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Why I Develop For The Mac

evanmiller.org

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Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#11

Post by Samuel_Michon »

sergiotapia wrote: post #6

I 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.

There are 75 million Mac users, many of whom have iTunes accounts and credit cards on file – they can buy from the Mac App Store with a single click.

20% of 75 million is 15 million. 15 million copies of any paid app is huge.

Also, let’s not forget that Mac sales has been growing for years, while the PC market as a whole has been shrinking. Today, there are 3 times as many Mac users than 5 years a go.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#12

Post by Keyframe »

fsckin wrote: post #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?

Maybe he meant WebGL, but even then it could be done very well as with more modern OpenGL variants with bitmapped font tables. OpenGL on Mac is 3.2 IIRC. Nvidia recently tinkered with proprietary version of OpenVG with beautiful text rendering capabilities. There are numerous ways to make great text with OpenGL be performant with native code. Even GUIs with IMGUI approach. Some of those techniques could be done with WebGL, I'm sure. So, I don't really understand his point about text and OpenGL a no go Sure, WebGL is not all you can get with native and OpenGL, but nowhere near a fiasco in performance.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#13

Post by jscipione »

sergiotapia wrote: post #6

I 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.

Well, according to this [1] the Mac install base is around 66 million users. So, if 20% of them bought your app for $1 you'd be $13 million dollars richer. That seems worth it to me. It seems that you are underestimating the size of the market and potential the to make money by writing applications for the Mac. You are also ignoring the fact that Macs sell at a premium so those 66 million represent not the bottom end of the market, but those with money to purchase services to make their lives easier.

[1] http://aaplinvestors.net/stats/mac-installed-base/

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#14

Post by imechura »

Developers, please take note of the authors statement below....

"Many developers assume that everyone wants their data to be “in the cloud”, but that's actually not true for a lot of my customers. Professional researchers often sign agreements in their children's blood stating that their data will be stored on an encrypted disk, won't leave their laptop, and will be destroyed when the research project is completed. “The cloud” is the last place they want their data to go."

There are so many great note taking and productivity application that I just can't use because the majority of my notes are of a confidential nature. If my company provided macbook where to be compromised I would not be held liable, however if my personal dropbox or evernote account where compromised I would be held accountable.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#15

Post by herdrick »

tannerc wrote: post #3

All 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…

Everyone I've talked to about it gave up on the iOS Facebook app and just started using the web version.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#16

Post by drivebyacct2 »

Having a hard time phrasing this without being a jerk, but many of these "native is better than web" psuedo-rants contain misinformation or seem to be lacking in an understanding of the current state of web technologies like persistance, app caching, etc, etc.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#17

Post by micampe »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #16

Having a hard time phrasing this without being a jerk, but many of these "native is better than web" psuedo-rants contain misinformation or seem to be lacking in an understanding of the current state of web technologies like persistance, app caching, etc, etc.

The reverse is also often true.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#18

Post by zenocon »

imechura wrote: post #14

Developers, please take note of the authors statement below.... "Many developers assume that everyone wants their data to be “in the cloud”, but that's actually not true for a lot of my customers. Professional researchers often sign agreements in their children's blood stating that their data will be stored on an encrypted disk, won't leave their laptop, and will be destroyed when the research project is completed. “…

This is a great point, but also orthogonal to the tech/platform choice. One can still develop a front-end using web tech which connects to a localhost server (see for example Google Refine -- which runs a localhost web server). It may make packaging and distribution it tad more annoying, but there are tools that can do this, and then you get the benefit of cross-platform adoption -- as well as the option to make it a hosted service, if desired.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#19

Post by jgrahamc »

imechura wrote: post #14

Developers, please take note of the authors statement below.... "Many developers assume that everyone wants their data to be “in the cloud”, but that's actually not true for a lot of my customers. Professional researchers often sign agreements in their children's blood stating that their data will be stored on an encrypted disk, won't leave their laptop, and will be destroyed when the research project is completed. “…

I'm very much in the camp of not wanting my data in the cloud. I don't autoupload photos, for example, because I want control over them.

What I would like is a home cloud server which would handle all the services I could get from the cloud with explicit sharing with chosen people (e.g. my family).

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#20

Post by Spearchucker »

tannerc wrote: post #3

All 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…

Warning, rant:

Web does not mean ubiquitous network availability. It's a turn of phrase that only seems to originate from Silicon Valley and Redmond. When I get on the London Underground my network is gone. When I drive from Cape Town to Hout Bay my network disappears. When I go into my favourite coffee shop in Berlin my network disappears.

If an app (Evernote, for example) relies on a non- store-and-forward network connection to hook me up with my data it gets uninstalled. I can't use Trello for the same reason. When I need my data I need my data.

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