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Why I Develop For The Mac

evanmiller.org

151–160 of 184 posts

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ isn't a pure win. It's far more complex, and leaky abstraction wise than Objective C is. MOST people write mac and iOS apps in Objective C, and it works well, is predictable. It's also far easier to find people who do Obj-C well than C++ (in the mac environment, but this holds for all systems I've ever seen as well).

The worst thing about C++ for UI work is that it offers essentially no introspection and is a nightmare for tools authors. It's good for writing high-performance application kernels but for everyday UI building it's just overly complex and awkward.

Qt for example uses hybrid approach. UI itself is not defined it C++, rather in declarative language (QML). C++ is used for application logic. That wasn't so in Qt from the start, but was brought there because of dynamic UI requirements, especially on mobile.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct but if your not on the app store, who will know about your app.

I seem to remember people were selling software for the Mac before the app store came along.

Im just saying your giving up a major marketing outlet if you arnt on the MAS. Of course you can go it alone, but since it is a MAC app, that would be foolish.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#153
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…

I'm surprised by this sentiment. I thought web apps had 'won' on the desktop? Is the pendulum starting to swing the other way?

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not even 10% of the article.

So? If that was enough to make a specific point, why should he use more words?

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#155
I find this article a very good example of how you can try your very best to describe in reasonable terms and tone why a certain decision was the right one for you, but that won't stop a bunch of people who know neither you nor your business to tell you why your opinion and you personally suck.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#156

> 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…

Yes, SVG is the perfect tool for this, and I bet there is no visualization library remotely as awesome as D3 for the desktop: https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery

You can use D3 on the desktop as far as I know. It's a JS library.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#157
post #48

Objective C? What for, when there is C++.

C++ isn't a pure win. It's far more complex, and leaky abstraction wise than Objective C is. MOST people write mac and iOS apps in Objective C, and it works well, is predictable. It's also far easier to find people who do Obj-C well than C++ (in the mac environment, but this holds for all systems I've ever seen as well).

It's difficult to say which is the leakier abstraction, but I feel that in C++ I have the option of writing only high level code.

In Obj-C it's not unusual to have to mix in C. And sometimes the code I write is quite fragile due to the type system and not having some features available.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ isn't a pure win. It's far more complex, and leaky abstraction wise than Objective C is. MOST people write mac and iOS apps in Objective C, and it works well, is predictable. It's also far easier to find people who do Obj-C well than C++ (in the mac environment, but this holds for all systems I've ever seen as well).

The worst thing about C++ for UI work is that it offers essentially no introspection and is a nightmare for tools authors. It's good for writing high-performance application kernels but for everyday UI building it's just overly complex and awkward.

Also agree that QML is light years ahead of anything else for UI work. Declarative is the way to go, but most are focusing in the wrong direction (e.g storyboards).

Any programming language will be awful for UIs, be it C++, Obj-C, Python or C#.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#159
post #144

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…

> 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 think the problem is the youth of today doesn't know anything other than web development, so they are full of false assumptions.

Yeah, I personally have a giggle whenever i see a complaint about catering to multiple resolutions. I seem to remember devs having similar issues with desktop games (and apps) in the whole VGA -> SVGA -> XGA migration. (1987 to 1990 ish... My dates may be off). Were none of the lessons learned then applicable to mobile dev today?

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#160

> 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…

"(Or SVG or hobbling together colored DOM elements to animate"

COBBLING together

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