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."
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Informative)
It's Infoworld. What do you expect? They are a Windows-centric publication.
AFP not AFS (Score:5, Informative)
AFS is something else altogether.
Now if only Apple would update their documentation (Score:5, Informative)
recently got into Cocoa programming and for the most part absolutely love it, Apple has obviously put a lot of effort into their system and it shows. However, Apple seemingly skimped on one of the most important, but usually easiest to implement parts of their system: good, up to date documentation!
For instance, in the QTKit documentation is just beyond abysmal. There is little documentation on how to do very common things, such as set your export settings. I had to do a lot of hackery just to figure that one out(and its still far from straightforward), they have typos that have been there for eons, even though I used their feedback form to tell them about it, and perhaps worst of all, they don't even mention many methods that are in the API.
On multiple occasions I have had to go into the header files just to find out what I could do with various classes. I shouldn't have to do this! Compare this experience with say, Javadocs and its night and day. While Javadocs are far from perfect, they are infinitely better than what Apple puts out.
Why would Apple do something like this? It costs them almost nothing to create a lot of these docs, and actually updating them once in a while could save developers tons of frustration. I guess maybe the paid ADC accounts are bit better? Thats really a low blow if they are though....
Furthermore, Apple tends to deprecate APIs without really replacing them with an API with the same functionality. Case in point is QTKit. Its a nice API for what its worth, but there are tons of occasions you either:
a) have to go down to the old Quicktime C APIs(which means your code won't be able to compile in 64 bit and may not work at all on Snow Leopard) or
b) Have to come up with some creative hacks to get the functionality you want.
For instance, in order to get an MPEG-4 formatted to anything but the default size you either have to use an atom container which is 32 bit only, or manually set up a Quicktime export with the settings you want, write some applescript to save that to a file, THEN read that file in as NSData THEN set that to be your export settings(which on Apple's website has the oh so helpful documentation:"Information to come."(That was over a year ago).
AFP != AFS (Score:2, Informative)
Andrew File System [wikipedia.org]? Surely not. Perhaps they meant Apple Filing Protocol (AppleShare over IP (and sometimes AppleTalk)) [wikipedia.org].
Re:It is a good middle ground. (Score:2, Informative)
Of course, with the virtualization aspect, you can do the same thing with a Linux box, cheaper. Throw up Ubuntu (which, like Mac OS X, just works (TM) -- most of the time, anyway), install VirtualBox, load that puppy up with enough RAM and you'll be able to run Windows, Linux and OS X all at the same time.
Perfectly Good Dev Platform (Score:4, Informative)
I've been using a Mac as a development platform for years. Never had an issue. Just because it's an Apple system doesn't mean one has to use AFS or write Cocoa apps.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:4, Informative)
I keep hoping that someone will come up with a better replacement, but CIFS/SMB will continue to work until that day comes.
It's called NFS v4 [nfsv4.org]. Kerberos for authentication, encrypted traffic, lower overhead, no passwords or password hashes sent -- ever.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
We use a standard NAS serving NFS and SMB/CIFS.
All the Macs in the office use NFS, the few windows machine use SMB/CIFS.
Never had any problem using NFS on any of the MacBook Pros or MacPros
Re:It is a good middle ground. (Score:1, Informative)
You can't legally run OS X by visualization, especially if it is on a non mac. Macs being more expensive then a PC is a myth, it only seems like that is because there are less configuration options. If you thunk Ubuntu just works you probably haven't used an other OS other then Linux or BSD for a while. I tried to replace OS X with Ubuntu for a couple of month. It never worked right. Things wouldn't detect (even after upgrading to 8.10) stuff failed to load after waking up from hibernation, WI-FI Dropping left and right. That is not Just works.
Re:Now if only Apple would update their documentat (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It is a good middle ground. (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, I usually don't post to correct people but... It's THAN not THEN! You use than in comparasions, for example "the cat is better than the dog" and you use then in situations like "I ran the dog over with my car, then i got the cat too."
Sorry but it just hurt me to read your post.
Nice platform, but... (Score:5, Informative)
I really like developing on my Apple machine for the most part, but it has a few issues that make it less appealing to me than Linux.
Currently, most of the development I'm doing is using Django and PostgreSQL. Installing PostgreSQL and the required Python libraries on OS X is tremendously painful. It was painful on Tiger and Leopard has made it more so. Macports tries to make it easier, but it could use a lot of work/testing/more work.
