Why I Develop For The Mac
evanmiller.org
Why I Develop For The Mac
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Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#2>OpenGL is simply not a good option for 2D text-heavy graphics. So I'm left with , and is slow.
That's what we call throwing the baby out with the bath water. What's wrong with using an orthographic frustrum?
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#3All good thoughts, and similar to why I develop native apps for iOS vs web apps.
I think John Gruber summarized it nicely when he said: "Facebook, bless them, has it right. What's great about the web is ubiquitous network availability, not running within a browser tab. Websites are just services, and what you see in a browser tab is merely one possible interface to that service. The best possible interface to that service is often, if not usually, going to be a native app, not a web app."[1]
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#4I'm going to take a wild stab at the primary reason he develops on the Mac is his own comfort and expertise with it - which is fine, of course. With the advancements made in web tech today, I don't think all the performance reasons he listed ring entirely true. See for example Google Refine https://code.google.com/p/google-refine/ which is a similar tool to his Wizard tool, with a web front-end.
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#5Evan.. nice to see you on the top slot on HN!
Thoughtful blog post as usual.
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#6I would love to make Mac applications but the prospect of having such a small potential userbase makes it a non-option for me.
Imagine, 10% of desktops have Mac OS, of that only 20% will buy my application; that's a very small user base.
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#7More accurately: Why I develop this specific class of applications for the desktop rather than the web. This is basically what the author is talking about despite the generalization regarding desktop apps; if he's going to stick with that he should have gone with "desktop" instead of "mac."
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#8All good thoughts, and similar to why I develop native apps for iOS vs web apps. I think John Gruber summarized it nicely when he said: "Facebook, bless them, has it right. What's great about the web is ubiquitous network availability, not running within a browser tab. Websites are just services, and what you see in a browser tab is merely one possible interface to that service. The best possible interface to that se…
I think dismissing web tech b/c of what Facebook does or John Gruber says is short-sighted. Case in point: the people over at Sencha rebuilt Facebook in HTML5 to run faster than Facebook's native app [1]. It may take an additional level of skill and careful planning...and it may be easier to shoot yourself in the foot with a WebApp that provides a compelling experience with performance on par with a native app, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
1. http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-l...
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#9I would love to make Mac applications but the prospect of having such a small potential userbase makes it a non-option for me. Imagine, 10% of desktops have Mac OS, of that only 20% will buy my application; that's a very small user base.
At the same time, every member of that 10% bought a Mac desktop, and therefore bought a product with high margins. If 10% of your potential audience has no problem buying software, especially high-margin software, they'll be easier to sell high-margin software to.
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#10I would love to make Mac applications but the prospect of having such a small potential userbase makes it a non-option for me. Imagine, 10% of desktops have Mac OS, of that only 20% will buy my application; that's a very small user base.
That's about 2% of the total amount of desktops. I don't know the exact numbers, but I assume that it amounts to several dozens of million sales.
Are we getting so disillusioned that we consider to be "such a small potential userbase"?