In an unfortunate turn of events, my MacBook Pro has decided to take a vacation. It's spring time, so there must be something in the air. Maybe it's the upcoming Passover, which is known to be "the festival of freedom". Anyway, it just died on me. The Apple service in Israel has room for improvement: they promise to fix it in two weeks. Two weeks. What am I going to do in the mean while?
I wasn't really shocked when it happened. My personal experience tells me that laptops, no matter how good they are, will need service every year or so. It's probably because all the miniature and delicate components cramped in this overheating space, which constantly gets rattled and banged. My previous laptop was an IBM ThinkPad T41. It was a good and sturdy machine, but I did visit the IT department every now and then. The advantage of working in a big company is that I got a replacement laptop (with my hard drive) whenever such a mishap occurred, so I could keep on working. Now, I'm decommissioned.
I'm making the best of this time to finally test my product on Windows. It took me a few hours to restore my environment. I backed up my source repository, but not much else, which means I have to restore my workspace. I had to download all the relevant products (Eclipse, Spring, H2, ...) and install them. I also had to work around issues of platform compatibility, mainly resource locations. However, once all this was done, I was up and running.
I appreciate the platform compatibility, but It's not perfect. The Eclipse UI is based on SWT. SWT is much better looking than Swing since it is wrapping native UI controls. Which means it may behave a bit different under each platform. It is cross-platform, but it is far from being bug free and requires the developer to test and debug the product on all platforms. My product is running, but not without glitches. Well, I have the upcoming two weeks to get rid of those. And maybe I'll get a little freedom myself.
