Irritations and Parallels.

I've had my hands full lately learning and using a handful of new (to me) technologies on the job (Spring, SpringMVC, and Hibernate if you were wondering), and I've been doing it all on the MacBook Pro (MBP), of course.

Besides some minor issues that I've complained about in previous posts, some new ones have revealed themselves, but they're mostly hardware related:

Mooing Fans - This went away after a May firmware upgrade.
Heat- Everyone seems to experience this.
Ticking/Clicking from underneath the delete key - more fan problems. This is intermittent at this time.

I guess I'll let these hardware issues pile up then take it to the nearest Apple store to fix whatever is possible in one fell swoop.

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The application I'm currently developing for my company is using Adobe's Flex 2 for the graphical user interface (GUI). Flex 2 is still in beta and requires Flash 9 player, which works horribly on Intel-based Macs. If you want to install it, Adobe informs you that must run your browsers (Safari, Firefox, etc.) in Rosetta mode (PowerPC emulation), which is ridiculous: it takes Firefox 30 seconds just to load, and peforms terribly. Not only that, both Safari and Firefox crash when I try to load a SWF file generated by Flex 2.

So, these problems forced me to install Parallels and Windows XP just so I could have Internet Explorer 5.5+ and Flash 9 (the non-crashing version). I look forward to a native version of Flash 9; Adobe really needs to get on the ball with Intel-based Macs, considering there isn't even a Universal Binary for the latest version of Photoshop.




Update: So, as soon as I post these gripes about Flash 9 a native (Universal Binary) is released. Guess they're reading my blog ;). I'll still need to test my apps in IE 5.5+ occaisionally, so the install (and purchase) of Parallels was still worth my time and money.