Why Developers Are Switching To Macs 771
snydeq writes "Programmers are finding themselves increasingly drawn to the Mac as a development platform, in large part due to Apple's decision to move to Intel chips and to embrace virtualization of other OSes, which has turned Mac OS X into a flexible tool for development, InfoWorld reports. The explosion of interest in smartphone development is helping the trend, with iPhone development lock-in to the Mac environment the chief motivating factor for Apple as a platform of choice for mobile development. Yet for many, the Mac remains sluggish and poorly tuned for development, with developers citing its virtual memory system's poor performance in paging data in and out of memory and likening use of the default-network file system, AFS, to engaging oneself with 'some kind of passive-aggressive torture.' What remains unclear is whether Apple will lend an ear to this new wave of Mac-based development or continue to develop products that lock out uses programmers expect."
Strange Complaints (Score:5, Insightful)
As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately? Swapping is a *bleeping* killer! Especially when you have more than enough memory not to swap. :-/
So don't use it. Macs support CIFS/SMB pretty darn well these days. I keep hoping that someone will come up with a better replacement, but CIFS/SMB will continue to work until that day comes.
It is a good middle ground. (Score:5, Insightful)
OS X is really a good middle ground between Windows and Linux. OS X supports many of the Windows Protocols (a lot better then linux in some ways) as well there is a better selection of high quality closed source applications, then linux has. However being Unix based it it is more stable then Windows and less prone to viruses and other malware. Then combined with virtualization you can run Linux OS X and Windows all at the same time for cross testing your code.
It has a clean interface and performs well. You are not fussing with simple stuff. all in all it is good for development. (And the Apple keyboards have extended function keys that makes compatibility with old Vax systems much nicer too)
Macs are UNIX 03 (Score:4, Insightful)
You would think that the fact that OS X is UNIX 03 certified [opengroup.org] might be of some interest to developers as well.
Sure, maybe not as much as the reasons stated above, but... it is worth mentioning. And just the fact that it is any flavor of Unix-like OS is attractive to many.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:1, Insightful)
That's because you're using vista, you need to downgrade.
Re:innovative (Score:5, Insightful)
once again macs seem to be innovating, the dual gpu thing
You mean the severely limited, non SLI-hydra-whatever GPU thing that requires a restart/logon-off cycle just to switch?
That thing was actually released on a few toshiba laptops (and sony laptops?) long before el-jobso did his magic.
Of course, the (software) inflexibility of that configuration is actually a feature, according to apple. So, I digress.
Mac Trolling as /. Submission ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Almost as bad as the Ron Paul trolls on Digg.
Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Missing the point? (Score:2, Insightful)
its the community that matters (Score:3, Insightful)
I have spent the last 8 years writing visual basic applications in Windows
At Christmas last year I got myself a Nokia internet tablet - it runs Maemo Linux.
Surprisingly now, 11 months later I am comfortable back in C, have a nice little library and *know* I have found a better path.
Its been a kind of torture as well, everything was new and sometimes finding information is a brutal experience.
If it hadn't been for the great community around maemo.org I wouldn't have gotten as far as I have.
It was this community element which was missing with other devices and systems when I was looking around.
Apple needs a mini tower not a over priced mini la (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple needs a mini tower not a over priced mini laptop with out a screen in a small box.
The mac pro is nice but $2300 and only a $30-$50 video card?
AIO also are not that good.
Where is the mini tower that can do dual display?
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Insightful)
I was going to weigh in on this, but maybe I'm the anti-first-post guy, there were no comments when I came back from the article and I was trying to compose my thoughts.
I don't think there's anywhere to go with this other than a biased writer grudgingly writing a story about a platform he hates because he needs to pay the bills this month.
The article makes me want to go through it with the "wikipedia editing brush" like a schoolmaster grading the entries that appear on the site:
"Yet for many [who?], the Mac remains sluggish and poorly tuned for development [citation?].."
Move along, nothing to see here folks.
Re:Apple needs a mini tower not a over priced mini (Score:2, Insightful)
Sigh, not this one again. Apple will likely not ever make an inexpensive mini tower because the profit margins are too small. Their strategy is to aim at the high end of the market and let Dell and HP fight it out over the market for cheap computers.
Re:It is a good middle ground. (Score:2, Insightful)
People always report these sorts of problems, but I have yet to experience any of them. And, yes, I've used Windows XP, Vista and Mac OS X recently. As always, I guess, YMMV.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:4, Insightful)
Only because you've never used it at scale (or probably not OSX as a NFS server either). Their NFS performance isn't that hot and I would strongly advise against using OSX as a mission critical NFS server. I'll just leave my comments at that.
