Can anyone suggest a good free IDE for the Mac? I have been using JCreator for the PC and would like to find something simple and similar for the Mac OS X. Any suggestions?
The real application is worth the money (if you unlike me got any) - but you can use the test/development versions for free!
Unfortunately Borland doesn’t offer JBuilder officially for Macosx. However since it’s written in Java it should run there, too?
Well, JBuilderX is just so cool it would be a pity if it didn’t run on MacosX. 
Basically you can extract the pure JAR files out of the JBuilder distribution and it should run on any Java enabled platform. Last year I’ve seen the JBuilder Win distribution run on Linux - just with an own starter batch file.
PS: I’m talking about the free JBuilderX version named Foundation (or Personal? No, Personal has been with JB9, now it’s Foundation again, like in JB-pre-9 or so, oh well.).
Actually you can use the installer (its InstallAnywhere AIR) you just need to invoke it witha VM yourself.
I just broke my JBuilder Enterprise on my mac with Apple’s thrillingly screwed up 1.4.2DP JDK install so Im about to reinstall. I can post how I did it once I’ve doped it out again…
I use Eclipse 3.0M5 works very well on OS X and it is free.
(a simple hack is needed to run it on 1.4.2DP1… just ask on the java-seed list.)
[quote]Actually you can use the installer (its InstallAnywhere AIR) you just need to invoke it witha VM yourself.
I just broke my JBuilder Enterprise on my mac with Apple’s thrillingly screwed up 1.4.2DP JDK install so Im about to reinstall. I can post how I did it once I’ve doped it out again…
[/quote]
Well, good to hear. 
So JBuilder runs on Macos, too.
The Enterprise version, now that’s a very nice one. These clever guys at Borland bundled the JBuilderX free Version with the Enterprise Trial version this time, so for one month all the - otherwise - greyed out functions and menu entries work… I already love that UML diagramm stuff which is done on the fly. Lovely.
Yep and JBuilderX works with the Mac 1.4.2
So if anyone needs installation instructions let me know and Ill post them.
Hey Io looked around at sun’s site but could not figure something out: if I want to develop on a Mac then which sdk do I dl and install? Someone mentioned before about a 1.4.1 but I cant seem to find that. Can someone point me in the right direction, please?
[quote]Unfortunately Borland doesn’t offer JBuilder officially for Macosx. However since it’s written in Java it should run there, too?
[/quote]
It does and Im running the latest version (JBX) just fine
One hiccup is that they use InstallAnywhere and there is an incompatibility between the InstallAnywhere launcher and the developer JDK1.4.2 but you can run it manually with your JDK1.3.1. If anyone needs instructions, post and ill dope it out again. (Its the eay you run all InstallAnywhere stuff, basically you invoke one class in the install.jar and it does the rest.)
And yes, I love JBuilder
[quote]Hey Io looked around at sun’s site but could not figure something out: if I want to develop on a Mac then which sdk do I dl and install? Someone mentioned before about a 1.4.1 but I cant seem to find that. Can someone point me in the right direction, please?
[/quote]
You should already have java1.4.1 installed, it comes with Panther. To find out, open a terminal and type “java -version”.
If you want the developer preview of 1.4.2 then you need to join the apple developer site (go to apple.com and then click the Developer link)