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by James Robertson.
Original Post: 7.2 on my iLamp (iMac with the swivel LCD)
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How do other's do it? Are other's doing it? That's what I want to know. At the recent SmalltalkSolutions conference, nearly half of the attendant laptops were Macs. And rightly so, it's a wicked cool killer laptop. But VisualWorks on the Mac is not. I've been doing some after hours coding on my OSX 10.3 iLamp, and it's not pleasant. If you program for any length of time in VW under OSX, I'd love to hear what you're doing to keep it a pleasant experience. I'm just letting it default it to the default L&F. If I try development builds of 7.2.1, am I gonig to be any happier? Some of the things I've noticed:
Sticky lLauncher Menu Bar Menus - This may be some of the packages I've got loaded, I have yet to check in a virgin image. But frequently when browsing selectors for example, I'll click and drag to that option, let go, and up comes the references autocompleting dialog. BUT, the menu does not go away. It's very annoying. I'm relegated to operating the mouse the way Windows wants me to, what with the click (press and release) to get the menu up, then place the mouse over the selection and click again.
Native Menu Bar - There's a series of *GH*Mac* parcels. One of them purports to use the native menu bar. I loaded a bunch of them. I didn't notice the native menu bar being used. I didn't notice any real differences at all, so I unloaded all of them.
Menus - VisualWorks (and other Smalltalks) have always been very high on context sensitive menus. Under VW, the menu is done via the middle mouse button and Macs are usually one button by default. I could get a multi-button mouse. But I have one of these snazzy clear "no" button mice, and I like it. I like just how well the rest of the Mac UI gets along with just the one button. So I'll go on using the CTRL key. I think. The problem is that CTRL is also the click modifier you use in a selection list to unselect, so I can't unselect from a list.
Shift Tab - Try to navigate backwards in a request dialog and... you get what CTRL-SHIFT-Y gives you on most other platforms, the emergency evaluator.
Speed - I've heard others complain about VW speed on OSX machines--this seems to be the one complaint i DO NOT have, I guess my 1.25 G4 is above the pain threshold.
This marks day 2 of my return to blogdom. I'm on a roll
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