imac

Over the weekend I finished the transition from my PowerBook to the Intel based iMac as my primary development platform. Rather than use the PowerPC only Flock or stick with Safari I have started using an unofficical Intel compiled version of Firefox. Performance is excellent and there are no issues with reliability, Java or Flash.

Installing Rails and ImageMagick turned out to be very straightforward thanks to DarwinPorts, the Rails on OSX wiki and the ImageMagick on OSX howto. Currently there is no Intel compiled DarwinPorts binary but fortunately it compiled from source without issue (once the Apple Developer Tools were installed).
In the process I found a nice Eclipse plugin for Ruby on Rails named RadRails.

My Intel iMac arrived on Tuesday and I have been playing with it ever since. Overall it is working out really well, it is snappy when running Intel/Universal binaries and the screen quality is superb. The extra 512meg of RAM has not arrived yet so it is hard to judge performance but it is very promising. At the moment it kind of feels like you are driving a Formala One car with the tires borrowed from the family sedan, whilst Intel binaries run very nicely Rosetta is very slow especially when two or more legacy binaries are open at once. I have a feeling however that the extra RAM will help a lot with this.

Eclipse patch for OSX Intel: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=98889

Still waiting on Fink support. Once that arrives in the near future will be able to install developer tools like subversion, ruby, rails, php5 and openldap.

With my new office space I was finding that my PowerBook was getting used less and less as a laptop. For a while I was considering getting a Mac Mini/iMac to replace it as it is two years old and sometimes a little slow. Then this week Apple announced their new iMacs based on the Intel processor. It is hard to turn down a major speed increase (my guess running legacy apps through Rosetta will still be faster than my PowerBook) plus it comes with a far better video card, more RAM, bigger hard drive and the ability to plug my 19" LCD display into the side and span screens.