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An appeal to Apple from Anukari

anukari.com

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Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#121

Post by duped »

freedomben wrote: post #115
duped wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you, but there simply isn't an alternative for pro audio developers. You go where the users are and the majority of the market (by revenue) are Mac users. Now a lot of people may reply to this that Windows isn't that bad with ASIO (third party driver framework) or modern APIs like WASAPI (which is still lacking), or how pipewire is changing things on Linux so you don't need jack anymore (but god…

Agreed, you're in probably the toughtest spot. That said, Reaper and many others have done great things with DAWs and other audio processing in C++. Maybe getting a "native" look is too difficult, but I figured I'd throw it out there.

The problem is not the application software but the operating system and hardware. Linux is arcane and Windows is permanently behind the curve.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#122

Post by duped »

AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #100
duped wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you, but there simply isn't an alternative for pro audio developers. You go where the users are and the majority of the market (by revenue) are Mac users. Now a lot of people may reply to this that Windows isn't that bad with ASIO (third party driver framework) or modern APIs like WASAPI (which is still lacking), or how pipewire is changing things on Linux so you don't need jack anymore (but god…

How is WASAPI lacking? I thought the abundance of FL Studio beat producers proved that for audio work, today, Windows is completely fine.

Basically every software (except Logic) is available on Windows but users still buy Macs. Even among those users, people usually fallback to ASIO instead of directsound or wasapi backends.

WASAPI requires exclusive mode to be useable for pro applications, or else your latency will suffer and they may be doing some resampling behind the scenes.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#123

Post by wpm »

pjmlp wrote: post #40
thraway3837 wrote: post #30

This is all just too much Stockholm syndrome. Apple’s DX (developer experience) has always been utterly abysmal, and these continued blog posts just goes to show just how bad it is. Proprietary technologies, poor or no documentation, silent deprecations and removals of APIs, slow trickle feed of yearly WWDC releases that enable just a bit more functionality, introducing newer more entrenched ways to do stuff but stil…

On the old Mac OS, and early OS X day, the documentation was great, I dunno what happened to the documentation team. Swift on the server is for Apple ecosystem developers, to share code, just like all those reasons to apparently use JavaScript on the server instead of something saner.

The story I have heard was that they all got shit canned. They were professional technical writers focused on telling you “why”. These days most of Apples docs are “what”, and a lot of those don’t even tell you anything. Enums without values documented. Class docs that amount to “yep this class exists”.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#124

Post by NexRebular »

bigyabai wrote: post #108
duped wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you, but there simply isn't an alternative for pro audio developers. You go where the users are and the majority of the market (by revenue) are Mac users. Now a lot of people may reply to this that Windows isn't that bad with ASIO (third party driver framework) or modern APIs like WASAPI (which is still lacking), or how pipewire is changing things on Linux so you don't need jack anymore (but god…

FWIW I have worked on several professional live audio productions and never heard of Anukari once. This is a pretty niche domain regardless of what circles you work in. It's really not about "X job is for Y OS" here. > there simply isn't an alternative for pro audio developers. Tell me you don't work on live audio without telling me you don't work on live audio. Windows has always been usable if you have a suitable A…

> Windows has always been usable if you have a suitable ASIO

The gold standard being RME hardware and drivers. Not a single issue ever on windows.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#125

Post by sunshowers »

johnnyjeans wrote: post #75
duped wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is "don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower" territory imo. I don't think Apple is actively hostile to 3P developers or tries to lock them in. I think they simply don't care - or lack the institutional capacity to care even if individual developers in the organization want to care. The Apple developer experience is an abject horror because they believe everyone who is capable of developing high value applications f…

I'd argue you can see the hostility if you compare shipping to Windows vs shipping to Apple. Microsoft doesn't care if you copy over your MSVC suite into a Wine environment to build your software for their platform. Even SignTool just works. It's not necessarily trivial to do, but that's simply because the MSVC suite is a horrible mess like everything else Microsoft. Apple explicitly disallows cross compilation in th…

(From private conversations with people at large tech corporations, my understanding is that that provision of the ToS is inconsistently enforced. Obviously not a good place to be for independent developers, since it partly depends on if you're important enough.)

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#126

Post by duped »

bigyabai wrote: post #108
duped wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you, but there simply isn't an alternative for pro audio developers. You go where the users are and the majority of the market (by revenue) are Mac users. Now a lot of people may reply to this that Windows isn't that bad with ASIO (third party driver framework) or modern APIs like WASAPI (which is still lacking), or how pipewire is changing things on Linux so you don't need jack anymore (but god…

FWIW I have worked on several professional live audio productions and never heard of Anukari once. This is a pretty niche domain regardless of what circles you work in. It's really not about "X job is for Y OS" here. > there simply isn't an alternative for pro audio developers. Tell me you don't work on live audio without telling me you don't work on live audio. Windows has always been usable if you have a suitable A…

> Tell me you don't work on live audio without telling me you don't work on live audio.

