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Why I Develop For The Mac

evanmiller.org

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Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#111

Post by scott_s »

zenocon wrote: post #86
tvon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He's quite explicit in stating this his reasoning is for his specific problem.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#112

Post by klibertp »

shmerl wrote: post #94
jamespo wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac users typically don't like non-native UI apps

This is not specific to Mac users. Most prefer applications which integrate with their desktop environment well. It's a tradeoff. Using something like Qt will try to mimic the native UI close enough, even if not 100%. But saves you the time on learning each native toolkit. I'd say it usually pays off, and that small percent doesn't worth the effort (especially if the project is supposed to be cross platform).

Who downvoted this guy and what for, when he's only stating his opinion on what tools to learn if one wants to develop for desktop?

And I personally think he's (shmerl) right. Learning a couple almost completely redundant APIs, but each with it's own problems, gothas and plain stupid decisions is hardly a good thing.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#113

Post by bitwize »

shmerl wrote: post #74
mhenr18 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ObjC++ uses C++11 (plus you NEED ObjC/ObjC++ to make calls to Cocoa).

That's my point. Learning the language just to use some platform specific non portable technology like Cocoa? No thanks. Better to stick with what's reusable, like C++ and Qt.

Iron law of native desktop app development: Code to your platform's native GUI API -- no wrappers. Or your user base will notice and one-star that shit.

You have less of an excuse on the Mac, which has literally the best GUI API in Cocoa that anyone has ever invented.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#114

Post by drivebyacct2 »

rytis wrote: post #98
millstone wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This made me scratch my head. Desktop apps have been accommodating multiple screen and window sizes since before the Internet existed. Do you think we hard-code a separate layout for every window size? I don't know if responsive design is "hard" or not, but I observe that on the web, fixed widths are still incredibly common, and even major sites break easily. I visit Google, and if my window size is not at least one…

As someone who is not a "web designer", but occasionally have to knock up a page or two I agree with you all 100%. To me the whole CSS business is just a big hack, and not at all usable or intuitive. YMMV, but I think there's a reason why people come up with [1] type jokes... [1] http://bethesignal.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/css-is-awe...

Wait, someone who doesn't use a technology full time doesn't understand it and thinks it's a hack? News at 11.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#115

Post by drivebyacct2 »

millstone wrote: post #80
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but with that intro to your post and the way you follow it up, you strike me as exactly the person in question who has been out of the web dev game for a bit and doesn't know how much it's progressed in the last 3 years alone. It's not hard to do responsive design. Yes, in iOS world you can still hard code 5 layouts if you want. Those of us that have also done Android design work understand why that's unt…

This made me scratch my head. Desktop apps have been accommodating multiple screen and window sizes since before the Internet existed. Do you think we hard-code a separate layout for every window size? I don't know if responsive design is "hard" or not, but I observe that on the web, fixed widths are still incredibly common, and even major sites break easily. I visit Google, and if my window size is not at least one…

So the same coded version of Office works on your tablet and phone and the UI adapts properly? That's pretty impressive.

I wasn't implying desktop designers hard code everything -- but in fact many of them do or make assumptions that the app will NEVER be used on anything smaller than even the absurdly small 800x600. We're talking about mobile apps, responsiveness, the cost/benefit of targetting multiple devices with one app vs six native apps.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#116

Post by drivebyacct2 »

kenjackson wrote: post #72
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Native apps should always be faster except in the case where the native app isn't architected properly or web services are poorly implemented. Unfortunately, I've seen that both are often the case. For CRUD apps like Facebook, it's often easier to do them right as web apps, but a good native app developer with a good backend team should almost always be able to beat them.

In that case it's incredibly disappointing that Twitter or Facebook's mobile apps continue to be every bit as fast as their native apps. I KNOW that you are right, as I've said, I'm well aware and worried of the overhead of doing things like video decoding in the browser... but for literally a few http requests, infinite scrolling and TEXT... (which is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Path, etc, etc, etc)... Chrome for Android is simply going to be as fast as the native app.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#117

Post by astrange »

jokoon wrote: post #30

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.

Perhaps you could paste the error text somewhere?

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#118

Post by lettergram »

Until instantaneous data transfer discovered (where the speed of light isn't the limit), the closer one is to the processor the faster the application will be. The point being that with data manipulation unless you have a huge bandwidth, the packet size can match and the ability to assure rare outages (if ever) applications on ones personal computer, with personal data will always be faster. The point being is all the discussion regarding performance on desktops vs web applications is moot when we are at least a decade away from everyone having internet connections capable of instantaneously transferring hundreds of megabytes of data.

Personally, I can barely stand web applications, I want my computer to move as fast or faster than I think.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#119

Post by daeken »

ccgus wrote: post #92
stevejohnson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technical reasons aside, the canvas tag is still orders of magnitude slower than writing Core Graphics by hand. Personally I'd say almost unacceptably slow, but YMMV. You succeeded in picking out a minor technical inaccuracy, but not in addressing the point the author was making about rendering performance.

One of the reasons it's slow is because CG bitmap contexts are pre-multiplied, but the Canvas spec requires things to be not-premultiplied, so there's a bit of extra math that needs to happen w/ Canvas vs. straight CG/Quartz.

> the Canvas spec requires things to be not-premultiplied

It does, but unfortunately neither Webkit nor Gecko respect this. Take a PNG with an alpha channel and draw it to a canvas over a white div then read back the pixels; you get the pixels premultiplied by the white behind it. Same with other backing colors. There are cases where it won't premultiply, but unfortunately they're a minority.

(The reason I ran across this particular case is that I use PNGs to compress data, and using the alpha channel to store data is impossible because of the premultiplication.)

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#120

Post by kalms »

Encosia wrote: post #82
kalms wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

Of course.
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