How do you define 'fast enough'?
If you return control to the user under 150ms your app will fell quite snappy. From 150ms to 200ms is okay too. Anything above 250ms is noticeable and considered by many as sluggish.
Why I Develop For The Mac
81–90 of 184 posts
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Also, it would seem that Mac users tend to spend more money on software, than the general PC user. [citation probably needed, but whatevs]
That could only be true if you ignore software for business (even small and medium business, not just "enterprise").
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#83>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?
I think the keyword is "text-heavy". Rendering 256 characters into a texture to use with WebGL is one thing, but what about unicode, or readability at small sizes? I'm honestly asking, I'd love to hear about ideas or libraries etc.
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#84Developers, 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 terms of these agreements seem pretty arbitrary and probably present a false sense of security. Properly encrypted data in the cloud is completely secure. In fact it should be impossible to tell from random bits.
On the other hand data on an encrypted disk is not exactly the same thing. It must be made available to the OS whenever the user is logged in. Any breach in security say from an email attachment or malicious website would expose its unencrypted contents.
I wonder what the required policy is for backups? Can they be stored on servers if encrypted? Remote servers?
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#85With each web project I take part on, I feel more and more in sync with what the author states.
The proper way is to have desktop applications that take proper advantage of the hardware and operating system integration and use the network for communication.
Leave the browser for the documents. No need for browser compatibility headaches or JavaScript/CSS/HTML hacks.
Just use your favourite programming language and take advantage of the OS capabilities to full extent.
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
At the risk of sounding cavalier :) see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5659447 -- which is a better summary of the point I was trying to make. It seems he likes the Mac native platform, which is great, but don't try to sell me on the idea that all other platforms and the web, in particular fall short.
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#87Developers, 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).
While still alpha, BitTorrent Sync looks really promising for this use case.
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#88Someone develops for the Mac because thinking about cross platform and making it work in the browser is too hard, so we'll just bet the farm on letting Apple handle the hard stuff, and hope that performance doesn't later drop off, and then clients ask why it is no longer so good, and I say "but, I develop on this closed platform, and it should be good..." etc.
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#89> So I'm left with , and is slow. I consider this a bit of a frustrating pseudo-myth. It's true canvas is slow compared to lots of native drawing, but its usually presented as a false equivalency issue. Canvas didn't set out to replace native drawing of hand-crafted OpenCL. It's an alternative to cross-platform graphics on the web, where you get Canvas or you get Flash (Or SVG or hobbling together colored DOM element…
> What's wrong in this case with the very good performance across many platforms (even tablets) of the SVG-backed RaphaelJS?
So I attempted to determine the accuracy of this claim. I ran a benchmark from Kevin Roast [1] who seems to author a lot of Canvas demos. For each of the 8 tests in his benchmark, I recorded the FPS reading that I saw that was the lowest (e.g., framerate dropped to X at some point during the 5-second test).
Mac iPad
20fps 16fps
29fps 18fps
30fps 21fps
30fps 30fps
28fps 6fps
29fps 18fps
29fps 7fps
12fps 30fps
mean_mac = 25.875, median_mac = 29 mean_ipad = 18.25, median_ipad = 18
On the Mac side, I can see both sides of the issue. Arguably 26-29fps in a wide variety of situations is good enough for a wide variety of applications. At the same time, I can understand the author really wanting to blow past 29fps.
On the iPad side, the issue is more clear. I think most people would say that 18fps is unacceptable for a drawing application.
(If these numbers are contributing to the "pseudo-myth" of slow Canvas performance, please point me to a reasonable benchmark. This one is just the most comprehensive one that I found.)
> At the risk of being a bit rude, it's worth noting that he doesn't bother with all Desktops, just Mac, which causes further suspicion that this is really just a rationalization piece and not about performance.
He addresses the choice of the Mac platform in some detail in the "Drawbacks" and "Conclusions" section of the post. At the risk of being a bit rude, it's poor form to dismiss someone's reasoning as a "rationalization" without addressing the reasoning on the merits. To the extent that his choice of Mac over Windows et al is specious, it is not a claim that is supported by your comment.
Re: Why I Develop For The Mac
#90Developers, 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).
BitTorrent Sync would be a good fit for you http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html