Re:The poor performance may get you down (Score:4, Insightful)
As a PC fanboy for 20+ years, I have to say...when the games I play work natively on Mac, I'm switching.
Yes, I know I can buy a Mac now, buy Windows, and dual boot. But I don't want to do that, and I don't want to spend $100 on Windows when I just dropped $400 more than I'd pay for a Windows system to begin with.
I've priced it: comparable hardware with OS, the Macbook that meets my specifications is $400 more than the Dell equivalent. I can't justify spending $500 to do exactly what I do now. If I'm going to switch, it's a complete switch or not at all.
Compared to CIFS, AFS is fast, secure and scalable (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it is a pain to set up, but once there, you can scale from a workgroup to global filesystem. That is, you'll need a dozen AFS admins compared to 100 CIFS admins in a large organisation. Not only that, with a global filesystem the amount of duplicated data drastically falls, and with that goes storage costs.
maybe in USA (Score:3, Insightful)
So, no. I work in a mid-size software factory and I can assure you developers aren't going anywhere.
Re:It is a good middle ground. (Score:3, Insightful)
OS X supports many of the Windows Protocols (a lot better then linux in some ways)
Which protocols are you referring to, and how is their support better in OS X than Linux?
I ask, because in my experience when OS X needs some cross platform functionality, they just port the Linux solution.
Re:The poor performance may get you down (Score:3, Insightful)
I went desktop, but the principal is the same. I dualboot into XP to play my Windows games, and for anything serious, I use the Mac side. I have no regrets. I just fine everything more intuitive and stable under OS/X and I can use the native software, or run *nix programs or run an emulator for anything I have to run in Windows under OS/X. I don't think the extra cost was a waste at all, as my 20" Imac at home is a very slick system, and extremely well thought out overall.
From 1988 until just last year I ran PCs only and I have no regrets over no longer having to fuck around with system configurations or fight the OS to get it to do what it says its doing, etc. I am glad to be out of the business of constantly incrementally upgrading my system every time MS issued a new version of their OS etc. I am sure I spent far more on all those little transaction than I would have if I had just bout a Mac originally. Now, its true that when I go to upgrade I will need to buy a whole new machine, but the old one will have retained considerably more value than a comparable PC would so the difference should be less than you would think.
At work my company bought me a brand new 24" Imac and its a glorious system to do development on.
I am not a fanboi, just a thorough convert. If games are all thats keeping you from buying a Mac, go buy a Mac and a cheap copy of XP. I think you will be quite happy with the results. After using OS/X for the past year, I now think of Windows as a "Toy" Operating system suitable for games only. Anything else requires a professional and well design OS (Yes, I could be running Linux, and have done so in the past, but OS/X offers me everything I need and is a *nix in any case).
Re:Apple needs a mini tower not a over priced mini (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nice platform, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite the fact you can get almost anything to run on OS X eventually, for most software it's much much harder to get up to date software versions then "apt-get install fizzbuzz" on Ubuntu or debian testing.
For my needs, Ubuntu is much closer to the "just works" ideal then OS X.
Re:Apple needs a mini tower not a over priced mini (Score:2, Insightful)
Why Does every OS article end up basing Windows (Score:1, Insightful)
As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately? Swapping is a *bleeping* killer! Especially when you have more than enough memory not to swap. :-/
So don't use it. Macs support CIFS/SMB pretty darn well these days. I keep hoping that someone will come up with a better replacement, but CIFS/SMB will continue to work until that day comes.
As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately? Swapping is a *bleeping* killer! Especially when you have more than enough memory not to swap. :-/
So don't use it. Macs support CIFS/SMB pretty darn well these days. I keep hoping that someone will come up with a better replacement, but CIFS/SMB will continue to work until that day comes.
It always amazes me to see an OS article turn into a M$ Bashing ground. I am using Windows for over 8 years now and _it_works_. i have tried my hand at UBUNTU and for starters it cant configure my sound card out of the box and sorry i am not interested in searching a driver because if canonical dident care to write one for Toshiba laptops i dont care to search for one and install it. Mac's they dotn have Back space oops... documentation well, check MSDN, every thing else seems rooted in the 80's
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Insightful)
That depends on how you define Unix. Linux is Unix-ish. I consider any OS that is certified to be UNIX 03 [wikipedia.org] to be Unix. And why compile? Maybe I'm lazy, but I don't feel like doing any unnecessary steps. Just install it from the OS CD; It is not installed by default. Compiling it to me is like compiling a kernel. Sure, I could try to do that, but in the end, I did a lot of work that I may need to do. As for POSIX compliant software, there will be some that don't run on OS X just like there are some that don't run on Solaris, IRIX, etc. Now if you could provide an example, someone could probably help you fix it.
