The Dan Gaul Weblog

I switched over to an Intel Mac from my PPC one about 2 months ago. I use Zend Studio for my PHP IDE, and it worked just fine on the PPC, including studio server and being able to debug. There were always issues with some memory leaks, but they were minor annoyances more than anything else. All I had to do was save the project and restart Zend.

Switching to an Intel Mac has been an extremely positive experience. I can now run Parallels and check things in IE6, IE7, run some windows programs I’m missing on the Mac, etc. However, the move to Intel has been a pain in the ass for developing using Zend Studio. I can’t install Studio Sever, which is needed for debugging in the environment I’m in. The memory leaks seem worse, where I frequently have to KILL Studio instead of just saving the project, closing and relaunching it. Sometimes I dont notice Studio is acting right away, and my changes aren’t saved even though I’m using the keyboard shortcuts to try to save.

You see, Zend Studio and Studio Server are not officially supported on Intel Macs, yet. Boo on me you might say? Yes, I agree somewhat. Zend is a Java applications, so it’s supposed to be cross platform. Zend Studio Server uses Apache, so releasing a versions for Intel and PPC should technically not be that different. Especially since the thing that server dies on is not the install, but the initialization of Studio Server, where the apache module fails to load. However, Zend’s lack of response to just release an updated Studio Server is inexcusible. Many comments in their forums shows that many people are unhappy to the point of switching to a different IDEs. I myself tried out Komodo, which I thought was pretty good but I missed some things in Zend Studio that Komodo doesnt have, plus we here at Digital Trends have forked out a ton of $ for Zend Studio licenses. I dont want to go spend even more money for a pro license of Komodo when it’s not in my development budget.

I submitted a ticket a couple months ago to Zend about this problem, and their response was that a new version of Studio should be out within a month. That time has come and gone, and still no new version, no support for Intel Macs.

If this is how Zend supports customers, I’m not inclined to renew our licenses with them when they expire near the end of the year.