Your point that it should just work is correct. In my own experience OS X comes closer to delivering on that ideal more often than other OS’s, but it’s far from perfect. My wife noticed a feature of Address Book does not work right – causing some stress after the upgrade.

I hope your brother is able to get it all worked out!

In principle, I agree with you. Unfortunately, as far as the end-user is concerned, “wrong” most definitely does equate to “bug”. Also, while Apple may now be following the HIG for the position and existence of the icon in the dialogs, it’s failing to follow the Java specification in showing the *correct* icon. An incorrect icon is worse than a non-existent one, since it actually misleads users.

Yes, you *can* use either pipeline, but quite unfortunately the one which breaks most Java2D apps is enabled by default. Since those apps work just fine on every other platform, I think it’s a fairly safe bet that Apple isn’t satisfying the Java spec somewhere.

User’s don’t care about whether Swing is doing things “the correct way” according to Apple or not, they just care of it works the way they expect it to. That’s what Mac is all about, right? (“It just works.”) Well, whether through Apple’s ill-advised experimentation, or incomplete specification validation or whatever, Java on Mac no longer “just works”. I doubt that this can be considered a good thing for Apple or the right thing to do by the end-users.

Oh, as a matter of record, my brother purchased a brand-new macbook this week. He is now completely locked out of a critical section of his school’s online curriculum due to Java’s non-functional status (the section works fine on both Windows and Linux). Now it may be a function of the pipelining or the lack of Java 6. He doesn’t care. All he knows is that it doesn’t work.

More here: http://weblogs.java.net/blog/javaben/archive/2007/10/more_on_leopard.html

The pipeline issue is just configuration, also not a bug. You can use the Sun pipe or the Quartz pipe.

Fabrizio has been pretty active and makes a lot of valid points, and he mentions that the release notes should be out, and in fact they are:

http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/Java/JavaLeopardRN/index.html

The Apple engineers are working very hard in any case. Apple’s secretive nature is sometimes wacky, but their people do care in the trenches. Also Leopard is not bug free but it’s not bad overall.

I did – just now. You ref the JavaLobby mess – there’s almost no accurate info in there.

The fact remains that Apple has delivered a pretty good JVM and I haven’t seen any evidence to the contrary, and in fact the very thread you mention is what made me mention Eclipse in the first place.

Yeah, I would never blame Apple for all of Eclipse’s issues on Mac. In fact, I don’t think anyone even mentioned it…

> What about Java 5 on Mac doesn’t work properly? I mean – do you have even one example?

http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t102936.html

I’m not worried. There are a lot of JVM enhancements are in there. The missing items are the scripting engine and the compiler API. Most of the scripting engine items can be attained in other ways.

Eclipse has bugs. This is not Apple’s fault.

The use of “no indication” and “doesn’t care” are both incorrect. In fact, every Eclipse bug I’ve found has been submitted to Apple and -they- are working with the Eclipse team. The Carbon team is fully engaged. Apple engineers have been -very- responsive.

Apple revealed their plans at WWDC. Nothing has occurred to indicate that these plans have changed.

I was looking up TinkerTool, which is not yet compatible with leopard, here’s what I found:

“Apple has denied access to the final version of 10.5 to all software developers. Even companies which paid Apple thousands of dollars for the right to get advance information before the official release date did not receive any data about the final version of Leopard before October 26, 2007 16:00 UTC. The final version is known to be different from the preview versions.”
http://www.bresink.com/osx/leopard.html

Apple’s treatment of programmers is why they lost the last round 20 years ago, they want to control everything. Why developers bother with Mac I just don’t understand.