Meanwhile Back to Reality: “So Long Apple. The Party's Over”

You only have to spend a few minutes at JavaOne to know that Apple is popular with Java developers. Everywhere you look, you will see someone carrying around a shiny brushed metal MacBook Pro, or a gloss black or gloss white MacBook. Rick, Matt, and I, all have MacBook Pros. In addition, I have a dual core G5 PowerMac on my desktop, and Rick has a MacPro. Between company purchases from Apple, and our own personal purchases, we've spent tens of thousands of dollars with Apple on computer products. I think we've been quite loyal to Apple. But as of today, that's all changing for me. Today I am saying "so long Apple. The party's over."

What party do I mean? I mean the free ride that I as a Java developer have been giving Apple for way too long now. And as we have remained loyal to Apple, Apple has basically spit in our face. Not only did Leopard not ship with Java 6, but Apple, in typical fashion, apparently thinks it has no obligation to its customers to inform them about why the plans changed, and when (or even if at this point?) Apple will ever have a working copy of Java 6. Apparently, Apple has even been just deleting threads in their forums where people are complaining that Java 6 doesn't exist, rather than actually respond to them and let them know if there is any kind of time line for Java 6. But wait... It gets worse...

Java 5 on Leopard is so broken, that some of it is flat out unusable. For example, I recently tested an application I wrote that uses Java2D for image zooming. On Linux, Windows, and on Java 5 in OS X Tiger, it worked fabulously. The scaling and zooming are very smooth. On Leopard, it is not even usable. It's slow, and manages to rescale during zooming at about 1 frame every 5 seconds. Working with IntelliJ IDEA in Leopard has been no picnic either. On a fairly regular basis, it will seem to just hang for 10 seconds or more and then start working again. I suspect the garbage collector is having problems, but once again, these are problems that did not exist in Java 5 with the previous version of OS X.

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