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Macbook for Developer?

jstad

jstad

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 13, 2007
119
0
I am looking at getting a MacBook over the MBP because I like they keyboard alot more than that of the MBP. Anyway, I was going to ask how everyone felt about the MB as a software development machine. Is it a good performer when it comes to running eclipse and other IDE's? I am aware the graphics card is not the best but the rest of the system seems like what i am looking for. I will be running a webserver locally on the machine for some Ruby development as well as PHP. Any advise is appreciated.
 
jstad said:
I am looking at getting a MacBook over the MBP because I like they keyboard alot more than that of the MBP. Anyway, I was going to ask how everyone felt about the MB as a software development machine. Is it a good performer when it comes to running eclipse and other IDE's? I am aware the graphics card is not the best but the rest of the system seems like what i am looking for. I will be running a webserver locally on the machine for some Ruby development as well as PHP. Any advise is appreciated.
Click to expand...

Ruby + Rails + Mongrel + Capistrano + RadRails? No problem.
 
It'll be fine, my iMac G5 runs Eclipse perfectly well and my CD Macbook (which is faster) and iMac G5 run Xcode well, so I don't think the MB will be a problem, the 2GB RAM upgrade is probably worthwhile though.
 
I've been using my MacBook as my primary software development machine for the past year and it's working great. A powerful graphics card isn't critical for the kind of work that I'm doing. I'd love to have the MacBook Pro's faster CPU, but I can't justify the price difference for such a small performance boost.

I don't use Eclipse as much as I used to, since I've started using TextMate, but yeah, Eclipse works fine. You will of course want to load up on RAM if you're going to be using Eclipse, but you probably already knew that.
 
One more question, other than textmate is there any other good Ruby development editor for OSX? If I am not mistaken, I dont believe it has code assistance like eclipse has for java (at least for ruby).
 
jstad said:
One more question, other than textmate is there any other good Ruby development editor for OSX? If I am not mistaken, I dont believe it has code assistance like eclipse has for java (at least for ruby).
Click to expand...
This question is asked approximately a hundred times a week on the ruby-talk mailing list, so you might try searching the mailing list archives to see what people are saying. A few names that come up frequently are:
I think all three of these provide some kind of code assistance (a.k.a. "IntelliSense") for Ruby code.
 
The only advantage in any real sense the MBP would have over the MB is screen real estate... I find the MB to be a bit low-res for development work, but the speed is quite fine. Really, though, even the 15" MBP I have is a bit limited, and you could certainly buy an external 20" with the MB->MBP price difference.
 
As everyone else has said -- you'll be fine.

I'm using the MacBook as my primary dev machine and I couldn't ask for more. I use TextMate to fiddle with Ruby and Rails, then switch to Parallels for Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET.

2 gigs of ram is the sweet spot thought.
 
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