[depolitic]

I am gathering data in regards the status of developers on OSX. The data will be used to develop strategies for promoting OSX as a development platform, to assorted commercial entities involved in developing software. Thus encouraging these commercial entities to become switchers, and employing OSX as their dominant development platform.

The aim of promoting OSX to developers, is to increase awareness of the Macintosh platform, and showing the benefits to the developers of developing and deploying OSX based solutions.

Awareness should lead to a greater range of software package on the Macintosh in the coming future, and will subsequently hopefully lead to a greater market share for Apple Computers. Something we all wish to see.

I thus need to know the following from developers on Mac OSX or who are developing for Mac OSX:

1- Do you develop on OSX, and why?
2- Do you develop for a commercial entity?
3- What size is the size of your development team?
4- Are you a switcher, or planning to switch to OSX, from any other platform, if yes why and from what platform are you switching from?
5- What languages do you develop in, and why?
6- What do you see as OSX strength as a development platform?
7- What do you see as OSX weakness as a development platform?
8- What would you like to see Apple do to assist you in developing the next generation of software on OSX?

Please feel free to engage in discussion of my questions. Your feedback will be instrumental for helping myself and all Macintosh developers.

[jessejlt]

Originally posted by depolitic:
I am gathering data in regards the status of developers on OSX. The data will be used to develop strategies for promoting OSX as a development platform, to assorted commercial entities involved in developing software. Thus encouraging these commercial entities to become switchers, and employing OSX as their dominant development platform.

The aim of promoting OSX to developers, is to increase awareness of the Macintosh platform, and showing the benefits to the developers of developing and deploying OSX based solutions.

Awareness should lead to a greater range of software package on the Macintosh in the coming future, and will subsequently hopefully lead to a greater market share for Apple Computers. Something we all wish to see.

I thus need to know the following from developers on Mac OSX or who are developing for Mac OSX:

1- Do you develop on OSX, and why?
2- Do you develop for a commercial entity?
3- What size is the size of your development team?
4- Are you a switcher, or planning to switch to OSX, from any other platform, if yes why and from what platform are you switching from?
5- What languages do you develop in, and why?
6- What do you see as OSX strength as a development platform?
7- What do you see as OSX weakness as a development platform?
8- What would you like to see Apple do to assist you in developing the next generation of software on OSX?

Please feel free to engage in discussion of my questions. Your feedback will be instrumental for helping myself and all Macintosh developers.

1. Yes. Because of stability and the UNIX core.
2. No.
3. 1. I'm a CS student.
4. Yes. Because I'm sick of Microsoft. And, again, the UNIX core.
5. C++, VB, Cocoa (learning). Because I'm a CS student and C++ is what they teach us. I'm trying to learn Cocoa because I love OS X and cocoa is an excellent language for creating functional little everyday apps. I doubt I would ever want to code in Cocoa as a career, but thats not a concrete responce.
6. Unix core and all the goodness that goes along with that.
7. It's a Windows-sentric world.
8. Better documentation of Cocoa. I would like to see a lot more in the lines of obj-C++, which I've only seen bits and pieces of, but is very appealing to me since my primary language is C++.

[calumr]

Originally posted by jessejlt:

8. Better documentation of Cocoa. I would like to see a lot more in the lines of obj-C++, which I've only seen bits and pieces of, but is very appealing to me since my primary language is C++.

Obj-C++ is just the ability to call C++ code from Obj-C code, and vice-versa. AFAIK, there isn't much else to it, so there isn't much to document either.

You can't treat Obj-C objects as C++ objects (and vice-versa), or have any sort of C++ interface to the Cocoa API's. I think this is what people think is meant by Obj-C++.

[larkost]

While it is true that you can't make Coccoa calls directly with C++, with ObjC++ you can mix the code so freely that tis 'limitation' is really easily oevrcome. You simply have to wrap your Coccoa calls in C++ bridge methods.

[Arkham_c]

Originally posted by depolitic:
1- Do you develop on OSX, and why?
2- Do you develop for a commercial entity?
3- What size is the size of your development team?
4- Are you a switcher, or planning to switch to OSX, from any other platform, if yes why and from what platform are you switching from?
5- What languages do you develop in, and why?
6- What do you see as OSX strength as a development platform?
7- What do you see as OSX weakness as a development platform?
8- What would you like to see Apple do to assist you in developing the next generation of software on OSX?

