i expect it to be considerably faster.. probably not as fast as the windows vm because it's received more love, but faster than the current powerpc vms. the mactel machines improved bus/processor speed will be a big help, and the ways that they're not faster than ppc (altivec, heavy media stuff) will have little effect on java (yes, contradictory, but i just don't think it's been optimized that way on the mac).

i didn't have the $$ for a dev transition kit but i'll be saving my quarters for a mactel laptop. we need to start getting benefactors or grants for this sort of thing.

processing will be made a universal binary, though that means very little, since the only component that matters is a tiny bit of binary code that launches the thing. i may need to do this in order for it to run properly, since java won't run via rosetta, and i don't know how that affects apple's java launcher (which we use with p5).

java, thankfully, is already native on the new intel macs and doesn't run under rosetta. so it should be all nice and clean.

native code for libraries like jogl and serial are likely to not run at all, and we'll need to get new versions of those (hopefully from the jogl and rxtx people).

my hope is that the java implementation will get a little less ropey as you say, perhaps they'll be able to benefit if there are intel-only optimizations that haven't been ported to osx. and the faster processor will be huge. but in general i expect it to still be behind the windows vm in terms of quality.

So far, I haven't been able to test Processing on my MacBook Pro all that much.  A quick poke shows that JOGL needs to be dealt with.  I tried using the JOGL rework from...

http://homepage.mac.com/gziemski/projects/

... but it gave me this error (note that I might have implemented their files incorrectly, but here is the error message anyhow)

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /Applications/Processing 0103/libraries/opengl/library/libjogl.jnilib:

Also, the video library needs to be tweaked.  Webcam input and videos play back blue with alpha so I guess its that ol' ARGB vs RGBA demon.

I hope to play with it some more this weekend, so if new issues pop up, I will mention them here. (?)

robert

blue video input now being tracked here:
http://dev.processing.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=313

there is an rxtx build (RXTX 2.1-7r2) that works with Mactels on the rxtx.org page - would switching that in the java installation on the machine fix things or would it cause all manner of problems.

Cheers

Nick

thats great - got my mactel last week and just sorting out all my hardware/software arguments - tweaking java installs would have been a steep curve for me.

I will try it soon with some bluetooth stuff

Cheers

Nick