Re: Is Mac Mini capable to develop cocoa app?
Re: Is Mac Mini capable to develop cocoa app?
- Subject: Re: Is Mac Mini capable to develop cocoa app?
- From: Dan Saul <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 12:56:18 -0600
Well considering OSX doesn't even work at anything less then 1024x800
(or whatever it I can't remember off hand) I wouldn't worry about
testing on anything less then this.
On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 10:31:57 -0800, Mark Dawson <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Mar 11, 2005, at 9:43 AM, Andy Armstrong wrote:
>
> > On 11 Mar 2005, at 16:36, Mark Dawson wrote:
> >> All that said, if you are going to develop, 512 MB is the absolute
> >> min, and 1 GB is the preferred choice.
> >
> > As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread a nice big display is
> > probably as important as anything. A lot of your development time is
> > spent using a text editor - not the most cycle hungry application.
> > Being able to see plenty of what you're editing is a huge advantage.
> >
> I would agree. Dual monitors are a good option, too (even if different
> sizes)--they allow you to have your debugger in one window and your app
> in another.
>
> However, I would say that bigger screens is a much bigger end-user
> issue than speed (mentioned below). You have to be careful in your UI
> layout that you take in consideration that the user will likely have a
> smaller screen area than you. I remember having put together a nice
> UI arrangement, with plenty of screen room to spare, then running it on
> an older 480x640 screen and it was horrible! I would say ALWAYS test
> your UI on a 480x640 resolution to double check this (unless you're
> target pros, who probably would never have that config).
> > If build speed is really a problem I'm sure you can lash together a
> > couple of cheap Linux boxes and make a compile farm :)
> Distributed builds (see the XCode mailing list archives) seem to have a
> certain amount of overhead (and you want the "head" machine to be the
> fastest). From the reports that I've seen, a Dual 2.5 GHz (plenty of
> RAM) is over 2.5-3x faster at compiling than a mini (1.42). XCode WILL
> use both processors, so you do get a nice benefit from a dual machine.
> When RAM is taken into effect, a mini is a little more than 1/3 the
> cost of a dual. If you are doing big projects, a dual is the way to
> go. If you're doing medium projects a mini would work just fine--its
> really a decision based on your work habits vs the cost of your time
> (i.e., how much time do you spend compiling & linking in your day).
> > Bear in mind also that if you only have one machine and it's the
> > fastest thing on the block you won't get much of an idea about parts
> > of your application that might be unacceptably slow on an older
> > machine.
> >
> But by finishing quicker, you'll actually have time to run the
> profiling tools and tune it up. The best solution would be to buy an
> old 400 MHz G4 (with 128 MB of memory!) (iMac, Tower, etc). And use IT
> as your test subject. That way you can feel the slowdowns (even w/o
> running the profiling tools), but you won't be effected by having to
> develop on that machine. Being on a "worse" machine simply to "feel
> the pain" causes premature optimization (optimizing while you're still
> changing the code, meaning that you could optimize the same section
> many times). I been there, and the productivity hit is horrible! The
> other problem is that you have no idea of what the baseline really
> is--its slower so things will naturally be slower. Without running a
> profiling tool (like Shark), you still don't have any idea if the
> slowdown is the machine speed/memory configuration or actual problems
> in your code. So you still have to rely on profiling.
>
> A dual 2.5 might get you 5 (could be a lot more) more compiles & links
> a day than a mini. Over a 6 month project, that really adds up.
> Additionally, it REALLY speeds up the profiling! Running malloc debug,
> guard malloc, and any memory thrashing tools can mean the difference of
> minutes getting your app launched depending on the speed of your
> machine (on one OS 9 project, the difference was 40 min vs 10 min--a
> HUGE productivity gain).
>
> For development purposes, I'd say get the fastest machine you can
> afford, with caveat that RAM is important, also (i.e., I would guess
> that a 1.25 1 GB mini is a faster development machine than a 1.42 256
> MB mini). The bigger your project, the more important screen size is;
> consider two displays.
>
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