Why I Develop For The Mac • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#21

Post by Samuel_Michon » Sun, May 05, 2013, 5:33 PM UTC

jscipione wrote: post #13

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…

Those numbers are one year old (WWDC 2012). In the meanwhile, Apple has sold 17 million Macs. Mac install base is closer to 75 million.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#22

Post by pooriaazimi » Sun, May 05, 2013, 5:33 PM UTC

obviouslygreen wrote: post #7

More 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."

You seem to have missed the whole "Features" section. Here's a list of what he said he gains "for free" by developing for Mac (of course, other environments might have similar stuff, but not exactly like OS X's): Undo/Redo with Core Data, PDF export (and "import" into current documents), Multi-touch zoom.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#23

Post by claudius » Sun, May 05, 2013, 5:36 PM UTC

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.

How are his points regarding computational performance and local handling of large amounts of data misinformed?

There’s a reason why there is Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#24

Post by Samuel_Michon » Sun, May 05, 2013, 5:37 PM UTC

jgrahamc wrote: post #19

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).

Then perhaps Transformer is for you: http://www.filetransporter.com/

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#25

Post by rsync » Sun, May 05, 2013, 5:39 PM UTC

jgrahamc wrote: post #19

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).

I think (hope) that there is a distinction that can arise between "cloud" applications and services and "offsite" or "online" applications.

If you plug together a handful of off the shelf Amazon components, slap a label on it, and open the doors, perhaps that is rightly called a "cloud" service ... the end provider has no accountability to you (or your users) and you have no idea what's going on behind the curtain. It's all just magic happening many layers of abstraction away.

But if you build systems, own the platform, write the architecture and provide something that you understand and have accountability for, end to end, I think it can satisfy the skeptics (of which I am one).

So in this case, the researcher that can't store the documents on dropbox ... hopefully he could upload them with duplicity to an online storage platform that was built and run like this[1].

And I hope that this would be possible because such a distinction could be made ...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5638295

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#26

Post by potatolicious » Sun, May 05, 2013, 5:41 PM UTC

herdrick wrote: post #15

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.

Ask everyone again. This was true a long time ago (long time being, like, 1.5-2 years), where the Facebook app was so slow and so crashy (and the API down so often) that it was mostly useless.

Facebook is, IMO, one of the gold standards now for large-scale iOS app building. I had the pleasure of hearing one of their people speak about this a few weeks ago and they're very much at the forefront of iOS engineering.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#27

Post by rimantas » Sun, May 05, 2013, 5:42 PM UTC

zenocon wrote: post #4

I'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.

  > his own comfort and expertise with it - which is fine, of
  > course. With the advancements made in web tech today

Do you have any expertise developing for desktop/native mobile? I have a lot of expertise developing for the web—I've spent 4x as much being the web developer before switching to iOS programming full-time and every time I see someone presenting web tech as a superior way to build apps I have a hard time taking this seriously. If there is a lack of expertise it must be the other way: web devs don't know what native frameworks offer. Sure we can push and twist and stretch a systems with foundations met for the marking-up document structure and styling document presentation to fit the needs for the up, but what's really the point? Yes there is the promise of develop once run on every platform, which in practice is more like develop core once, endlessly tweak for idiosyncrasies later. And when the web tech really works for mobile app it usually just means that your app had to be a web page anyway.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#28

Post by freyrs3 » Sun, May 05, 2013, 5:45 PM UTC

> Try running a profiler on a native Mac application that does a fair amount of drawing. You'll see references to function calls like: sse64CGSFill8by1

Try running a disassembler on any compiled graphic applications of the last 10 years on any platform and you'll see SSE instructions.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#29

Post by johnrob » Sun, May 05, 2013, 5:46 PM UTC

jgrahamc wrote: post #19

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).

Isn't that just "security by obscurity"? Your home cloud server is probably more accessible to hackers than an amazon server.

If you're ok with relying on obscurity, you already have it - you are one person among billions on this planet. Who else cares about your photos?

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#30

Post by jokoon » Sun, May 05, 2013, 5:49 PM UTC

answer: become nobody really wants to do it, and obviously the supply/demand system might be really rewarding.

I recently (today) stopped to try to make some simple ogre3d application because somehow xcode can't manage permissions to create a file somewhere.