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Why I Develop For The Mac

evanmiller.org

61–70 of 184 posts

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#61
I was experiencing some native-client nostalgia for a bit until I got to "beg Apple to perform an expedited review of the fixes." Seriously? Fuck that shit. I'll keep my lousy performance and server maintenance woes, thanks.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#62

> Browser vendors with cross-platform drawing kits just don't invest the same kind of effort into drawing lines and circles. As a result, large areas seem laggy on most browsers, whereas native apps “just work”. (“Are the graphics pre-computed?”) This is incorrect. Firefox and Safari use Core Graphics (Quartz) just as Mac native apps do. Things like lines and circles go through the exact same SSE-accelerated routines…

Well, of course browsers are going to render ultimately with the platform's native drawing functions -- which have undoubtably been optimized. The issue is the high-level of abstraction between the description of what is to be drawn, and the drawing calls themselves. This is fine for a majority of tasks, but when it becomes a bottleneck your hands are pretty tied. Native apps have much more direct control over threading, vector processing, audio devices, networking, etc.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#63
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm well aware of what native SDKs offer. I don't know why you assumed I'm unfamiliar with native development. As for the last statement, and much of the others, I'm not even sure what you're asking. If you want a nice syntax for it, then yeah, wait for the spec to be finished. Otherwise, you're probably implementing that logic yourself. The same as if you want a native app to pull in different assets (unless we're t…

FWIW Facebook's HTML5 app was terrible. They recently made a switch back to native.[1] 1: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...

And then Sencha remade it and it managed to be faster than the native app. Also note that the actual mobile Facebook site remains as fast as the native app and was always faster than the "native" app that just used webtech. So, ironically, the webapp still wins when used and developed properly for a Facebook type app.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#64

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 won't use cloud storage because: 1. even in Seattle, internet response time is erratic. Delays anywhere from a second to a couple minutes is commonplace. Using an app requiring constant traffic over the internet is quite unpleasant. 2. The backup problem. If my cloud account "goes dark" for whatever reason, I'm dead in the water, and I'm helpless to fix it. 3. I simply won't use a cloud solution that doesn't encryp…

I was under the impression that JungleDisk's encryption scheme was not as secure as they claimed[1]. Have they fixed it yet?

[1] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-06-03-insecurity-in-the... and its discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2616634

[2] http://push.cx/2011/retracting-my-jungledisk-recommendation

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#65

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 won't use cloud storage because: 1. even in Seattle, internet response time is erratic. Delays anywhere from a second to a couple minutes is commonplace. Using an app requiring constant traffic over the internet is quite unpleasant. 2. The backup problem. If my cloud account "goes dark" for whatever reason, I'm dead in the water, and I'm helpless to fix it. 3. I simply won't use a cloud solution that doesn't encryp…

> 2. The backup problem. If my cloud account "goes dark" > for whatever reason, I'm dead in the water, and > I'm helpless to fix it.

Isn't the cloud part of your back-up strategy? For example, I use OneNote for all of my notes. It syncs the notes on my PC to the cloud. As long as I'm connected, I have a backup online.

Changes also sync to my other computers when they're online.

Additionally, the notebooks are included in the local data backups we make (in our case off-sited to our ISP).

Sensitive stuff is encrypted in TrueCrypt, and the TrueCrypt volume is stored on DropBox. MI5/CIA could probably break the encryption, but there are easier ways for them to get at it.. http://xkcd.com/538/

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#66
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You've mis-read my statement as some sort of attack on native development and counter-attacked accordingly - even personally? I never said web tech was superior. I'm simply presenting a counter-argument to those that continue to deride web development and claim it can't hold a candle to native apps. There are endless examples of web applications done right that have compelling experiences and perform on par with nati…

You gave a very cavalier response.

> 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 (...)

This to me reads as "I'm not going to put much thought into this, but it sounds like he is just ignorant."

Maybe you didn't intend it that way, but that's how it read to me.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#68
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Synology is doing good things in this area. They offer a "private cloud" backup and file-sharing solution, served from a (linux based) NAS, with client programs for Mac, Windows, Android and iOS. I have a home/small office model and I love it. http://www.synology.com/dsm/home_file_sharing_cloud_station....

I have one of these and I can highly recommend it.

Maximum capacity is 96T, that should be enough for most home servers.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#69

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.

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"?

No, it's just that when you go out the first time you pick the low hanging fruit.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#70

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…

> So, if 20% of them bought your app for $1 you'd be $13 million dollars richer.

http://sivers.org/1pct

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