Apps considered good Mac apps typically use native GUI or polished custom GUIs that fit the aesthetic and conventions. Multi-platform stuff like Eclipse and MonoDevelop are slapdash in that department.
Eclipse is one of the best java editing environments though, in terms of understanding java and not just editing text. Yes it's fidgety and ram hungry, but using it is a significant improvement over vim etc strictly in terms of my productivity. Though it may only really demonstrate value on larger apis; if you can keep most of an api in your head, ie it's a very small java project using few external libs, it may not do much for you.
And I just bought 16GB of ram for my macbook for $150; it's from crucial which I've had good experiences with but it's as expensive as it gets for 2x8GB. So that's a pretty trivial expense for your development environment: $75 a year.
You and the OP are comparing apples and oranges. VIM is an editor, Eclipse is an IDE. You can have your cake and eat it too [1]. Eclipse is a good cross platform IDE yes, but throwing more RAM at it won't make it feel natural and native to the platform.
Is there some sort of secret to getting Eclipse to work without being really slow? Someone once mentioned using the latest Java, but I've yet to give that a try. Frankly it's the only thing that demotivates me from writing Android apps.
Whether something 'runs' vs whether it's 'slow' are entirely different matters. Eclipse still hangs and stutters while using it with generally nothing else of substance running on the machine. It's better under linux than osx, but it's still there. Intellij has far fewer of these hangs/pauses, although it has some too. Looking fwd to java 1.7 to help reduce these issues.
I agree that setting up PhoneGap isn't hard, but if this is a marketing ploy... well, it worked on me. Trigger.io appears to have SMS support, which PhoneGap no longer does, so I'm going to check it out.
That said, it irks me that I'd have to pay $3600/year to support more than 2 platforms.
Don't hold back! They remind me a lot of me and my brother. At the ripe old age of 7 and 5, we started programming with MicroWorlds, and spent hours teaching ourselves from the manual so we could make simple 8-bit DOS games.
Once a month or so, we would also make a trip to the local thrift store and we would each get to pick out 1 electronic gadget (<$5 unless it was particularly compelling) to take apart. I hacked up everything from keyboards to handbag-sized cell phones. Exploring programming and electronics as a kid was a big part of my success as an adult. For a lot of people, technology is scary/magical, but it doesn't have to be that way.
My first 'real' program was drawing a house in LOGO when I just turned four. I still remember my dad explaining me the concept of angles because I really wanted to draw a roof.
When I tried to rewrite that program 25 years later and downloaded a LOGO interpreter for OS-X; when it came to clearing the screen somewhere out of the vague recesses of my muscle memory the 'CLEAR' command just popped out.
I learned that my ten year old was only learning consumption patterns for computers at school.
Web searching and a tiny bit of Office basically.
Something had to change and I've found that several kids are keen enough on LOGO even in our day and age to come to a Saturday morning LOGO lesson in the computer lab.
...even some of the grown ups have started bragging about shapes they built or clever uses of the REPEAT command.
It's just a magically simple analogue for all things code.
It seems that getting a programming job that way only works if you know someone at the company, or the company is small. Unfortunately, in my experience with both sides of the process, you won't even be considered for a job at a big tech company without the right degree--your application doesn't make it through their first filter.
