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An appeal to Apple from Anukari

anukari.com

151–160 of 197 posts

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#151
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…

> 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…

Eh, is this worse than Windows? You develop UWP or WPF or whatever the current flavor is with Visual Studio, and use C# APIs that only exist on their platform.

On Mac, I can use bash/zsh mostly how I would on linux. The main compatibility issues come from BSD tools vs GNU, which are very simple to replace if you want. On Windows, they use PowerShell, which is totally proprietary.

On Mac, web & infra development can use completely open source tooling which can be shared with Linux.

You can still use VS Code to edit Swift (or C#), but the more "proprietary dev environments" (Xcode or Visual Studio) are probably more powerful with system level integrations.

Heck, you can use PyQT on mac if you don't like Swift or Xcode.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#152
post #12

One thing I don’t understand: if latency is important for this use case, why isn’t the CPU busy preparing the next GPU ‘job’ while a GPU ‘job’ is running? Is that a limitation of the audio plug-in APIs?

I mean the CPU can't prepare a job for samples which don't exist yet. If it takes 0.5 milliseconds to process 1 millisecond's worth of audio, you'll necessarily be stopping and starting constantly. You can't keep the GPU fed continuously.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#153

Be careful what you wish for here. Knowing Apple, they will stonewall any API requests, and may very well shut your app out for the private API workarounds described.

I don't think Anukari is in the Mac App Store, nor do I think a plug-in like it will ever be appropriate for the App Store, so I don't know what exactly you're worried about.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

“Linux” isn’t a person or a company. Different people contribute to it with different goals. > 90%+ of work on Linux comes from corporate sponsorship And approximately 0% of these corporate contributors care about the “Linux desktop” experience. Unlike Apple their goal is not to build a consumer-targeted OS. Linux on the desktop is very, very niche, and even among the people who do use it, a lot of them will spend al…

If you haven't used linux desktop for a while, even a year ago, try again. Use a bleeding edge distro like the latest Ubuntu or Fedora ideally running Wayland and you will be surprised how smooth and feature-full it has become, with gobs of high quality apps available with no finicky compile instructions or crazy installation steps needed to follow.

Whatever rough edges you may encounter will keep being sanded down at a speed I haven't witnessed since when linux was the hot new thing in the 90s. Linux desktop felt stale and abandoned trough-out the 2010s but nowadays its pretty marvelous how fast it's becoming a real alternative to windows and mac. I truly believe that if it had the proper developer adoption and first class hardware support from OEM vendors it would already be a true alternative.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#155
post #12

One thing I don’t understand: if latency is important for this use case, why isn’t the CPU busy preparing the next GPU ‘job’ while a GPU ‘job’ is running? Is that a limitation of the audio plug-in APIs?

I attempted to preempt your question in the section of my blog post, "Why don’t you just pipeline the GPU code so that it saturates the GPU?" It's one of the less-detailed sections though so maybe you have further questions? I think the main thing is that since Anukari processes input like MIDI and audio data in real-time, it can't work ahead of the CPU, because those inputs are not available yet.

Possibly what you describe is a bit more like double-buffering, which I also explored. The problem here is latency: any form of N-buffering introduces additional latency. This is one reason why some gamers don't like triple-buffering for graphics, because it introduces further latency between their mouse inputs and the visual change.

But furthermore, when the GPU clock rate is too low, double-buffering or pipelining don't help anyway, because fundamentally Anukari has to keep up with real time, and every block it processes is dependent on the previous one. With a fully-lowered GPU clock, the issue does actually become one of throughput and not just latency.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#156

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…

Oh please, every platform and programming environment has undocumented apis, workarounds and hacks.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#157

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…

> Networking APIs that require the use of a 3rd party library because the native APIs don’t even handle the basics easily This is nonsense. I've been a professional Mac and iOS developer for well over a decade, and even in the days of NSURLConnection, I've never needed a 3rd party networking library. Uploading, downloading, streaming, proxying, caching, cookies, auth challenges, certificate validation, mTLS, HTTP/3,…

Yeah NSURLSession is great and I always find whatever library I’m forced to use clunkier than using it directly with some helper methods.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#158
Don't miss the link thrown in the second to last paragraph to https://x.com/Mick_Gordon/status/1918146487948919222 , a demo Mick Gordon put together, to which @anukarimusic replied

> Lol on the second day it's out, you have already absolutely demolished all of the demos I've made with it and I've used it every day for two years

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#159

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…

I'm constantly amazed how developers worship Apple while Apple couldn't care less about them. Bugs that never get fixed, documentation that's incomplete, wrong or non-existent, and their bug tracking is a complete joke.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#160
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…

> 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…

I don't even understand why they are following a cash cow strategy of milking their current customer base dry when they could be growing massively.

They have amazing hardware that is far superior to the competition and that they can build at very competitive prices while still making good money.

Building a PC in 2025 absolutely sucks. The prices are getting insane. Plus Windows 11 is super hated. It is the perfect time for Apple to win over people.

They just need to stop kneecaping their great hardware but the shitty software side. Just open it up a little bit. Add Vulkan support. Actually make your GPU usable. Actually help Steam to do their magic like they did with Linux, no one is going to buy games on the bloody Apple store anywhere. Show some respect to the developers.

Shareholders giving up massive growth for short term profits. So frustrating.

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