Installing the same tools on Linux is so easy, a Windows user could do it.
Re:Andrew File System??? (Score:5, Informative)
The author is a moron. He meant AFP, Apple File Protocol [wikipedia.org]. Macs do not support AFS out of the box.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Informative)
Kerberos for authentication, encrypted traffic, lower overhead, no passwords or password hashes sent -- ever.
Kerberos authentication, encrypted traffic, and "no passwords sent" apply also to NFSv2 and NFSv3; that's all done at the ONC RPC layer.
And all of those are supported by Leopard's NFSv2 and NFSv3 [connectathon.org] (krb5 = Kerberos 5 for authentication; krb5i = Kerberos 5 with a signature for integrity checking; krb5p = Kerberos 5 with encryption for privacy).
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:4, Informative)
When developing a game for the most popular online phone game store will net you $250,000 in two months, as an independent developer:
http://toucharcade.com/2008/09/19/trism-developer-makes-250000-in-2-months/ [toucharcade.com]
Re:MacOSX has awful Java support (Score:5, Informative)
Java 1.6 for OS X, has been available for months now. And JDK 1.7 will not be out in a few months either.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:1, Informative)
OS X running on Intel is 100% UNIX 03 certified, not Unix-ish. Regarding your sugar-gas analogy, the Mac can run on gas, sugar gas, or just sugar, whichever you prefer. That's why it's flexible. Get sick of OS X? Run Linux or Windows without a problem.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
Sweet! Now just point me to the quad core Mac for $400 and we can do an honest comparison. Oh, one doesn't exist?
That WAS the point.
Re:So, what would you pick? (Score:2, Informative)
... as long as case-insensitivity is fine.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Informative)
X11 compiles just fine.
http://www.xfree86.org/current/Darwin.html [xfree86.org]
http://developer.apple.com/opensource/tools/X11.html [apple.com]
http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R6.9.0/doc/html/Darwin.html [x.org]
My primary complaint is that most OSS developers expect all Unix systems to be Linux systems. Which means that I have to let Linux software get its hooks into my OS X system in order to get anything compiled. Since OS X is NOT Linux, this is quite an unpleasant process.
OS X runs Unix software. Period. I usually get a host of tools installed first thing on my Mac. Thankfully, this has become less and less necessary over time as Apple has started including many of the most useful utilities up front.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, NFS is not safe since it trusts clients. If users need to have root or sudo on their individual machines, they can go out and read any file on the server (well, technically partition, but who has one partition per user on their server?). NFS comes from a time of big iron servers where no end user EVER had root access. The world has changed.
CIFS/SMB may be slow, but at least it got the per-user authentication right. If you want an alternative, something like the Andrew File System (the other AFS), or OpenAFS would be better. OpenAFS exists for Macs.
Re:MacOSX has awful Java support (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So, what would you pick? (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm... you realize you can format HFS+ case sensitive, right?
Re:So, what would you pick? (Score:3, Informative)
You can format it to be case-sensitive, just don't try and install Adobe Creative Suite 3, or you will sadly get this message [adobe.com].
Re:innovative (Score:5, Informative)
Re:innovative (Score:2, Informative)
once again macs seem to be innovating, the dual gpu thing where you have a low power one for run of the mill 2d stuff and high power one for the apps that need it are a good example (i believe this is appearing in pc laptops as well).
Innovating? You heard about Lenovo Think Pad T500? It was released before Steve did his latest thing, it's uglier than Mac Book (heck, it's uglier than anything on the market) but it's built like a tank, it runs cold, and, surprise, it doesn't have that retarded screen resolution. C'mon, Steve, 1440x900 on 15" box with a price that starts on $2K? You must be kidding.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Now if only Apple would update their documentat (Score:1, Informative)
my livelihood consists of writing quicktime-based software for os x. qtkit's not even remotely near being a "finished" API, and the documentation isn't up to date largely because significant portions of QTKit are being re-written completely from scratch so it runs well on 10.6 (whereas right now most QTKit calls wind up using the old-school "Quicktime" framework).
beyond that, i've noticed that methods/etc. not covered in the documentation have been omitted because they're buggy or cause problems in some (frequently exceptional) circumstances. in other words, the act of looking up an obscure method in a header file sort of reminds you that what you're going to come up with may not work as you expect in every possible situation. on the other hand, stuff covered in the class browser or documentation is virtually guaranteed to work in pretty much any situation you can imagine.
i'm not saying that the documentation's even remotely perfect, but it's not the abysmal pit of fail you make it out to be- and many of my changes and corrections have been implemented very quickly.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
Ah yes, but did you ever try running those old Solaris versions on non-Sun hardware? I remember struggling to get Solaris 7 to run on a machine and my experience was that it was at best quirky, driver support was practically non-existing, the only other operating systems I can remember trying with worse support were MINIX and OS/2, even Plan9 is better than Solaris 7 in that respect...