Wait a minute, proprietary OS on specifically designed platform? Haven't you just described Unix? Only recently has Sun opened Solaris to non-Sun hardware. IBM has never released AIX for anything but their own servers. So is OS X Unix or not because you have just contradicted yourself.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:0, Insightful)
Dammit, will you people *please* stop wasting so much of my life by claiming there's nothing to see and ordering me to move along? I swear, every time one of you cretins does that, I'm honor-bound to read the whole fscking article to see what exactly it is you all don't want disseminated. I will fscking *NOT* move along, and I'll fscking decide for my fscking self whether there's anything to see.
If you're a dev, it's open as you want to make it. (Score:3, Insightful)
With a Mac base you've got better cross-platform options than anything... you've got UNIX at the base, and a decent and consistent GUI, and two virtual machine vendors tripping over each other trying to give you the best Windows experience, and for Linux development... well, it's UNIX. UNIX is UNIX is UNIX. Portable apps run on OS X with "./configure; make install" and if you need something that's written to "all the world's Red Hat" standards... well, Linux runs REALLY well inside virtual machines.
Dev tools, libraries, and compilers? You have the same GNU toolchain you have on Linux.
Yes, Apple bears watching, but for something that right now Just Works, get a Mac. And if you write portable code, if Apple decides to rip its belly out on DRM and wander around bleating and tripping over its own entrails? You can still jump ship to Linux, BSD, or even (if you're a masochist) Vista and Cygwin.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's see...incorrect information about Mac OS X and POSIX compliance? Check.
Horrible car analogy(complete with Halliburton as an oil company? WTF)? Check.
+1 Interesting? Hell yeah!
Way to go mods. Pass me the crack pipe and I'll make you look like amateurs.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Unix-ish. Try compiling X11 (or any of hundreds of other POSIX compliant software packages) from source on a Mac. I'll wait.
Installing X11 from source on any *nix is painful.
Re:The poor performance may get you down (Score:4, Insightful)
On the downside, running PC games on the 360 isn't all that pleasant. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion *feels* like a port of a PC game: here's where you'd use a mouse. And here. And here. And here is where a keyboard would be really handy. And here.
I'm all for gaming on the 360 - and maybe it's just adventure games that suffer (or maybe suffer most). But there is still a place for a crap PC box for game playing.
Re:wow what a load (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple decides who will make their crap batteries, like every other corporation they choose the lowest bid and then sell for the highest amount they feel they can sell them for.
In the end it's Apple's responsibility to make sure their batteries are functional, don't try to pan off Apple as some victim, the only victims here are the people that bought Apple products.
The question is still "why would anyone pay 3 times the amount when they can get it for cheaper and frankly better".
I can't tell you how many times I have heard stories like " I bought a 5000 dollar mac pro so I could start a music studio and now it isn't working" and I tell them "you could've bought 4 PC's that do the exact same thing for that price and if you had you would still be working right now thanks to redundancy".
Simple... They aren't (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why Apple is retarded. They miss out on developers by restricting the platform/IDE and not supporting Java or Mono. Then they place absurd restrictions on iPhone applications. Anyone who is thinking of getting a mac just so they can develop on the iPhone should ask themselves this question.
WHY SHOULD I SWITCH PLATFORMS IF APPLE CAN LOCK DOWN MY iPHONE APP WITHOUT REASON!!!
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Insightful)
I bought a MacBookPro two years ago because "it's UNIX, you'll love it". It's not UNIX and I don't love it.
Have you noticed the file system is not case sensitive? Or perhaps you noticed all the extra files that reside on Mac systems when you tar a directory? Not really UNIX, but where are dump and restore?
And there *are* problems getting X-11 to play nice w/cocoa. For example, look at the issues between MagicDrawUML and Eclipse. Works great on X boxes, won't work at all under cocoa. This isn't the only example, just the one irrtating me today.
Granted, at least it isn't windows and the hardware is nice enough. But it isn't UNIX.
