[OSM-talk] OSM on "factory" Macs
Martijn van Exel
mvexel at gmail.com
Mon Apr 21 22:24:53 BST 2008
Op 21 apr 2008, om 22:46 heeft Frederik Ramm het volgende geschreven:
> Hi,
Hi Frederik,
>
>
> for an upcoming OSM booth we have the offer of a local Apple dealer
> to supply us with all the hardware we want (including 30"+ displays
> and all). These would, however, be out-of-the-box Macs with those
> funny keyboards and those mice without buttons you know... and they
> wouldn't even let us pop an Ubuntu CD in and install a proper OS ;-)
That's very nice.
>
>
> My question to the Mac users out there: Will those Macs be suitable
> for demonstrating all important aspects of OSM, i.e.
>
> * Slippy Map (heard rumours that it runs sub-optimal on Safari,
> always loading tiles for all layers instead of current only?)
I just compared FF2 and Safari 3.1.1 using http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=52.3977&lon=4.8929&zoom=12&layers=B0FT
FF2 does 195 requests, Safari 174.
Safari actually performs better. I did not do extensive testing, but
with a clean cache Safari loads the above page about a second and a
half faster than FF2.
>
> * JOSM (especially concerned about usability with 1 button mouse)
That is indeed horrible. Recent Macs are supplied with a two-button
mouse though. Well - it's actually still one physical surface, but
left and right clicks are detected. I would recommend connecting any
regular mouse though, because the scroll 'wheel' (it's actually a
little ball) is nasty.
>
> * Potlatch
It...Works. Expect hiccups now and then. Flash is slower on Macs than
on Windows. Even recent Macs suffer. I have a MacBook Pro 2.16GHz
Intel Core Duo and I regularly have to wait 1sec+ for Potlatch to
react to user input after it stalls.
>
> * ...?
You could of course install Windows on them ;) Or Ubuntu / Debian /
Whatever in a VM. I run Windows, Ubuntu and Mac OSX all at the same
time with no problems at all.
>
>
> Or will I have to install countless helpers, utilities and control
> panels?
No. Only thing I'd recommend is putting this:
#!/bin/bash
java -jar -Xmx256M -XX:MaxPermSize=256M /Applications/josm-latest.jar
in ~/Library/Scripts/JOSM.sh (chmod 0755) and enabling the script menu
through the AppleScript Utility (included in Leopard) for easy access
to JOSM.
>
>
> I would like to accept the offer but if I end up endlessly tuning
> those machines to act like normal computers then I'd rather opt for
> run-down but working Linux boxes from the community instead of the
> shiny Macs.
Is there no-one with hands-on Mac experience that can lend a hand? You
wouldn't want to turn down those 30" screens :)
Good luck!
--
martijn van exel -+- mvexel at gmail.com -+- http://www.schaaltreinen.nl/
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