Aug 7

Mac Support Woes

Development

I’ve been having an issue with audio playback on the Mac.  The problem boils down to SWT thread support in the Apple Java VM.  It occurs in 1.5 of the VM, but not in 1.4.  Unfortunately I am using some Java 1.5 features in my code which would make it difficult to run on 1.4.  And SWT doesn’t yet have support for 1.6, which I don’t think is officially distribute for Macs yet anyways.

So, what are my choices?

Drop Mac support, for now

The main problem with this is that I know there are some Mac users out there, including myself!

Switch to using Swing instead of SWT

This would require a fair amount re-coding/re-learning.  Swing also doesn’t look as nice as SWT.  It would simplify the distribution a little bit, but I’ve already got that solved and automated.  But Swing should work on Mac without a problem.

Switch to Java 1.4

This would also require some effort and be moving backwards.  But it would allow Macs to run the app and play audio.  At least until 1.4 is no longer supported/distributed by Apple…

What do you think I should do?

For the curious, you can see details of the problem here: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=238436

Thanks to Kevin Barnes of the Eclipse project for being so hopefully in tracking down the source of this problem!

Update:

I tried another approach.  I tried using QuickTime for Java and ran into a similar problems where the UI and audio library don’t want to co-exist.  I figured I’d use QuickTime for Mac and JavaZoom for Windows and Linux.