/Mikael
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:4, Informative)
True, but this always works:
> su # to become root
> su otheruser # to become otheruser (no password required, since you are root)
> cd ~otheruser # access otheruser's files
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:2, Informative)
We live in a Windows-centric world.
Re:MacOSX has awful Java support (Score:4, Informative)
You're also stuck with 1.5 if you want to use SWT, the graphics toolkit behind Eclipse and some Java-based GUI applications. SWT uses native graphics libraries, and the current version uses Carbon. And since Carbon is 32-bit only, SWT has to be ported to use 64-bit Cocoa.
On the other hand, it's not like Apple has to provide the latest JVM/JDK and I'm not aware of any reason why someone else (even Sun) couldn't release one.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
Not at all true, at least not on a properly configured network. I work at Sun, where all the network file systems are NFS (with Samba used to support PCs). I also have root access to a system in my group. Let's see ... (tries to access the CEO's private files). Nope, doesn't work.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
Ever hear of the NFS options to squash root access? It'll map to the user 'nobody' if you do it right. Presto, instant client root limitations.
Granted, I'll give you that NFS isn't all that secure. Or, for that matter, refined. But it's simple and useful enough for a small and/or development network - and works better than SMB/CIFS when dealing with Unix to Unix and permissions.
Re:maybe in USA (Score:3, Informative)
there are no keyboard shortcuts for the little red / yellow / green window buttons
Red (close) - Cmd + W
Yellow (minimize) - Cmd + M
Green - yeah, no kb shortcut, but I personally never use the zoom button anyway.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:2, Informative)
I agree that Apple's vendor lock-in strategy is annoying, but if you're going to complain about it you should at least get your facts straight.
It is only since linux has become somewhat pervasive that it seems as though you should be able to pick up some "Unix" source code and compile it there, and compile it elsewhere with equal ease. Unix vendors have always played the vendor lock-in game; one of the causes of the original "Unix wars" (and the unfortunate outcome of Micro$oft squeezing through the middle) was that porting from one Unix variant to another _always_ took significant effort. Even today portability between Linux, *BSD, Solaris and say HP-UX is non-trivial (though not as bad as it once was).
EFI is only a very small part of what is different about a Mac vs a regular PC.
EFI is Intel's beast, developed a _long_ time before Apple changed away from PowerPC. It was originally developed in conjunction with HP for use as firmware for the Itanium platform, the only thing that's been holding back it's ability to completely replace that crufty pile of dog snot called the BIOS is Micro$ofts incompetence.
Indeed the ability of the OSX86 [wikipedia.org] project to get OS X to boot on a regular PC is composed of three parts:
the first is due to Apple's use of EFI but is easily circumvented, the second requires a bit of work but can hardly be described as vendor lock-in, it is the third that you are complaining about and it is done by encrypting system binaries with a key stored in the SMC [wikipedia.org], nothing to do with EFI (and nothing to do with TPM either!)
OS X running on Intel is 100% UNIX 03 certified, not Unix-ish.
Compatibility is still iffy. I dare you to try to compile X11 or mod_python from source. Doing either is a hard trek, if you can do it at all.
Regarding your sugar-gas analogy, the Mac can run on gas, sugar gas, or just sugar, whichever you prefer.
You misunderstand the point of the analogy: the car doesn't run on sugar; it runs on gas, and the sugar is an artificial limitation intentionally imposed by the manufacturer, just like Apple and their god-damned EFI chips.
That's why it's flexible. Get sick of OS X? Run Linux or Windows without a problem.
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?
