Google Web Kit on Mac OS X
The Google web toolkit was the hit of JavaOne. ONJava blogger Robert Cooper gushed on Wednesday: "I just saw the presentation at Java One, and I am here to tell you, this isn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread. It is the greatest thing since CHEESE."
Mac OS X users were disappointed to see only Windows and Linux downloads. (On the O'Reilly editors' backchannel, Daniel Steinberg wrote: "I think this is Windows or Linux only - like a surprising amount of J1 news. Chris Adamson pointed out that many of the booths which had Windows only solutions were staffed by engineers using Macs.") But Brian Jepson went and tried out the Linux download on Mac OS X, and found it (mostly) works. He wrote:
Mac users might think they are locked out: on the download page, you can choose Windows or Linux. And if you download either one, you might be discouraged to find shared libraries in the form of .dll or .so files. The Linux version does work on the Mac, [though], but you won't be able to run it in hosted mode since that mode depends on SWT (that's what those shared libraries are there for, apparently). Hosted mode gives you more debugging power, so you are giving that up on the Mac.
Still, I would have expected more clue from Google. Mac OS X may be only a small percentage of the PC installed base, but it's a HUGE percentage of the installed base of leading-edge developers. At O'Reilly conferences, Macs outnumber PCs by a huge margin, as much as 3 or 4 to 1.
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Matt Biddulph writes in IM to Nat: "re tim's point about percentage of mac users at the leading edge
check out http://www.monkeyhelper.com/2006/05/apple_insurrection_1.html that my friend rob [lee] just made"
Another thing about the 'high percentage of mac developers': just because they take a mac laptop to the conference doesn't mean that's their main development platform. It's still a bit of a hassle to get linux/bsd working on a laptop, so a lot of these guys might just be using apple hardware for checking email and surfing the web at conferences. This seems to be backed up by the fact that a lot of the software is linux/windows only at release.
Hi Tim and Radar,
Does the Mac omission reveal anything about the intended audience--perhaps less leading edge web20 and more corporate?
aloha
One thing to keep in mind, is it better to launch on all platforms at once, or to launch as soon as possible. Launching thin can be much better than not.
Well, one of the things covered in the "Development on OSX" stuff at J1 is that the Apple guys have fixed some SWT related issues in the Mac JRE, and are distributing a universal SWT now. There is a bit of confusion on this point, but I have found most of the SWT-based applications run on my Core Duo mini if I rip the Intel SWT from Azureus and plant it in the application.
I expect GWT is no different.
I will say, however, I do most of my work on FC5 and GWT works like a champ there.
Per your comment above, has the Mac OSX version come out yet from Google? Also how do us Mac users find email addresses effectively, who/what do we use?
Thanks,
Grace
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Tim O'Reilly [05.21.06 10:16 AM]
Mike Loukides writes on the O'Reilly editors' backchannel: "I'm missing something here. SWT runs on the mac (see
http://www.eclipse.org/swt/). But I haven't tried to get anything
running yet."