On Sep 17, 2005, at 4:51 PM, Turtle Creek Software wrote: PLEASE, humor us old Mac fogies and let us have a simple-minded GUI when we are programming. Won't Apple rescue us by buying CodeWarrior and getting it so it will build on Macintel? Or sponsor anyone else willing to do that?
Why would Apple want to support two IDEs?
Some of us old Mac fogies thinl the Xcode interface is simple enough. You're right, there are a lot of frustrated Xcode users right now, some because the underlying compiler is different on Xcode, and some because the user interface is different. Apple should recognize the needs of CW transplants and try to accommodate them as much as possible, but it would be ridiculous for them to try to prolong the life of CW IDE. Apple has already, to a large extent, made efforts to support CW users. The CW key bindings and project importers are not perfect, but they are significant gestures of goodwill toward CW converts. It's not fun to be forced into a program which doesn't work right, and it doesn't sound like XCode will be a suitable replacement for CW within the next 6 months.
For dozens or more likely hundreds of developers, Xcode is currently acceptable, if not perfect. Personally, I don't think CW was ever perfect, either. A good IDE is always a work-in-progress, especially since development tools evolve quickly and force underlying changes in the tools. Your comments seem to overlook the fact that we have been using the Xcode tools for *years*, and although we have periodic complaints, we are getting valuable work done with them. Personally, in many ways I now find the Xcode IDE to be more powerful than CW. I find it especially frustrating trying to debug in CodeWarrior without the benefits of gdb command line access.
The biggest question for you to answer is whether your competitors, existing or potential, will decide to embrace Xcode now, instead of waiting 6 months or a year to do so. If the Mac market share you possess now is important to you, then I think it would be foolish not to at least begin the port now. You don't need a transition machine to get the code collected and compiling without warning for i386, which will probably be the bulk of the work involved for most developers.
Daniel
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