I also feel I should point out, I am not a PC fan-boy. I use a dual-boot XP/Ubuntu PC at home and an iMac at work (which i'm using at the moment). My biggest problem with Apple is that they go out of their way to limit the capability of their products, to the detriment of the consumer (such as EFI). They've done the same intentional vendor lock-in for iPods and now for iPhones.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:2, Informative)
The most annoying non-unixy thing with OS X is the NetInfo garbage and the incredibly buggy implementations of some standard unix commands like chsh. I remember when after having upgraded to OS X 10.3.9, I found I still used tcsh or whatever and wanted to switch to bash, typed in chsh, edited the file so /bin/bash would be default shell, saved, and ... BANG, OS X decided /bin/ was now my standard shell. Naturally, I could no longer use Terminal.app with that user.
That's 10.3.9, with a bug that would have prevented any unix with even the most basic bug testing from releasing a new 'stable' version.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
Begin Rant
Buddy, you hit the nail on the head. I manage a network of 20+ macs with 2 mac servers. I'm typing this on a mac. I say this to hopefully demonstrate that I'm not a troll or a windows fanboy.
Try maximizing a window on a mac. Minimize a window, then alt-tab back to that app. You get the app, with no window! You then get the 'pleasure' of moving the mouse to the menu bar, selecting the window menu, and hopefully finding the window you wanted.
On some Apple made apps closing the main windows does not close the app, on others (still made by apple) it does. System Preferences I'm looking at you here.
I Spend more time in my day fighting the mac interface than I do getting productive work done. Yes this is an exaggeration, but that is how it feels.
OSX server (both tiger and leopard) fail in such spectacular manners that it would make your head spin. The admin tools crash all the time. Open Directory loves to trash it's LDAP database. God help you if you need to restart your server after an update to iTunes! Make sure all your OD data is backed up somewhere right before the reboot. Oh, and be ready to do a repair on all the filemaker data while you are at it.
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. Among those, it reduces the php mem amount back to the default 16 megs. The bundled (by apple) web apps on the server can't run in that little memory. For those that don't know, FileMaker is owned by apple.
End Rant
Seriously though, apple does make nice equipment. It just seems like they don't give a crap on certain issues.
Re:So, what would you pick? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't use a Mac anymore, but a colleague tried to use a case-sensitive filesystem and at least one application broke. I don't remember exactly which one it was, but it was part of Adobe's creative suite.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
Look, if you don't want to listen to the advisement of what may and may not be interesting to you, then why use slashdot at all? Slashdot hate aside, the whole point is to bring up stuff that matters to nerds. He's saying this stuff doesn't matter. Of course you can make the final decision, but I'm not sure why you trust the slashdot web site to bring up articles that you'd find interesting over people that read them.
In other news, the article is annoyingly devoid of any statistics. I've been reading for years why Mac is a great platform to develop in (and many of the points good), but they don't really pan out as an end result of taking a big piece of the market share.
So unless you show me statistics of a gaining market share, I'm going to shelve this right along with all of the other articles talking about the good points of Macs throughout the years. This article should be named "Why Developers SHOULD Switch to Macs," not the assumption that they're already doing it.
And maybe they are? I can buy that - just show it.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Informative)
As others have mentioned, it's AFP, not AFS, but the point remains the same. It's slow because it sacrifices speed for goodies like hi-res icons, and remembering icon positions.
NFS is slower yet on OS X, both as a server and a client,
The funny thing is, though, that Mac OS X Server can serve out the same sharepoint over AFP, SMB/CIFS, and NFS. All at the same time. There's no conversion necessary. Just click the checkbox for the protocols you want to turn on. (This includes FTP also.) So why they complain about AFP, when there are other options available with a click of a mouse, is a little puzzling.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately?
Have you?
Vista's paging system specifically is rather different than XP, with the new memory prioritization mechanisms, so that a big application, background app, or file operation doesn't shove crap to the page file as it did under XP and as other OS notoriously do.
Shockingly this is one area where Vista's team really did a good job with system architecture and memory handling and the usage of a pagefile when applications do need more RAM, use of a pagefile with background I/O priorities and other mechanisms like states and events that make a world of difference.
Besides...
If you don't like the pagefile in Vista, turn it off.
(NT is not OSX or Linux and does not require a pagefile to run.)
Side Note: If you have a lot of RAM, turning it on or off has virtually no difference in performance, as the Pagefile is only used to lazy write RAM contents of low priorty applications to improve resume from hibernation support, so the computer can just reference the already on HD contents of RAM when it resumes.
