If I needed them, I’m sure MarsEdit and VoodooPad are great products.

And, to counter my own argument, form and fit-and-finish are part of being functional. I just am a pragmatist at the end of the day.

Warren

Cheers,
Paul

(*) BBEdit for others plays the same role, no doubt…

As someone coming from the commercial Windows software world, I see a really “big fish in a small pond” attitude:

1. The mac shareware world has these packaged-up-with-ribbon-and-bow tiny little blips of functionality that nobody would give you anything for, anywhere else but on the mac, where it seems nearly useless bits of shareware with pretty icons in the dock stand for something, and people pull out their visa cards and buy stuff, because this is the Mac, and here we are, we pay for every little thing.

2. Having grown used to the massive commercial software marketplace serving the Windows majority, I still find it jarring how much less functionality, and less available software I can find for Mac, than I could find for Windows. Commercial software on Windows tends to be a sharp-edged thing. Most vertical market software I’ve experienced was a painful thing. Glitchy. Buggy. Crashy. But one did get the job done.
And there’s something to that.

So everybody, the down side of that perfectionism is that you have, on the Mac, almost none of the functionality of the vertical market software that is available for windows. You have 1 developer working on Mac software for every 100 working on Windows software. And you have a choice of 1000 screen-capture programs on Mac, whereas on Windows, you have software for every hobby, every profession, every workplace, every industry on the planet.

So, let’s pat ourselves on the back people.

Hello. Anyone. Home. In. There.

I’m a big mac fan. And I’m embarrassed at the things Mac developers take pride in. It’s not the shiny icons that make our macs useful. It’s the massive amount of productivity you get out of the core (Operating system and bundled apps, and the various popular commercial apps). The shareware scene adds a bit to it. But how many users power up their macs and run shareware apps, and only shareware, all day? How useful, really, in terms of minutes of use, per user, per day, are we aiming at?

Warren

I can guarantee that there are just as many lazy Mac developers as there are Windows and Linux developers.

Actually, I don’t think anyone can ‘guarantee’ anything of the sort in that class of statement on any topic.

If anyone is producing COMMERCIAL software products and are doing so as their only means of income, commercial reality comes in to it. If you want to get a product out your client is not going to accept that you are 18 months behind because it doesn’t have enough spit and polish, nor will they accept an application that is riddled with bugs. Again, this is not unique to what platform you are developing for, it’s just commercial reality.

No, but when prioritizing what gets fixed, what gets DONE, actually, the developer and the client are both going to look at the market for the software.

In other words, what’s “good enough” for Windows users in many cases isn’t even on the same continent as what’s “good enough” for Mac users. I’d argue that Mac users would live with fewer features that are done with extrarordinary spit and polish that have a feature-laden app that produces little joy in its use. And vice versa for Windows users.

So when you’re trying to get that product out the door and reality intrudes and hands you the knife, what basically happens is that Mac developers cut deep and Windows developers cut across. Not because Mac developers are better or Windows developers are somehow more savvy, but because that’s what will users will expect in the final product.

As for YOU, Jalkut, you !#$!#$!@#$ Landed f*cking Gentry of Mac Development. Always on your !@#$!@#$ highfalutin horse about something or other.

A Rix Pox on you! ;-)

It is actually questionable to define what Linux is. I think that the technical answer would be that Linux is essentially the Linux kernel and only the Linux kernel. It doesn’t have a graphical user interface and it doesn’t actually do that much. You are really not supposed to ever see it.

Therefor I don’t see Linux as one entity. It’s not really interesting that I run Linux. I could run a BSD kernel or a SunOS kernel. That doesn’t do any difference from the user’s point of view.

What I do find interesting is the desktop environment you’re using. Take GNOME as an example. It’s a portable desktop environment built especially with usability in mind, about making excellent software. It’s almost as close to the Mac as you can possibly get and I have found many similarities between Mac and GNOME developers.

I think that many people just like you may feel confused about the fact that Linux has no graphical user interface and that if you want to use one you can choose one yourself. That there is no consistency.

I do agree that it could sometimes be useful with a more streamlined Linux platform, but when you think about it we actually have the same thing on the Mac platform. You can take Darwin, or even just the XNU kernel from Mac OS X and run GNOME on it. Although this has not been as popular as with Linux it’s definitely possible and some people are doing that. Does it make the Mac developers act the same as the Linux developers you are talking about? Not really. Because we are not XNU developers, and the same thing goes with the GNOME developers. They are not Linux developers, they are GNOME developers.

I am a .NET developer, but also do development for the iPhone, in Objective-C, not MonoTouch ;-)

I do agree that there are many quality applications for the Mac platform, just as there is for *nix and windows. However I think that quality software has NOTHING to do with what platform the developer is writing for, it’s up to the individual developer and I can guarantee that there are just as many lazy Mac developers as there are Windows and Linux developers.

I enjoy developing for all platforms, and put the same effort and thought in to them, regardless.

As for the whole Windows developers only think about $$$ and produce sub-par software is just plain BS. If anyone is producing COMMERCIAL software products and are doing so as their only means of income, commercial reality comes in to it. If you want to get a product out your client is not going to accept that you are 18 months behind because it doesn’t have enough spit and polish, nor will they accept an application that is riddled with bugs. Again, this is not unique to what platform you are developing for, it’s just commercial reality.
It would be interesting to see the ratio of hobbyist vs. commercial developers on each platform, but I don’t think you could get an accurate and unbiased set of statistics.

Lastly, I do like the Apple community, most people are very helpful and will share their ideas and code, however I don’t think that is unique to the Apple community, and if you look at the oloh stats (https://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?measure=commits&percent=&l0=-1&l1=csharp&l2=java&l3=objective_c&l4=perl&l5=php&l6=python&l7=ruby&l8=-1&commit=Update) you’ll see that open source Objective-C projects are well behind other platforms.

All in all, as I’ve stated, I like developing on all platforms, and to be honest I am still getting used to the intricacies of XCode and find myself much less efficient as I am in VS2008 + Resharper, but then again, I use VS 80% of the time when developing, so can’t pass judgement, as I know it takes new devs to Visual Studio a bit of time and coaching to leverage the full power of the IDE.

Just my two cents :-)

Al

Sorry, back to the subject at hand… thanks for the thoughtful essay Daniel. As someone attempting to live in both the Windows and Mac development worlds, your comparisons line up quite well with my own experience. I would love to see a developer community driven recognition of others’ work. So many Mac applications are (or at least appear to be) true labors of love, it would only be fitting.

Sometimes I’ll have a slow sales period, and get a bit discouraged. But, at some point, I’ll get an e-mail from a customer with a question, a comment, a suggestion, or something like that. When I’m able to make things better for the customer and they let me know–or, more rarely, they let me know right off the bat that they’re happy and they really like my software–that’s a strong shot in the arm. It tells me that the work I do is valuable for others, and staying with it is the best thing to do.