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Why I Develop For The Mac

evanmiller.org

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Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#141

Post by shmerl »

leephillips wrote: post #131
bitwize wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is Linux's native GUI API?

Linux doesn't dictate a native API for GUI. It de facto dictates the display server protocol though (currently being X11 and Wayland as the next generation). So any API would be built with that in mind. That said, most widely used APIs are Qt and GTK+.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#142

Post by tonyedgecombe »

visualR wrote: post #126
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#143

Post by pjmlp »

klibertp wrote: post #109
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.

Why?

I work for a consulting company which does all kind of projects, and I jump from joy every time I get to chose a native project instead of a web one.

It all depends on the market you are aiming for.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#144

Post by pjmlp »

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…

> 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.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#145

Post by tonyedgecombe »

jamespo wrote: post #93
shmerl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Years ago I would have agreed with you, now I'm not so sure.

Most users know so little about the UI of their computers that they don't know when to click the mouse once or twice.

They spend their day working on Windows, checkout Facebook on their iPhone on the way home, play a game on a Playstation then send some email using Gmail on Safari.

Then you have the major changes within operating systems over recent years, Windows Vista/7 and Windows 8 both introduced major UI changes as has OS/X.

Peoples interaction with computers has become much more diverse. Unless the UI is jarringly different they just aren't going to notice.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#146

Post by pjmlp »

visualR wrote: post #126
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Given the amount of applications on the app store, it is as hard to find anything as anywhere else.

Plus, people are selling desktop applications since the dawn of home computing, nothing new there.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#147

Post by pjmlp »

reion wrote: post #33

My favourite "OpenGL is simply not a good option for 2D text-heavy graphics."

Actually it is quite true, contrary to many other 3D graphics APIs, OpenGL lacks support for text rendering.

It is up to you to somehow transform text into 3D graphics operations.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#148

Post by pjmlp »

gte910h wrote: post #134
shmerl wrote: 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).

My main issue with Objective-C is that we are in 2013 and the language still lacks namespaces.

Prefixing names is just something no developer should be forced to do.

I hope with the work being done in clang for C++ modules, Objective-C gets some form of namespaces as well.

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#149

Post by ygra »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #114
rytis wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone who feels fairly proficient in CSS and also has experience with desktop application layout stuff (Swing, Qt, XAML mostly) I can say that CSS does feel like a hack. It was conceived as a (more or less) simple stylesheet language for (mostly) textual documents. By now it's used not only to style increasingly-complex document layouts but also application UIs and in that respect it definitely falls short of what other (widget-based) things could achieve for years.

It gets better with some of the CSS3 layouts which more closely mirror what's ben available in the desktop world for ages, but using those is just a recipe for »Your site looks like crap on my browser« mails because they're not standardised yet or not yet widely-implemented (or your target audience uses something else than the bleeding-edge version).

Re: Why I Develop For The Mac

#150

Post by cageface »

gte910h wrote: post #134
shmerl wrote: 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).

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.
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