Re: [avr-chat] AVR IDE [WAS: UISP / AVRDude : what to choose ?]

[Brian Dean]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 07:19:35AM -0500, David Kelly wrote:

> Thats why I was up late the other night, installing MacOS X Tiger and  
> X-Code on my laptop. X-Code appears to be exactly the right way  
> things should be done, expect no less of Apple.

Here here.  My wife bought my G5 for me over a year ago and, while I
loved going to the Apple Store and poking at the systems - they are so
beautiful and well designed at every level, I was a bit skeptical of
using one day to day.  I'm a long time Unix fellow after all, since
the '80s.  Of course, I knew that MacOS X had some Unix underpinnings,
I figured most of that would be hidden and you'd really have to dig
down to get at anything and even so it would be crippled in some way
or somehow discouraged.

Not so!  My MacOS X system is basically a FreeBSD Unix workstation
w/X11 + all the great GUI technology leveraged from NeXT and Apple.
The default shell is zsh.  How cool is that?  Other companies have
tried to pull off System-wide UI's on top of Unix, but Apple is the
only successful one, IMO.  You truly can have your cake and eat it
too.  It's called MacOS X.  X11 gives you all the Unix apps you can
shake a stick at and the native Aqua gives you everything else.

So recently I was in the market for a laptop.  I really debated with
myself about whether to buy a Dell which had a truly astonishing
screen resolution of 1920x1200.  High resolution display is very
important to me, and while I love my Mac, I'm also quite comfortable
on FreeBSD - it being my system of choice besides the Mac, which is
what I would be installing on the Dell.  But when I started thinking
about all the little things that are just so easy on the Mac - music,
sound, burning DVDs, fireware video camera, iTunes, iMovie - and
realized many of those things would be impossible under FreeBSD (or
Linux for that matter too).  And when it came down to it, I bought the
PowerBook since I've grown quite attached to the Mac and its very
nicely designed hardware and software - software which does not
stagnate, Apple releases fairly major updates on a regular basis.

So I picked up my PowerBook one Friday around 4pm.  I got it home by
5pm, had some dinner, and by 7pm I had the full suite of AVR tools
downloaded, built and running and flashing MAVRIC boards.  Probably
would've been faster if I hadn't had dinner :-)

> Avr-gcc under X-Code would be something. Have heard several have it
> running.

I have yet to actually do this.  Being a long-time Unix developer, I
still prefer a couple of xterms and emacs.  In Unix, the shell _is_
the IDE :-) I've written a few native Mac applications using X-Code
and friends, but not yet tried to get it set up for cross building
AVR.

-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean
ATmega128 based MAVRIC controllers
http://www.bdmicro.com/