1 - yes. I like UNIX, and I like a nice user interface.
2 - yes. I work for a company with 32,000 employees
3 - 8 members
4 - I use both. We use Windows for Outlook, and a few developers use it for development (but most just use Exceed to get into the Solaris or AIX boxes)
5 - Java, perl, python, RealBasic. Perl and Java are the company standards, and I hate perl, so I code in Java. OS X is a really nice java development platform. I do some scripts in python because python is a great language and I would use it for everything if it were a company standard, and I use Realbasic because it's great for building a GUI application quickly. I know several other languages as well, but I don't use them regularly.
6 - UNIX foundation, nice interface, good java implementation, strong tools (gcc, SQL Grinder, Project Builder Realbasic, JBuilder, Eclipse)
7 - None really. Since I develop in java on OSX and then deploy the apps on Solaris and AIX, I know what I have created is cross-platform.
8 - Make java better and faster on OSX.

[depolitic]

Question -9

In your development team who or how is the choice of what programming technologies are employed, and what hardware products are used in developing your products?

This information is important to understand, So we can target the decision makers in non-mac or other poly-platform companies better.

[Gul Banana]

Originally posted by depolitic:
1- Do you develop on OSX, and why?
2- Do you develop for a commercial entity?
3- What size is the size of your development team?
4- Are you a switcher, or planning to switch to OSX, from any other platform, if yes why and from what platform are you switching from?
5- What languages do you develop in, and why?
6- What do you see as OSX strength as a development platform?
7- What do you see as OSX weakness as a development platform?
8- What would you like to see Apple do to assist you in developing the next generation of software on OSX?
9 - In your development team who or how is the choice of what programming technologies are employed, and what hardware products are used in developing your products?

1. Yes, for multiple reasons: Cocoa, an excellent high-level API, a standard UNIX foundation with all the tools you'd expect, and very 'safe' interfaces which do a lot of the work for you in terms of threading, memory management and stability. Also, it's really pretty and I like shiny things.
2. Not yet, alas.
3. Generally 1, occasionally more
4. No
5. C - speed, efficiency, a standard, power, flexibility
C++ - all of the above plus object orientation and other conveniences
Objective-C - very nice runtime dynamism, #import, some other useful bits and pieces, is the language of Cocoa
perl - useful for writing quick scripts and great for parsing text
Java - cross platform like nothing has ever been before, true write-once-run-anywhere. Also a decent language in its own right, although I wish it had pointers
Those are the main ones at the moment, though I know others.
6. UNIX foundation, excellent APIs, free development tools.
7. Speed, the extreme lack thereof; less third-party support than Windows.
8. Improve Project Builder with features found in commerical IDEs like true code completion; increase the speed of gcc by a couple of orders of magnitude (number one wish), bridge trees and XML to Cocoa, optimize CoreFoundation. Make NSTask able to deal with ptys.
9. Since it's basically me, I make the decisions - I use a G4/400 desktop and a G3/800 laptop mostly, with occasional access to slower and faster machines.

[Angus_D]

1) Yes, because I have a Mac and Cocoa rocks.
2) No.
3) 2.
4) No.
5) Obj-C, C (mainly).
6) Its gummy interface.
7) Its gummy interface.
8) Give me more fun APIs to play with and waste some more time.

[ambush]

1- Do you develop on OSX, and why?
2- Do you develop for a commercial entity?
3- What size is the size of your development team?
4- Are you a switcher, or planning to switch to OSX, from any other platform, if yes why and from what platform are you switching from?
5- What languages do you develop in, and why?
6- What do you see as OSX strength as a development platform?
7- What do you see as OSX weakness as a development platform?
8- What would you like to see Apple do to assist you in developing the next generation of software on OSX?

1- Yes. I like Cocoa.
2- Not really
3- Two
4- Nope.
5- Obj-C mostly.. because it's the best choice to interface with Cocoa, like they say.
6- Cocoa rocks..
7- It's ass-slow.
8- Build a faster os, damnit.

[int69h]

Originally posted by depolitic:

1- Do you develop on OSX, and why?
2- Do you develop for a commercial entity?
3- What size is the size of your development team?
4- Are you a switcher, or planning to switch to OSX, from any other platform, if yes why and from what platform are you switching from?
5- What languages do you develop in, and why?
6- What do you see as OSX strength as a development platform?
7- What do you see as OSX weakness as a development platform?
8- What would you like to see Apple do to assist you in developing the next generation of software on OSX?

1 - Develop on - Unix + commercial software + most of my free software favorites.
Develop for - I'm in love w/ the Cocoa frameworks.

2 - Mercenary

3 - Depends. See #2

4 - I don't think of it so much as switch, but rather adding another 2 boxes to my farm.

5 -
Whatever language I'm told to write in - Brings profit to me.

Java - Good language, decent class library, easy deployment to multiple architectures. Widely supported.

C# / .NET - Better language, better class library, excellent documentation.

Objective-C - Dynamic runtime. Superset of C. Smalltalk messaging syntax. Cocoa frameworks.

