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Why I Develop For The Mac

evanmiller.org

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Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#101

Post by coolsunglasses »

zenocon wrote: post #8
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…

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 t…

They had to do more work, relatively speaking, to make that work well than it would've taken to do the same with a native app.

Sencha's little demonstration was the very definition of "bending over backwards".

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#102

Post by visualR »

bcoates wrote: post #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.

This is exactly why I stopped developing for native. If you want to fix a bug or tweak/add one little feature its a huge ordeal. Plus the 30% tax on non-recurring revenue. I'm glad he's doing mac apps. Less competition in the web space.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#103

Post by tonylemesmer »

johnrob wrote: post #29
jgrahamc wrote: post #19

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).

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?

I think the people here suggesting things like bittorent sync and owncliud missed the commenters request, i. e. a personal cloud that works with all these other services. Owncloud etc are just clunky implementations of drop box that offer less uptime and features. They don't offer slick, out of the box integration with other apps/services

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#104

Post by hawkw »

rubyrescue wrote: post #54

This is written by someone who actually writes a popular web framework for Erlang - the exact opposite of throwing a static site on S3. That gives this piece more credibility - he knows how to build active server-side software as well.

Good point. I'm personally of the opinion that one should not publicly denounce a thing unless they've spent time in the trenches trying to make it work.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#105

Post by Samuel_Michon »

stcredzero wrote: post #78
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of those are going to be replacements for existing Macs, however. (Mac user since original 128k.)

My estimate of 75 million was conservative, it’s closer to 80 million.

Half of all new Macs are sold to people who are ‘new to Mac’[1]. Even the people who buy a replacement for their old Mac will often find other uses for that old Mac or they will sell it or give it away.

One year a go, Mac install base was 66 million. Since then, 17 million Macs have been sold. 8.5 million of those are sold to people who never owned a Mac before. Let’s imagine that all the remaining 8.5 million units are bought by existing Mac users, and that half of them are bought because the old Macs died. That gives us a new total of 78.75 million.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2012/07/25/7-sure-f...

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#106

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

visualR wrote: post #102
bcoates wrote: post #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.

This is exactly why I stopped developing for native. If you want to fix a bug or tweak/add one little feature its a huge ordeal. Plus the 30% tax on non-recurring revenue. I'm glad he's doing mac apps. Less competition in the web space.

That's assuming that the app store is the only way to distribute mac apps which, unlike iOS, it isn't.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#108

Post by eslaught »

> nothing beats multithreaded C and vectorized assembly code

I think Terra would give you a run for your money:

http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/pldi13...

From the paper:

> Our Terra-based auto- tuner for BLAS routines performs within 20% of ATLAS, and our DSL for stencil computations runs 2.3x faster than hand-written C.

See also:

http://terralang.org/

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#109

Post by klibertp »

pjmlp wrote: post #85

With 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 ta…

That's nice sentiment from developer perspective. For a manager or entrepreneur it would be an unacceptable waste of time and money, so I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#110

Post by Samuel_Michon »

simonsarris wrote: post #99
drewcrawford wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-…

In the sentence you quoted I'm referring to SVG, not canvas, and the "in this case" refers to mapping apps, not games. I never made any claims with regards to games. In the test you quoted the goal is to stress it until it could only handle 30fps (it says so on the page), so you necessarily must see 30fps for the test to go on to the next one. That is why your median score on the Mac is 29fps, because it degrades smo…

“Your Mac ought to get 60fps for 1000 fish on a 1920 x 1075 canvas with no sweat.”

I just checked, and indeed, my new MacBook Air with external display ran it just fine at 60fps. My 3 year old Mac mini handled 45fps. My iPad 4 managed to crank out 25fps in a 981x644 window.

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