No one I know uses a Mac for dev work (Score:3, Insightful)
Not one developer I interact with on a daily basis uses a Mac or has expressed an interest in using one for his or her "real work". If they own one, it's for lesiure purposes; casual browsing and iTunes. For development of apps that we use at work, it's Win32 or Linux. While the vast majority of development is in Win32, most long for linux adoption for dev work, not MacOS.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't live in a Windows-centric world. I elect to opt out of that boneheaded mess.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Insightful)
"Yet for many [who?], the Mac remains sluggish and poorly tuned for development [citation?].."
who? Me, for one.
citation? I agree with that assessment. Mac's are sluggish. There are plenty of theories as to why, from the threading model it uses, to the woeful inadequacies of 'Finder'. Frankly, my gut is that its just the desktop environment and finder itself that suck. Because when you look at benchmarks of optimized applications and servers or big tasks like video encoding etc, OSX tends to hold up just fine... but yet I find every mac I've ever used has always been 'sluggish' to actually use. Its the little things like opening a program, resizing a window, navigating the file system, always feel a bit sluggish... or I'll see the dreaded pinwheel come up and prevent me from doing anything at all time and again for seconds on end.
There are non-'performance' related mac-ism idiocies too... like having a global menu bar instead of a per 'application menu'. (seriously, with large dual monitors, its pretty retarded when you have a 2x2" window down in the bottom right of the 2nd monitor, and you have to go to the TOP of the OTHER monitor, to access its disembodied file menu. It was fine on a sinle 15" or 17" screen... but its just demented on dual 24" displays. Basic HCI defect at this point, imo.
There are a lot of things OSX does REALLY well. But at the same time the rigidity of the platform REALLY can get under the skin of a Linux or even Windows guy who wants to be able to do things a certain (non-Apple) way.
Re:MacOSX has awful Java support (Score:1, Insightful)
Maybe because Apple DON'T LET Sun doing it?
Or any open source alternative doing it? (Not using Cocoa)
Or maybe because if you want Java 1.6 you have to BUY the new OSX - ?
I stopped to try using Apple only for that.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would I pay a premium for intentionallylimited hardware only to end up running an OS I could use on any other machine in the world?
simple really you wish to develop applications for Windows, Linux and OSX and android and iphone and windows mobile.
Buy a Mac and you cover most bases.
While OSX isn't the biggest platform, it's easier to build a customer base with less competition. (you become a big fish in a small pond)
Being fully cross platform your application will be able to be a company wide standard.
Even if your just designing web sites you can pretty much test all browsers.
If you can develop and release in parallel all your customers will be happy.
Apple hardware has a good reputation so other than the initial cost being a little higher it isn't a bad choice really.
(I don't own an apple either but I can see why I might)
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:2, Insightful)
Strange. I have a 15" 2.5ghz Core2 Duo MacBook Pro with 2GB's of memory. I also use a Dell laptop at work which has a 2.16ghz Core2 Duo with 2GB's of memory. From my experience, my MacBook Pro feels like its 100 times faster than my Dell at work. I run the same software on each platform too. Apache, Tomcat, PostgreSQL, Eclipse, Flex Builder, ColdFusion, Django, and Grails. There is just no comparison. The Mac just works while the Dell running XP barely works.
Re:No one I know uses a Mac for dev work (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Apple needs a mini tower not a over priced mini (Score:3, Insightful)
Im a developer, working with numerous developers (Score:4, Insightful)
this article is absurd out of the scales. just check how belong sentences compare to each other :
"scientists now agree that evolution does not exist", as voiced by various creationist propaganda sources
and
"Programmers are finding themselves increasingly drawn to the Mac as a development platform", as voiced by the shitty article we are being made read. in its summary at least
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:4, Insightful)
"You get the app, with no window"
Right, because an app != a window. What if you alt-tabbed to Safari so you could open a NEW window? It would be damned annoying to have some other window pop up.
"On some Apple made apps closing the main windows does not close the app, on others (still made by apple) it does."
Right, and there is a good reason for which one is which. Your point is?
"I Spend more time in my day fighting the mac interface than I do getting productive work done."
What a lot of nonsense.
"If you install FileMaker server on OSX Server it will overwrite your php.ini file with it's own idea of the settings you need."
And that's Apple's fault I suppose?
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows only sometimes closing an app? If it's a document-based application, of course it leaves the app running! That's how it is supposed to work. Preferences is not, so it's OK to quit. It only ever has one instance of its window.
Maximise adjusts the window to allow the contents to fit. I hate that too.
Minimise puts it in the dock. If you're on a Mac, you use cmd-h to hide all of an app's windows, rather than individually minimising each.
Every OS has a different interface. Learn it :)
Filemaker sounds like seriously bad engineering. Makes me want to slap it. I'm glad I don't need it. Have you tried reporting it as a bug?
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Unix-ish. Try compiling X11 (or any of hundreds of other POSIX compliant software packages) from source on a Mac. I'll wait.