I also won't even go into the history of NT and Windows and what brought it some early sucess was its ability to operate well with low amounts of RAM. Windows 3.x DLLs and paging allowed it to easily run applications that were 10x the size of physical RAM, and is an area where other OS technologies of the late 80s, early 90s could not compete. (Winword's EXE (not couting DLLs) was almost 2mb alone and ran on 2mb 286 machines rather well.)
Running Windows 3.x x86 on 2mb of RAM was comfortable and what helped Windows adoption. NT of the time even as big os the portable code was, still ran well in 12-16mb, and as late as 1998, running NT 4.0 on a 486-66 with 32mb of RAM as a server worked really well.
There is a reason the 'weight' of *nix hurt the earlier *nix movements, and there is still a myth about Linux or other *nixes being significantly more lightweight than NT. Remember today's Vista kernel and basic operational 'layers' can be shoved into 25mb, and this is light enough to run on most watches, let alone routers and other appliances, where Windows Embedded does have a significant presence already.
So before you fire an arrow over the wall, you might want to make sure you have any understanding of what you are talking about.
And for people that care, go check out a Vista Memory whitepaper or even check out Channel9.com and look back to Vista architecture videos for a better explaination.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:5, Informative)
First, if you're really using a mac, you wouldn't say "alt-tab." It's Cmd-Tab.
Second, this has nothing to do with maximizing at all (you rarely ever need to maximize on a mac anyway... it's pretty multi-window friendly). If you minimize a window on OS X, it goes down to the Dock, period. If you want it back, just click on the window in the Dock.
If you didn't want to really minimize it, you could have hidden the application (Cmd-H), and then Cmd-Tabbing to that application or clicking on its icon in the Dock would bring everything back exactly as it was. Or you could put stuff in different spaces. Or you could use Expose to switch between windows.
Same with whether or not closing a window closes the application as well. It's pretty simple... if the application only ever uses 1 window and there's nothing to do when the window is closed, closing the window quits the application. Otherwise it stays open. If you don't like it, you can always Cmd-Q quit everything, which would be the same regardless. And seriously... what are you possibly "fighting" with here? It sounds like you're just compiling a list of old rants, rather than saying anything relevant.
And btw, who seriously installs the update for iTunes on their server? You could just ignore the update (or better yet, delete iTunes from your server... what's it even doing there?)
If you don't like FileMaker, complain to them, or use something else... they're not Apple (yes, I know it's a subsidiary, but it's independently operated).
You're simply used to a Windows paradigm, nothing more. Just because you're used to something one way doesn't make a different paradigm wrong.
Rule of Thumb: 9 times out of 10, if somebody spends their first sentence trying to convince you they're using a specific system they want to criticize, they're probably not using it.
Re:I hate Windows (Score:3, Informative)
....Can I change it to 11/17/08 format so that it's easier to read with having to resize the column? No, that feature is only available in windows....
Not true, all that can be changed in the system preferences dat/time panel which refers you to the International panel. The Apple UI is better thought out than Windows and so the incentive to customize is far less to begin with, but still possible for those who want to fiddle with the settings.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
Have you noticed the file system is not case sensitive?
You choose to not have a case sensitive file system and complain about it. I'll leave understanding what I mean as an exercise for the reader. Hint: disk utility.
I develop for windows, linux, freebsd, and os x on a coreduo mac mini using Parallels. I have done a *lot* of science using purely unix tools on a mac box. I build my own gnu replacements for the some of the bsd tools that come standard with mac, like sort, ls, and yacc. I've built almost everything you can think of and compiled .so libraries I wrote on a fedora 6 box as .dylib libraries right on my mac. If you don't think Mac is Unix, you don't know what Unix is or how to use it. I've done hard-core science computation on IRIX, Tru64, Linux, Sun OS, and OS X, going back to '93. I've built on all of these--if it can be built, I can probably build it. So trust me when I tell you that OS X is Unix and that you just have some learning to do. Also, although I don't love everything mac, I do love the Unix side of it.
Re:I Like My Mac (Score:3, Informative)
Just curious -- was your problem that the command line utils were "out of date", or just different?
OSX uses BSD's command line utils, and BSD's utils are different from GNU's. You'll find different command-line switches here & there, and the output of top will throw you for a loop.
Re:MacOSX has awful Java support (Score:3, Informative)
Bullshit.
There is no official Apple blessed 1.6 for Tiger. If you want a sanctioned version of 1.6, you have to upgrade to Leopard.
