Re: Apple's Tools Strategy
Re: Apple's Tools Strategy
- Subject: Re: Apple's Tools Strategy
- From: Laurence Harris <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2006 13:06:13 -0500
On Oct 29, 2006, at 6:05 AM, Turtle Creek Software wrote:
Call me unrealistic or even a snob, but the nature of the work we do
is such that anyone doing it should have above average analytical
skills and be able to express his thoughts. Anyone using Xcode should
be able to offer more than "It needs to be better," especially if
he's used something he thinks *is* better, as you apparently have.
I think the radar system works extremely well, the times I have used
it. However, in this case, I haven't spent enough time with XCode to
be able to describe the problems well enough for the radar system.
Hence the vague complaints.
But maybe it's time to reframe the issue. I think the larger problem
is that the Apple tool situation changed dramatically last year, and
that may require a matching change in Apple's role.
For a while, Think Pascal/C was the development platform of choice for
many developers, then CodeWarrior took over.
However, now there is no alternative development platform created by
some company that HAS to make the product user-friendly, or lose
money.
And I guess you're right, with a free competitor, there is little
chance a competing/better product will ever appear again.
Not just a free competitor, a good free competitor. Xcode doesn't
suck, and I'm sure that's even more true of Xcode 3.0. There are just
a few areas where it could work better for certain types of fairly
common tasks and workflows. ResEdit was free, but it was so bare-
bones and undeveloped that someone wrote a $256 competitor a lot of
people bought. Xcode isn't even close to being in that class. It's
evolving rapidly and being developed continuously. Furthermore,
developing a serious competitor to Xcode -- much less one better
enough to get people to pull out their credit cards to buy it --
would be a major undertaking requiring a significant investment. Even
if you wrote such a thing, as long as Apple is actively developing
Xcode, you would always be at risk of Apple enhancing Xcode in a way
that wiped out your product's advantage. I can't think of much that's
riskier that writing an alternative to a free product actively
developed by a company with Apple's resources. Maybe as a hobby, but
not with the expectation of financial gain.
Does Apple really WANT to be the monopoly provider?
I don't that's on their list of things to accomplish, it's just a
natural consequence of the state of things. What they *do* want is to
not be reliant on third party products for their own development, nor
have us reliant on such a product for ours. CodeWarrior is the
perfect example of what Apple (or you or I) don't want: a product on
which almost everyone uses that suddenly ceases to provide what we
need. It doesn't matter if it's because of an acquisition and
subsequent management decisions or something else entirely. If your
business relies on one product and you don't control that product, it
puts you in a very risky position. So Apple wants to have an in house
group developing the tools Mac developers (including Apple) need.
Now, if you want write a super slick alternative to Xcode, no one at
Apple is going to care one way or the other, but given what's
happened in the past I don't think you'd see them abandoning Xcode.
If so, then I
think it had better find a way to make XCode more 'elegant', or risk
losing the most creative new developers (and some old ones).
I don't think the risk is that of losing "creative" developers. The
risk is of losing developers who just don't enjoy using or can't
quite adapt to Xcode's way of doing things. It's not unheard of for
people to get out of software development because according to them,
"it wasn't fun anymore." Don't underestimate the contribution these
people make to the platform, and I'm not just talking about freeware
and shareware writers.
Larry
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