Comments on: Developing on the Mac - A Windows Developer’s Perspective

By: Peter Centgraf

Peter Centgraf — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 22:22:51 +0000

I think you would be surprised at the OS upgrade rate of Mac users. I think you would be even more surprised at how little it matters when you leave non-upgraders in the dust. Follow this simple logic, borrowed from Omni Group and Delicious Monster founder Wil Shipley (http://www.wilshipley.com/blog/):

1. You make a product to sell and make money.
2. Iff a person is willing to pay money for quality X (e.g. games), they will also be willing to pay money for quality OS upgrades.
3. Apple makes quality OS upgrades.
4. People who are willing to pay for your game will also be willing to pay for Apple’s OS upgrades.
QED

Wil himself usually states the corollary: People who are too cheap to pay for OS upgrades are also too cheap to pay for your X (e.g. game).

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 06:58:44 +0000

Umm…you can freely intermix C, C++, and Objective-C code in the same file now and call among the three. So you certainly can bind your C++ libraries to your Objective-C UI layer.

By: Tim Hawkins

Tim Hawkins — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:53:08 +0000

I am also a switcher, having wriiten windows apps in C/C++ since win3.0, and I would not touch cocoa with a barge pole. I have two options with cocoa, objective-c that I cant bind any of the C++ libs I use and can obatin everywhere, or Java, where I have to sacrifice performance.

By: Phil Steinmeyer

Phil Steinmeyer — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:59:42 +0000

Re: Carbon/Cocoa - the problem is that many programmers like myself, don’t particularly want to switch paradigms to Objective C/Cocoa, primarily because it pretty much eliminates cross-platform ability, sticking you on the platform with 3% market share. Nice for tools maybe, but I don’t want to learn a whole new language/API just for tools.

By: Jason Maskell

Jason Maskell — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 20:29:14 +0000

I gotta tell ya Phil, you’re not giving XCode a fair shake. I’m in the same boat as you, been programming in Windows since 3.1 (not even WfW!) and before that, the AmigaOS.

I grabbed an iBook a year or two ago now, and ditched my PC laptop, as I was travelling. The switch to XCode from VC++ 6.0 was a bit jarring, I’ll admit. But aside from debugging (which is the Gnu debugger, btw.) it’s easily up to par with VS.Net (which I am now using on my new windows projects.)

As for ObjectiveC/Cocoa - Carbon is unsupported legacy CRAP. Don’t use it. Don’t expect them to give you example code to use it. Carbon was the cruft left over from OS9. Cocoa/ObjC is the stuff that NextStep (which is what OS X is) used, and it’s incredibly elegant. I only WISH I could use this language and foundation on something other than my tools (which are all developed in XCode using ObjectiveC and Cocoa.)

Now, VS.Net is great these days. Especially with some 3rd party stuff like Visual Assist, but XCode is damn good too. I’m not sure where you had the name changing problem, there’s really not enough info there to understand what your gripe is, but most of the rest is just pretty unfair newbie user stuff.

Window positioning and remember? Built into Coca. The only thing you have to do is name the window in Interface builder and it remembers the name and location automagically, as well as sizing.

Hot keys - XCode uses unix standard hot keys like ctrl-a, ctrl-k, etc.. I admit it’s jarring going back and forth from VS.Net to XCode, as there’s no attempt on apples part to make it easy for you.

It’s not perfect, admittedly, but it’s damn good.