This is pretty rude, I'm among the (probably small) subset of HN users who has developed real professional audio software.

All I can talk about is my experience, which is that in the plugin market a plurality of your revenue will be from MacOS users. My last job in this market had zero Windows/Linux users.

Now I have done a good bit of live work on Windows machines with ASIO, but I also do a bit of work there myself from time to time in venues with musicians - and I don't really know any musicians that are carrying around Windows laptops. 100% of them are using Mainstage and Ableton on Macbooks.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#127

Post by sunshowers »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #72
4ndrewl wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Even Wikipedia says Whataboutism can be completely deserved in some cases. It is absolutely deserved here - Apple built a 100 foot tower, and it's grown hairy over the last few decades. Linux built 7 30 foot towers without stairs in the same timeframe; but yelling about the overgrowth on the 100 foot tower is still somehow defensible. If they can't build their own towers correctly, they have no right to act like the…

Most of the work on the Linux kernel is commercially funded. Plenty of other parts to a KDE/GNOME/systemd/GNU/Linux desktop.

(I'm a pretty happy desktop Linux user, mostly because I don't think commercial OS vendors' incentives are properly aligned in the B2C space.)

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#128

Post by johnnyjeans »

scarface_74 wrote: post #91
johnnyjeans wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You go where the users are and the majority of the market (by revenue) are Mac users. One of the worst things about Apple is how much time and effort they spend trying to lock you into their platform if you want to support it. There's no excuse for it. Even once they have you on their system, they're doing everything in their power to lock you in to their workflows and development environments. It's actually insane…

Exactly what are they suppose to do if not create their own frameworks to bear leverage their own hardware? Do you want them to use cross platform frameworks that are not optimized for their system?

My problems start long before the special APIs come into play. When we supported Mac, I just wrapped the APIs like you do for any other system. The problem is I don't use Mac, so building software for Macs is inherently troublesome. I can build and test for Windows just fine from Linux and OpenBSD. I can't for Mac.

Now you might say this is problematic, Apple doesn't want third-party developers locking their platform behind some conditionally compiled set of abstractions that ruin everything they've worked for. Putting aside how ridiculous that is given system APIs are often wrapped for normal abstraction reasons anyways, that's totally fine. But then, it's also not my problem because I'm not Apple. I don't mind supporting their platform, I'll even turn a blind eye to the audacity of charging a developer fee while offering abysmal documentation and support. But I'm not going to crawl and beg for the privilege.

> Do you want them to use cross platform frameworks that are not optimized for their system?

Just like everybody else, because it hardly matters. Outside of Apple-land, Intel, AMD and Nvidia all get along just fine with rewriting SPIR-V to their microarchitectures. CPUs get along just fine rewriting abstract instruction sets like AMD64 and the various ARMs to their microarchitectures. Code is by-default compiled for instruction compatibility. APIs like CUDA and ROCm explicitly exist for vendor lock-in reasons. There's absolutely no reason why the throughput of these APIs can't be generically applied to compute shaders. None at all. The hardware vendors just want to capture the market.

Apple isn't exactly working with exotic hardware. The M1 is yet another ARM chip, not some crazy graph-reduction machine. These standards are fine and used across a wide-derth of hardware to no real detriment. I would suggest you may over-estimate how much they actually care about this idea of "specially optimized APIs." Consider that Apple pushes Swift as the primary language you Should be Using to ship software on OSX, and yet garbage collection is still handled in software. That's not what vertical integration for engineering purposes looks like.

Again, it all hardly matters. I wouldn't mind just wrapping these APIs, they're not particularly special or exotic any more than their hardware is. But the fact of the matter is that as a non-mac user, they go through a lot of effort to ensure putting software on their platform is as unattractive as possible.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#129

Post by sunshowers »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #53
pjmlp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still better engineered that dealing with the distribution of the day, reinventing the way to do sound, graphics stack, UI, ...... Once upon a time I thought either GNOME or KDE would win, and we could all enjoy the one Linux distribution, I was proven wrong. Then again, I have been back on Windows as main OS since Windows 7.

I don't know why you are downvoted here. The engineering standards, and churn within the Linux desktop , are hilariously bad. Nobody who uses it has a right to complain about how node_modules has a thousand dependencies and makes your JavaScript app brittle. Their superior Linux desktop won't even be capable of running the same software build outside of a Flatpak without crashes in three years. As for lack of documen…

Speaking of development workflows, has Apple finally implemented a scan-resistant LRU cache within their VFS layer? Last I checked performance would fall off a cliff once you started scanning more files than can fit in the cache.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#130

Post by sunshowers »

humbledrone wrote: post #2

Some folks may have seen my Show HN post for Anukari here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873074 In that thread, the topic of macOS performance came up there. Basically Anukari works great for most people on Apple silicon, including base-model M1 hardware. I've done all my testing on a base M1 and it works wonderfully. The hardware is incredible. But to make it work, I had to implement an unholy abomination o…

Great post, I found the description clear and easy to understand. I've definitely run into the issue you're describing in other contexts.
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