Oracle Releases A Developer Preview JDK 7 for Mac OS X

At JavaOne 2011 Oracle announced the availability of JDK 7 for Mac OS X Developer Preview.

Go to http://jdk7.java.net/macportpreview/ for the download.

A list of open issues can be found here.

I as an eclipse fanboy am also happy about the release of Eclipse Indigo SR1 which adds full Java 7 support. Go here to see what is new for Java 7 in Eclipse Indigo SR1.

To use newly installed JDK in Eclipse, you have to add the path to the JDK home manually. Start Eclipse with JDK 6, select "Installed JREs" -> "Add.."->"Standard JVM". Enter the path to the /Contents/Home folder inside the installed JDK bundle and provide a meaningful name:

Have fun while trying out the latest Java 7 features!

Hibernate Mode on Macbook Pro with OptiBay

Recently i bought an OptiBay Drive for my Macbook Pro. The OptiBay Drive allows you to replace your Superdrive with another hard disk or SSD.

I used the OptiBay to install an Intel X25 SSD on my Computer. I put the os on the SSD. After that, the system really works fast. This article has a video comparing an old macbook pro with hard disk to an old macbook pro with SSD. The article is in german, but you will understand the included video without knowledge of german.

But after the installation of the os on the SSD i had a problem: when i put the machine on standby it froze. I had to power of the machine and restart it. After some research if found out, that by default, mac os uses the "sleep and hibernate" mode for standby.

In sleep mode, the ram content is maintained. Of course this works only as long as there is power to maintain the ram contents. Waking up the machine from sleep mode is very fast.

In hibernate mode, the ram content is written to the hard disk. The content can be restored even if the battery fully died.

"Sleep and hibernate" mode means the machine goes to sleep mode but for safety reasons the disk content is also written to the hard disk.

For some reasons, entering hibernate mode only works if the ram content is written to the primary disk. But since i installed the os on the (secondary) SSD, the system tries to write the ram contents to the secondary disk. When doing this the system freezes.

First i tried to move the hibernate file to another disk. This is possible, the file is written when the system goes to standby. But when you try to wake up the system after a power loss, the system boots from scratch and does not restore the state which was written to the hibernate file. The reason for this is that the hibernate file must be on the root volume.

I solved the problem by changing the hibernate mode from "sleep and hybernate" to "sleep". This can be done with the pmset command:

sudo pmset hibernatemode 0

Now the system can be put in standby mode again!. The only drawback of this solution is that the current state can not be restored after a power loss (e.g. battery was empty).

As a last step you can recover some disk space on your ssd and remove the hibernate file. It is not used anymore.

sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

Subversion Clients on Mac OS

For Java development always use the eclipse subversive svn plugin.

Today i evaluated other svn clients for mac os. Of course there is the command line client svn. But that is not always comfortable. So let us have a look at different gui frontends for subversion.

 

The Textmate Subversion Bundle 

Textmate is my favorite text-editor for Mac OS. Textmate is a commercial tool which costs nearly 50 euros but it has so many useful features that i think it is worth the money if you are using your mac as a development machine.

The subversion bundle can be used to check out a project from a subversion repository and to work with the files from the project. It offers basic support for the add, remove, commit, diff, info and merge commands. Even the blame command is supported.

The Textmate blame window

The Subversion context menu in Textmate

As you can see the Textmate subversion bundle allows you to work with files in a working copy. But there is no support for importing projects to a repository or to create tags using the copy command. 

Conclusion:

Given this feature set, the subversion bundle is an option if you are developing using Textmate. But you will need another tool for the administration of the repository.

Finder Integration with SCPlugin

The SCPlugin aims to offer finder integration for subversion. The current version is 0.8.2. The SCPlugin project claims to support Snow Lepopard. I followed the installation posted here, but the plugin does not work for me. I can use the svn actions but i do not get icons that show the state of the files in my working copy. Did anyone get this to work? 

Conclusion:

For me SCPlugin seems rather useless.

SvnX

SnvX is a free standalone gui tool for subversion. It offers support for most of the svn client commands. It supports both managing files in your working copy and managing your repository.

The SvnX Gui

Conclusion:
This tool is the opposite of the Textmate subversion bundle: Repository administration works pretty good with this tool, managing a working copy is partially supported but not very comfortable.

Commercial SVN Clients

Besides the tools menitoned above there exists a range of commercial SVN clients. Since i do not want to pay for an snv client i did not evaluate them. Below is a list of commercial svn clients for Mac OS:

• Versions
• Cornerstone
• smartsvn

Summary

Despite the fact that subversion is being used productively for many years now the support for svn in Mac OS is not very good if you do not want to buy a commercial client app. I will continue using a combination of the command line client, svnx, textmate and eclipse. There is no suitable all in one solution for me. 

Do you have better solution?