Re: XCode for Jaguar?
Re: XCode for Jaguar?
- Subject: Re: XCode for Jaguar?
- From: Brent Gulanowski <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 15:38:02 -0500
On Sunday, October 26, 2003, at 03:03 PM, Chris Hanson wrote:
On Oct 26, 2003, at 4:10 AM, Stiphane Sudre wrote:
If you can be 100% sure that the target is Panther only, yes, but I'm
wondering if this represents a huge percentage of the total market.
Actually, no, you don't have to be 100% sure that the target market is
Panther-only for the economics to favor a Panther-only application.
If 55% of your market is on Panther and it takes 50% as much time to
develop a Panther application, that can also be compelling. You have
to look at market size, not just market share. (This is something we
tell people about the Mac, isn't it? :) And also, there are people
who will upgrade to Panther to use great Panther-only software, so
even if most of your market isn't there now they might go there once
your application (and maybe a few others) are released.
Those numbers are absurd in their contrivance. They might be applicable
to a screen saver or a small tool. Any well written, significant
application should have only a small percentage dependent on the
operating system.
Your issues mostly boil down to "Apple added new stuff that I can't
use on 10.2." Well, yeah. It's a new release of the operating
system, it's going to have new features. That's the way things work.
You're going to have to be careful about using them if you want your
software to run on earlier systems; fortunately, Apple provides the
SDK feature to make that relatively easy.
Why do we get all excited that Apple's operating system is not
monolithic when they end up treating it that way anyway? The Cocoa
frameworks are not technically part of the operating system in any
sense other than the way they are sold, and there is no reason not to
distribute them separately except monetarily, unless I've been lied to.
I personally think that Panther is worth the price, although so far it
does not sound like the new classes in Cocoa themselves are necessarily
worth much, so I would side with Aaron as much for his points as for
the simple fact that AppKit should be released in a separate installer
for Jaguar, and that it is a disservice to customers staying with
Jaguar to force them to upgrade so you can play with new toys.
It is most galling in that Cocoa is hyped as being designed with
modularity of code as a principal design virtue, but now it is not only
unavailable on any platform except Mac OS X, it is not even portable
between OS versions.
--
Brent Gulanowski email@hidden
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