Ben Poole

Sounds interesting. Does Extreme Planner work with build tools, testing coverage tools, and so forth? If so, which ones? Is it something that's easily extended?

I don't bother hunting for plug-ins much either. Personally, I use MyEclipse on my Windows box at work, and this is excellent: Eclipse, plus reams of extras covering J2EE development (JSP editors, XML editors, UML stuff, all sorts), for $30 a year. MyEclipse is also available for the Mac, but I don't have any experience of it on mine -- I tend to just use SubEthaEdit, Eclipse and Xcode at home.

Definitely just get a multi-button mouse. I've read good things about Apple's mighty mouse thing, but personally I just use a Microsoft optical mouse: USB, two buttons, scroll wheel, feels nice. One of the best things MS do... and I don't imagine that they actually make it ;o)

Hmmm... I've used Xcode a little, and it is a nice, responsive IDE. I wouldn't say that Java development was an afterthought as such -- it certainly isn't a second-class citizen in Xcode land, but Xcode's first master is Cocoa, yes.

If you want a full-on Java IDE, then Netbeans or Eclipse are a better bet for sure (assuming your machine runs them happily enough).

One thing: are you sure you need to download it at all? Xcode comes on the second disk in my Panther / Tiger installation packs as part of the Developer Tools suite.

Shifting requirements during the development phase are a fact of life, so the best approach is figuring out how to best incorporate them in your project lifecycle. It would indeed be interesting to see what Ship It has to say about this. On a general level I would say this:

(1) You have to have clilent buy-in: they can't expect to give you reams of change requests and not get involved on a daily basis, giving considered feedback, testing, and so on.
(2) Iterative development is the way to go. Code and test a bit, seek feedback, move on
(3) You need strong project management, someone with the confidence & authority to draw a line in the sand as required
(4) Related to (1), regular communication with the client will help get the message across that at some point they will have to decide between new features, delivery time, cost, etc.

TortoiseSVN isn't made for the Mac. If you want Subversion integration with the Finder -- which is what you imply in talking about TortoiseSVN -- then you need SCPlugin. You can download this here:

SCPlugin page at tigris.org

The 3.1 releases definitely support Java 1.5... what issues are you having exactly? Is your project definitely set up to use the correct Java run time?

Another tip for learning UNIX: never EVER start talking about text editors... LOL!

vi isn't too bad, but I often have to have my quick reference to hand. And if it all gets too much, SubEthaEdit comes with an optional CLI invocation, "see" which works very well

Sounds to me like you don't actually have it installed, or that it's installed but either way you're running Messenger from the disk image rather than your Applications folder.

Try this:

Open the disk image and drag the MSN Messenger application to your "Applications" folder. That should actually install the app (it will warn re over-writing if it's already there)

You can then safely "eject" (drag to the trash) the mounted disk image.

If you run Messenger from the Dock, ensure that the "alias" that's there actually points to the instance of Messenger in your Applications folder, rather than the one in the disk image.

Hope that helps.

Originally posted by Bear Bibeault:
I think that there may be confusion about what separator is being talked about.

Indeed, my apologies for my part in that. Returning to the issue at hand, I believe Dave has found a work-around, per his linked post. He says,

The Mac does not use the Sun implementation. I have no idea who makes it...
Anyway, it doesn't work the same way.

Well, I can at least answer this one: Sun don't provide a Java implementation for OS X: they leave it to Apple. So I guess it's Apple who are responsible in this instance. I don't imagine for a minute they're going to provide more detail on how the classloader works, but you never know...

Happy to help I missed one reference out though: this page is a pretty good overview of setting up Subversion (esp. if you want to access it via WebDav). Ignore the apparent focus on Xcode if that's not your IDE, the tutorial is actually more wide-ranging than that:

Using Subversion with Xcode
[ April 08, 2005: Message edited by: Ben Poole ]

Warren, I think you'll find that the separator in OS X is still ":", and that's what Dave is getting at in the posted follow-up.
[ April 08, 2005: Message edited by: Ben Poole ]

The MS remote desktop client is pretty good. No issues there that I've seen.

As far as the core Subversion applications go, whilst nicely compiled binaries aren't made available for OS X on the tigris.org site, plenty of other people do the work with the source so you don't have to. Notably, Martin Ott (of SubEthaEdit fame).

As for Subversion from the client perspective on the Mac, there is a Finder "add-in" which gives you functionality akin to TortoiseSVN on Windows (if you're familiar with that), i.e. contextual menu items covering things like check in, check out, etc.

Xcode supports Subversion, and of course you can also use Subversion with Eclipse via the Subclipse plugin.

Summary of URLs:

Martin Ott's site
Subversion site
Subclipse
SCPlugin for OS X

Hope that helps.

System.out.println( "Your final grade is: " + grade ); {
That's the first problem: you seem to have some errant brackets. Don't you mean to close that code chunk rather than open another? Also, yout getName() method is void, yet you imply a return type when you say this:

name = getName()

Start with fixing those, and take it from there. The compiler will give you clues.
[ April 05, 2005: Message edited by: Ben Poole ]

AppleWorks isn't that bad, but it is pretty long in the tooth, so I would still recommend doing as Edward says (there's been quite a kerfuffle in the Mac rumour sites lately re the possible 'iWorks' package).

Bear in mind that TextEdit can save files in .rtf format which can will open happily in Word depending upon how complex the original document is.

(TextEdit can also open .doc format files, again if they're not too fiddly).