You make a lot of points and I don't want this to run on forever, but
if Apple doesn't care about it's developers, then they should be
perfectly happy with nothing but ported apps that look like MS and and
are always behind. It isn't about what Apple think developers need,
but what developers think they need.
Apple cares a great deal about their developers. They do listen to bug
reports and feature requests, and they also listen on other feedback
channels. I have gotten letters from various managers if I posted
something to them which they thought needed clarification, so I know
they read the feedback mail.
That said, Apple must also care about staying in business, so
everything they do must produce revenue at the end of the day. More
developers and more products help with the revenue, which is why XCode
is free, and Java is pre installed. Some products are niche enough
that they need their own revenue stream, which likely explains why
WebObjects costs money. If you want to change a decision of theirs,
then use a businesslike argument. I do suggest using real financial
numbers. The programmers at Apple likely do not care about the
financial info, but the higher level decision makers sure do.
To be as blunt as possible: if you want Apple to release Java 1.5 for
Panther, create a business case with real numbers. Assume that it will
cost them time and energy to port 1.5 to Panther, and see if you can
make a case that this is worthwhile. Include the number of developers
and the number of machines they buy, and the expected targets. If you
sell an app, include a customer estimate.
I sent them a letter describing the expected timeframes for several of
our clients going to Java 1.4 and Java 1.5. I did not expect them to
change their business model, but I did expect them to use those numbers
in planning. I described the number of developers, the number of Apple
machines they purchase for development, and the number of machines that
would be used for deployment. I also tried to give a concrete idea
about which things were nice to have, and which would break the deal.
For example, one client has shipped a couple of racks of servers to
various federal agencies. Before the XServe, those racks were
Apple-free, even though they were running industry standard Tomcat.
Post XServe, said client started putting them in the deployed machines.
I was far from the only developer asking for XServes at WWDC some
years back, and Apple obviously heard us. They got pushed above a
tablet PC, for example.
For what it is worth, our clients are going to be deploying on 1.5
sometime early next year for the very first projects. These pilot
projects are going to start fairly soon - perhaps November. If I
cannot use 1.5, then I cannot work on those projects, so I will almost
certainly create a Tiger partition, install 1.5, and roll onwards.
They will not deploy on a beta OS with a beta JDK, so I really hope
Tiger does ship in the early part of 2005H1, but I can, as a developer,
use a beta OS and a beta JDK to work on the eventual projects. I have
before.
I have also used Virtual PC for testing, and my Mac for development.
Even with the added deployment grief, it was still better to have a
for-real bash prompt and system utils than to go to Windows.
We are developers - we have to make the call about what saves us time
when buying machines and making deployment decisions. It is in our
interest to let Apple know what went into those decisions, preferably
early enough for them to make their own plans.
Scott
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