C - Hard to beat for smaller projects. Usually the path of least resistance to interfacing with system libraries.

C++ - Sometimes it's a necessary evil that I must endure.

Bourne shell handles my scripting needs. I like Python and Ruby; however, my exposure to them has been limited. I decided many years ago that I despise PERL. Sure there's more than one way to do it, but they all suck.

6 - Unix inside, commercial applications and a nice interface outside. Have I mentioned the Cocoa frameworks?

7 - Has more than a lickable interface in common w/ molasses.

8 - Woo more of the larger software houses to their platform, which will in turn increase the number of potential customers available to the rest of us. I would suggest targetting the larger game companies. Sure the best titles eventually end up on the Mac, but nobody wants to play a game that their friends stopped playing 6 months ago. All of the excellent underlying tech won't lure droves of "Switchers." Ask Jean-Louis Gass�e about that if you don't believe me. (Ok I have to take back my comment on C++. Writing in C++ against the BeOS APIs wasn't so bad.)

[mythrndr]

1- Do you develop on OSX, and why?

Yes. Mac OS X provides two things that are interesting to a developer.

1. A very easy to use development enviroment and set of frameworks. The ability to rapidly develop front end portions of an application in combination with a traditional C++ backend allows applications to be developed very quickly.

2. The Mac OS X market is both niche and extremely passionate. Word of mouth spreads far more quickly in this space and allows newer development companies to gain recognition by the market much more quickly than for other platforms.


2- Do you develop for a commercial entity?

Yes. CodeTek Studios, Inc.

3- What size is the size of your development team?

4 developers, 1 web developer, 1 CEO

4- Are you a switcher, or planning to switch to OSX, from any other platform, if yes why and from what platform are you switching from?

Our entire company are switchers. Though I don't consider myself much of one as I used a NeXT cube at home.

5- What languages do you develop in, and why?

- C/C++
System level accessible languages that are powerful.

- Objective-C/C++
Excellent language for front end GUI development and rapid prototyping.

- Lua
The easiest and most flexible language in terms of using it as an embedded language. Please no debates, I have worked with Ruby, Python, and Java in this regard.

6- What do you see as OSX strength as a development platform?

UNIX base, open source code readily available, development frameworks are first rate.

7- What do you see as OSX weakness as a development platform?

Documentation is not as accurate or as thorough as it could be. Also there are still far too many private APIs that limit developers.

8- What would you like to see Apple do to assist you in developing the next generation of software on OSX?

Apple needs to engage growing developers and work hand in hand with them to promote and foster their success.

Jeff

[depolitic]

Apple needs to engage growing developers and work hand in hand with them to promote and foster their success.

Jeff - I think you have it - we do not need to focus on showing developers cool technology. To make developers use the Macintosh. Since individual developers will know the technology better then us. We must rather focus on helping bring their product to OSX and help them promote their products on the platform.

So maybe the focus should be on showing them how easy it is to port their C, C++, and Java, to OS X. and how OS X tools like Cocoa make that experience better and faster.

Maybe a combination of technical support and advice, mixed with knowledge of the Mac market, would be the ideal approach.

[trusted_content]

1- Do you develop on OSX, and why?
Yep, because it's my preferred platform and I think it deserves some really sick apps.
2- Do you develop for a commercial entity?
I work on my own and all of my code is GPL.
3- What size is the size of your development team?
See above.
4- Are you a switcher, or planning to switch to OSX, from any other platform, if yes why and from what platform are you switching from?
I've been a long-time Mac user, but I was in the Wintel world for the last few years; I switched back when OS X came out.
5- What languages do you develop in, and why?
I develop in C and Objective-C. I write in C for portability (mostly to Linux) and complete control of what is going on in my program; I use Objective-C for the convenience and elegance of its design and access to the Cocoa API.
6- What do you see as OSX strength as a development platform?
I see OS X's primary strength in the API. I think Cocoa is a windfall for developers; writing apps using the framework is not only rewarding and simple, it's actually FUN.
7- What do you see as OSX weakness as a development platform?
I think the main weakness is the fact that Cocoa is a closed API and there is no standard Objective-C implementation across platforms; I have experimented a bit with GNUstep but it has a long way to go before it can be truly usable for most applications.
8- What would you like to see Apple do to assist you in developing the next generation of software on OSX?
Keep on surprising me with good things.
9 - In your development team who or how is the choice of what programming technologies are employed, and what hardware products are used in developing your products?
Seeing as I'm a one-man operation, the buck stops here; my main boxes for OS X development are an iMac FP 800 and a Beige G3 233; my main box for Linux development is a P1 133 running Debian.



Thanks for asking ;]