You CAN use Soy Latte, however good luck convincing your users to go through the same headache you did to get the JDK to work on Tiger in the first place.
Java support is definitely lacking when compared to other OS's support of the language.
And the sooner they drop XCode in favor of eclipse, the better.
~X~
Re:It is a good middle ground. (Score:4, Informative)
Well I didn't make them up, I experienced them first hand. I had completely different problems on a Lenovo Think Pad. I Never had a good clean Ubuntu experience. Yet I report such problems except for saying oh this is a problem it may be unique, they just mod me as troll and ignore the problem. That is why Linux is limited to 2% market share.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
I would never replace OS/X with Linux or Windows. I would run them using VMWare or one of the virtualization options.
Why the heck would Apple spend money putting a development system on any other OS than OS/X? The IPhone runs OS/X. Microsoft sure hasn't ported the WinCE development tools to Linux and Windows.
Yes OS/X isn't FOSS but Windows also isn't.
Your complaints are philosophical. Apple hardware isn't proprietary in nature. It is very open because it can run Linux, Windows, and Mac OS/X. If anything is closed it is OS/X but too bad. If you want to write code for OS/X or the IPhone you just have to live with it.
Re:So, what would you pick? (Score:3, Informative)
I develop software that has to run on case-sensitive filesystems.
Honestly, if you do, you are an idiot. Honestly. Having any application dependent on such an irrelevant part of the underlying operating system would mean that you should be fired as a developer. The fact that you didn't apparently know that you could format HFS to be case sensitive (I use Linux for development and even I knew that) should qualify you for dismissal due to ignorance.
Honestly, if any of the software developers I have ever worked with wrote code that required a case-sensitive file system I'd have him fired on the spot. Writing software that requires something like that is absurd in the extreme. Writing software that just assumes the file system is not case sensitive (like a lot of Windows developers I have met do) is a little dumb, but it pales compared to actually writing software that mandates case-sensitivity.
Re:It is a good middle ground. (Score:1, Informative)
Yea extended function keys? Like printscreen? Nope. Home and End functionality...? Horrible.
I don't see how ANY seasoned non-Apple programmer could work with the functionality of home and end going to the end and start of documents instead of the current line..
Unless, of course, they decided to actually learn the way their machine works, instead of insisting on doing the things they do the way they did 'em on $otherplatform.
Home and End have always gone to the start and end of a document on the Mac. Changing that would alienate users. If you want to go to the start / end of a line, you use Command+left/right, or ctrl+a/e.
The closest thing to prtscrn would be Command+Shift+3, or Command+Shift+4 if you want to select an area to capture -- or just a single window by hitting space after the Command+Shift+4 part. You don't even have to open up another program to paste the resulting screenshot into, but if you *want* to capture to the clipboard, you can do so by holding Ctrl as well. Yes, very inflexible indeed.
Not being able to adapt to differences between OSs must be soul-crushing indeed. I never had any problems with it myself.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe he's saying that browsing and file operations appear slow to the user because of all the extra metadata, hi-res icons and what-not being processed.
Remember that on the Mac filesystem, files have various forks - resource fork & what-not. If the Mac is working with a non-HFS filesystem, it saves all this extra data into other hidden files on the filesystem. Each file may have one (or two or more?) hidden files (non-HFS) or forks (HFS) associated with it.
Extra processing &/or transfer time for these files/forks might be what the GP is talking about.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
1) Case sensitivity is optional. Besides which, I'd be strugging to think of much UNIX stuff that requires case sensitivity.
I once unpacked an open source project (a cluster analysis program from NASA) on an HFS drive and spent ages trying to get it to compile. The reason? Two header files whose names differed only in case. Would have been nice if tar had complained about that rather than simply extracting one over the other.
Re:Strange Complaints (Score:3, Informative)
From the Apple Human Interface Guidelines:
"In most cases, applications that are not document-based should quit when the main window is closed. For Example, System Preferences quits if the user closes the window. If an application continues to perform some function when the main window is closed, however, it may be appropriate to leave it running when the main window is closed. For example, iTunes continues to play when the user closes the main window."
Also, Mac applications do allow access to background controls, but it depends on the application. Some of this is historical, as it is much easier to enable the "background click" behavior in Cocoa apps than Carbon ones. Also, again with the Human Interface Guidelines, Apple prescribes that destructive actions (e.g. Delete) should remain unavailable even if they may otherwise be enabled, for background windows.