqua. Annoying since I use Alloy :)

Smaller annoyance, maybe also related to using Alloy, when I type option-n (for example to select None in the Create Constuctor dialog) I get this little window that shows a tilde. I have NO idea where it comes from.

The chosen keymap is not used in dialog/fields other than the main text editor. So when using Alloy you can use Command-C/V in the text editor but in anything else you have to use Control-C/V. Seems to be some internal inconsistency of IDEA.

It would be nice if a standard keymap layout would be included for Powerbooks/Macbooks. A lot of the key combos don't make sense on a smaller keyboard. I think there are a LOT of Macbook/Powerbook/iBook users.

The HTML Preview plugin still doesn't work on OS X.

Oh and the fslogger thing, the reason you need to type in a root/admin password during startup, does not work. It is the 6.0 way to keep track of filesystem changes but it does not work. I think it is because it uses an unsupported interface that is mainly used by Spotlight. I simply deleted the fslogger binary from the .app bundle and things seem to be fine.

Other than that, there are so many little bugs in 6.x (not OS X related) that still need to be fixed. But it is still early .. I just hope Jetbrains will release updates more frequently. I think the bugtracker shows almost 600 open now or so. Wow :)

S.

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I'm just a regular Mac user (I like my development
computers to be over powered).

So far, it has been mostly fine. 6.0.0 locked up my
computer twice but I haven't seen that since 6.0.1
came out. The 6.0.2 EAP (6043) quit on me once.


I've had this too with 6.0 EAP releases and the 6.0 final release. Almost every couple of days. Complete lockup of the whole Mac window server. Mostly when switching between IDEA and other apps. I actually got the impression that this was more OS X related and reported it to Apple. Since the last two or so system updates I haven't experienced any of that so I think it was a OS X/Java issue.

S.

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