Re: Apple's Tools Strategy
Re: Apple's Tools Strategy
- Subject: Re: Apple's Tools Strategy
- From: Laurence Harris <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2006 14:47:29 -0400
On Oct 28, 2006, at 12:27 PM, Turtle Creek Software wrote:
Chris,
Wow. Thanks for the thoughtful reply! I have no doubt that
Apple is TRYING to develop great developer tools. Maybe this
can be the start of a group dialog that will help actually
create them.
Here are some random thoughts/questions:
1. Apple wouldn't need to BUY the Codewarrior source, just
license its interface code.
Not viable. CW is a Carbon application and Xcode is Cocoa. As such,
CW's interface code would be useless to Apple.
2. If the above can't happen, then just steal as much of the
CW interface as is possible, or license the "look and feel".
Microsoft proved years ago that you don't need to license "look and
feel."
3. I'd be happy to pay money for a better development system.
Free and mediocre is not a good deal when it reduces the
productivity of a $100K programmer.
Programmers make $100K??? LOL
You're right, small things in development tools can have big
consequences for developers (as can fewer bugs in the OS ;-). But I
have no doubt that the tools team is working to give us better tools.
To get tools that are better the way *you* want them to be better you
need to file requests in Radar. If you don't, who's going to offset
someone else who's requesting changes you won't like? ;-)
Giving them an extra 1%
translates to $1K a year, and I think a good environment does
more like 10%.
True, but you'd be surprised at how stingy programmers can be. Many
of them pride themselves on not needing elegant software and will use
free over paid software unless the disparity is huge.
4. I think most great software is launched by just one person
or a small team. 100 people is fine for maintaining a mature
product, but XCode isn't to that stage yet. If you can't do #1
or #2, I'd suggest finding the rare individual(s) who can
invent a great new development environment, and give them the
space to do it. Give them some testers, then throw in the big team
afterwards to polish it.
This is the oddest approach I've heard. Usually it takes more people
to produce the early versions and fewer to maintain the product once
it becomes stable, assuming you want a full feature set from the start.
I think you need to understand that Apple is not going to throw Xcode
in out the window in favor of an IDE written from scratch by one or
two "rare individuals." They'd be crazy to do that.
5. Who wrote CodeWarrior 1.0?
Well, more than one person, and things were a lot simpler back then.
We were all compiling for one processor *on* one processor, and there
really was no viable alternative back then for most developers
wanting to do PowerPC development. Much has changed. What worked for
Metrowerks back then wouldn't work now.
6. Fortunately, small companies can be profitable in places where
large
ones can't. So even though Apple can't turn a profit on the
next great IDE, I have faith that some smaller folks eventually will,
It's not going to happen. Remember how much programmers make? Xcode
isn't perfect, but it's good enough that very few people are going to
be willing to lay out hundreds of dollars for an alternative that's
going to hiccup every time releases a new version of the OS.
7. I'd be curious what % of developers used/use PowerPlant? We would
sure appreciate having an improved version of that for OSX, so we can
concentrate on coding features within our product niche, rather than
basic system functions.
There is PowerPlantX, and of course Cocoa. But frankly, even a well
written Carbon application doesn't do nearly as much low level work
these days as we did before Carbon.
Larry
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