Seriously?
Have you tried compiling X11 (let's call it Xorg) on Linux, BSD, or any other architectures of late? HEADACHE.
There's a reason why essential and commonly used software often comes as a binary package for Linux, *BSD, and yes, OS X. Especially if it's a PITA to build.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:4, Insightful)
Documentation slows down development (Score:3, Insightful)
Cost nothing? Documentation is _hard_, and coder are usually chosen because they like to solve problems by coding, not documenting, so you have to hire some special people and they have to spend lots of time on this. Documentation is expensive and slows down development a lot.
Unfortunately documentation is also necessary if you want anybody to use your software. I have depressingly often found it necessary to abandoned the idea of using some API simply because I found myself spending way to much time trying to accomplish even simple tasks due to the complete inadequacy of the documentation. If figuring out how to do simple stuff requires a disproportionately large effort it often isn't worth the risk of continuing to use that API because the effort you have to put into figuring things out once you move into the API's more complex features will slow your project down unacceptably. When you are being pressed for results by your PHB and have to meet a deadline it is often preferable to use a less elegant API/Framework that may have been your second choice simply because is better documented. I don't really care if that documentation is in the form of good well written traditional API/Developer/Administrator/User guides or, alternatively, in the form of a large number of forum-posts, articles or blogs by frustrated users who painfully found out how to do things not mentioned in the scanty documentation by reverse-engineering, debugging and even painfully weeding through the source code. I do very much prefer the former but browsing through endless pages of google hits also gets me there in the end.
Re:Simple... They aren't (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right. Apple are obviously stupid. Just look at how unsuccessful the iPhone app store has been.
You can rant about the openness of the iPhone all you want, and I'd actually agree with you on many points. But to say Apple is stupid for doing it is pretty silly, since they seem to be doing incredibly well with it.
Re:maybe in USA (Score:3, Insightful)
Like American cars or cellphones? ;)
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't reproduce this. Which app?
Because I couldn't do it you must be lying. Glad you're not my tech support guy. Seriously, if I came back at my boss (or client) and said this, I'd be out on my arse, so top marks in customer service.
"Which app?" means "which application?" What I mean to say is which program does this? I'm curious to know. Macs have a lot of quirks. I don't use Spaces because it sucks hard with quirks, so I'm not going to argue with you about the possibility of quirks. In fact, if I could reproduce what you are saying, I'd have fun demonstrating the behavior to my friend who thinks that macs are "just toys". Never mind that my mac mini (aka "The Doorstop") can run circles around his AMD fedora box.
But now that you have copped a defensive attitude, I'm wondering if you aren't just making this stuff up. I actually believed you for a while there. Then I realized that you don't alt-tab through apps in OS X, you command-tab through them--bullshit flag #1. Also, the behavior you mention is reminiscent of something I've observed in windows, where you can minimize a window and not get it back easily. The application just sits in the task bar but has no windows--you can't even "maximize" them into existence. Bullshit flag #2. Also a google for Traffic Office manager os x yields no identifiable results. Bigtime bullshit flag #3. Yup, only *now* that I've had time to contemplate it, I know you are bullshitting. Good try.
The question is whether you think your trollish bullshit is actually amusing, because if there were a plonk file for slashdot, I'd put you right in it.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Insightful)
"On some Apple made apps closing the main windows does not close the app, on others (still made by apple) it does."
Right, and there is a good reason for which one is which. Your point is?
Could you please explain to me the good reasons? Mail, iTunes and iCal don't quit when you close their main window even though these are basically single-window applications. iPhoto, Disk Utility and Calculator do.
Seriously, I'd like to know. I've been using Apple computers since before there was the Macintosh and the logic of it remains utterly opaque to me.
Maybe you can then explain to me why when you click on the controls of an application in the background, three different things can happen: with iTunes the controls work but the application stays in the background; with Quicktime Player the controls work and the application pops to the front and with iCal the application pops to the front but doesn't register the action.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Insightful)
Not necessarily. NFS4 supports kerberos encryption (just like CIFS in AD mode). If root su:s to another user he doesn't have the other users kerberos keys, hence no go.
Of course, if you have root, and the other user is logged in, you can compromise his key store and impersonate him. But that's no different from CIFS.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Insightful)
Mail, iTunes and iCal don't quit when you close their main window even though these are basically single-window applications. iPhoto, Disk Utility and Calculator do.
I think the logic here is that iTunes can play music even with the window closed, and Mail and iCal show useful information in their status icons. On the other hand, iPhoto, Disk Utility, and Calculator are basically pointless without their windows.