4 ms·

> I find it, give the developer $5-$50, and enjoy a long and fruitful relationship. > You Google what you want and get all sorts of shite. You risk your neck a

• jen729w 8y ago
  > You are comparing buying an application from a commercial developer... My point was that it’s much, much easier to find good software for the Mac. The pattern tends to be search, find, buy, enjoy, vs. Windows search, get frustrated, download some shite, hate life.
  • Crinus 8y ago
    Windows has a lot more software than Mac and unlike Mac, software in Windows keeps working for years on (i personally use a lot of older software, largely because it is faster on modern machines). This means you have a TON of options, but at the same time Sturgeon's law enters in the picture so with the more options you have more crap. The other side of the coin is that you also have more quality options too. Yes it is harder to find good software, but it is far from impossible. One way is to look for sites dedicated to software and then look for comments about those sites in Reddit, etc and ignore those that have bad comments. Another way is to ask in communities like Reddit's /r/software - people will try to steer you towards cheap/halfass solutions and ask you why would you want to pay $1 to do X instead of spending a few weeks jury rigging the free Y+Z+W+4+5 (which btw are open source, thus have god given quality status) to do mostly the same thing except a little more broken, but if you insist about what you want, you'll often find good software there (i have found some nice apps through the subreddit myself). TBH it has been years since i used a Mac extensively, but i do not remember finding quality Mac software being any different than quality Windows software - i mostly relied on sites and communities too.
    • ubermonkey 8y ago
      AS a 20-year Mac user, I have no idea what you mean by "unlike Mac, software in Windows keeps working for years on".
      • Crinus 8y ago
        Apple does not pay much attention to backwards compatibility, deprecates APIs all the time, changes how they work, etc and if something is undocumented it is free for all to axe it regardless of how many applications use it. Microsoft, on the other hand, pays a lot of attention to backwards compatibility and tries to keep things running regardless of them being documented or not (which IMO is the right approach to take, if something is accessible then it is part of your public interface regardless of it being intentional or not - of course this can lead to more messy implementation, but this is secondary to keep applications running). As a result, none of the programs in my 2009 iMac work anymore - a few games, a few commercial applications (e.g. Pixelmator), etc, every time i upgraded macOS i lost one or two applications that were not compatible, until the point when macOS itself became not compatible with my iMac (and i am certain that if i try to move any remaining applications to another Mac, more stuff will not work). No matter what workarounds i tried to do, they didn't work. On the other hand, i have Windows software from a decade before my iMac even existed that still works perfectly fine under Windows 10 exactly because Microsoft cares about backwards compatibility. For example i have a boxed version of Paint Shop Pro 7 (the last great version of PSP with the best UI for an image editor, IMO) which comes with the application itself as well as a couple of addons (an animation editor and an image organizer) and all of them work literally out of the box (some older applications might need a few tweaks here and there but they usually work easily, but others like PSP7 work with no tweaks at all). For me this is a big reason why i stopped buying software on macOS: with their behavior towards API compatibility, Apple forces an expiration date to the software. On the other hand i do not even care if the company behind some piece of Windows software will exist or not in 5 years, since chances are i'll be able to run it regardless (assuming there is no need for Internet-based activation or some bullshit like that, which is why i avoid that type of software too). I guess Linux is kinda similar here, partly because Linus insists on backwards compatibility but also because even if the APIs change you can still compile the older libraries, although that is talking from a purely personal perspective (this would be very high on the "tweak difficulty" for most people) and in practice nobody sells stuff i'd be interested on Linux anyway so i haven't experienced it beyond trying some older game demos from very early 2000s (which mostly worked after i installed an OSS emulator and an older C++ library, with the exception of -IIRC- a Shogo port that needed Gtk1 for the launcher - which i could compile or copy from Slackware that still provides packages for it, but i lost interest). Still i'd trust Windows more to stay compatible and even under Linux i'd trust Wine before any other API. And note that in all that i ignore Apple changing CPU architecture every few years (which, according to rumors, are going to do again soon).
  • dangerface 8y ago
    How do you find quality mac software? Like a decent editor, I tried coda and found it extremely limited no plugins, limited language support and no configuration. This has been my experience with all mac software. Friends have recommended different software but when I tried to install it through iTunes I found the developers had went bankrupt or it was not available in my country, searching for apps on google seems to be a dead end. I tried to find software so that I could use a normal mouse at a decent speed but again found them broken, relying on system calls that are undocumented. I found one which worked until I updated to Mojave but then they removed the system calls it used an it no longer works, so theres $100 down the drain. Im not a fan of window but its so easy to just search google download it for free and it works your done. Linux you just search your package manger download it for free configure it to do exactly what you want and it works your done.
    • Crinus 8y ago
      > I found the developers had went bankrupt > found them broken, relying on system calls that are undocumented > they removed the system calls it used an it no longer works, so theres $100 down the drain And that is why backwards compatibility is important and why only Microsoft seem to get it (and Linus but sadly that doesn't extend to the userspace, except X11 but dumbheads want to remove that too) - it doesn't matter if the company is bankrupt after you get your program, it will keep in working doing what it always did. It doesn't matter if the OS gets updated with new features and driver support because the APIs will keep working for the older programs that use them (and sometimes even get new features since new programs may also use these APIs - although Microsoft doesn't have a great record here with introducing new GUI APIs every few years, but at least older stuff do not get abandoned). Your $100 (or whatever) wont be down the drain, it'll be spent on something that works for many years to come. In the meanwhile macOS will break half of its APIs and go through three different CPU architectures, ensuring nothing will work.