7 ms·

Is it just me, or did all these "hackers" that apparently bought Macs back then not really produce all that much hacker software (or non-hacker software, come

Is it just me, or did all these "hackers" that apparently bought Macs back then not really produce all that much hacker software (or non-hacker software, come to that)? It seems to me that Windows and Linux both had much greater funds of developer software than did the Mac ecosystem.

zepto 5y ago
The hackers that bought the Macs built startups.
speedgoose 5y ago
I believe that objective-c and the Apple documentation didn't encourage people to create on Mac for a long time. Now it's a bit better with Swift or web applications using Electron.
- WanderPanda 5y ago
  What the M1 giveth, Electron taketh away
  - tomxor 5y ago
    vi inspired the concept of the GUI. Then Electron sent many of us back to vi in search of lost CPU cycles. -- A JavaScript Dev
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Just the plain idea that vi had anything to do with GUI is hilarious.
      - tomxor 5y ago
        It is. It's modality was an anti-inspiration, as in... how the hell can we not have modes (a GUI)... sort of... then everyone started burring crap under menus though feature accretion... hence we go full circle, because people get fed up of bloat, leading to both UX fatigue and performance fatigue, which eventually gives you a kind of appreciation for simple modal interfaces.
        pjmlp 5y ago
        These are GUIs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800225.806843 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800225.806843 vi might have visual on the name, but only for those in the Bell Labs silo
- pjmlp 5y ago
  On the contrary, OS X had first support to Java via the Java Bridge and Apple's own JVM implementation, because they weren't sure if the developer community educated in Object Pascal and C++ would be willing to touch Objective-C, so they decided to play safe with having Java for the ride, doubling down on Java uptake. Objective-C was embraced by the developer community in such a way that they quickly deprecated Java Bridge and eventually got rid of Java development costs altogether.
  - speedgoose 5y ago
    I remember running Java applications on a powerpc g4. It was incredibly slow and ugly, no wonder why developers still preferred objective-c over Java on Mac.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      That was certainly not Apple's Java, as it had good JIT compiler with code cache, and the same L&F than Objective-C applications, that wasn't definitely it.
      - speedgoose 5y ago
        I remember the Java IDE like Eclipse or NetBeans being incredibly slow, and ugly, compared to the same software on similar priced computers running windows or GNU/Linux, or compared to more native software like Xcode or TextMate. But perhaps the powerpc g4 was simply a bad CPU for a JVM and Java developers were not very good at designing UIs for Mac. I also remember having to wait a long time whenever the JVM was starting. It was annoying when a website did contain a Java applet because my web browser would be stuck until the JVM was ready.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        pjmlp 5y ago
        Yeah, because they did not made use of the APIs exposed by Apple on their JVM implementation, XCode also did Java back then. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/LanguageIntegration/LanguageIntegration.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/10000112i https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Legacy/JavaBridge/JavaBridge.1.html#BGCDBCJG https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Java/Conceptual/Java14Development/00-Intro/JavaDevelopment.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001911-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ja...
dijit 5y ago
A lot of what works on Mac bleeds into Linux. Linux userland tools in the last 10 years are incredible; it’s not easy to draw a direct line between that and the Mac, but I’m relatively certain there is correlation. I’m talking about castnow, youtube-dl and a whole slew of other software which integrates proprietary things. In the 00s things like those were almost all running exclusive to windows.
- zabzonk 5y ago
  > A lot of what works on Mac bleeds into Linux I'd say it was the other way around, and it also bleeds into Windows. For example (of course): git.
  - herbst 5y ago
    Or literally the whole Linux ecosystem with WSL
- csomar 5y ago
  > Linux userland tools in the last 10 years are incredible Yet, still waiting for a Git GUI for Linux.
  - ptomato 5y ago
    Sublime Merge?
  - ficklepoet 5y ago
    Pretty much everyone I know has used GitG since... 2006?
deregulateMed 5y ago
People really don't want to believe that we are chemical reactions and that Apple used psychology tricks on us through marketing campaigns. It's a lot easier to justify buying an Apple product with an excuse than to realize that relentless advertising is what caused people to give Apple money.
- onethought 5y ago
  I don't buy this. There was something special in that time of having a Unix system with a well considered cohesive UI. Windows was not an option, and 1 click install set-and-forget linux distros weren't (aren't? :P ) really common. There was a clear gap in the market for a unix system that was up and running with minimal fuss, apple capitalised (accidentally happened upon) this.
  - fundad 5y ago
    Exactly! Psychology tricks would include supporting Linux commercially which is a wildly successful business (even before counting the likes of AWS which supports an OS as part of hosting). They by definition market their product and win sales. Sales funded Linux and a lot of OSS beyond what hobbyists could possibly have done, an inconvenient truth. People who want to support their own installation of Linux or FreeBSD do so without considering a commercial OS and a few of them constantly shitpost about how anyone could possibly not make the same choice as they do.
    - ficklepoet 5y ago
      > do so without considering a commercial OS You forget that most people are using Linux to replace a commercial OS.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    Dell makes hardware that easily rivals Apple and sells it with Linux pre-installed and officially covered by their support services.
    - 5y ago
makeitdouble 5y ago
The mac’s main advantage to devs/hackers is Darwin, and we mostly use it for linux compatible software. Heck, I’ve switched from FreeBSD to osx just to get better laptop hardware and peripheral support. Most stuff we produce are *nix compatible. I’m no great hacker but everything I wrote to make my life easier is shell based. I think Windows with ASL will have the same impact, with more and more *nix compatible software being produced.
m12k 5y ago
As someone that uses both Mac and Windows regularly, I find the quality of the software I use on Mac to be generally higher. Cyberduck (FTP), Transmission (bittorrent), Charles Proxy (packet sniffing), Sourcetree (git gui), Pixelmator (image editing), Sketch (vector graphics), Things (todo), 1Password (password management) are all solid applications with polished user interfaces, where I struggle to find anything quite as nice on Windows (several of these have been or are being ported to Windows, with varying levels of polish carrying over).
- mkl95 5y ago
  What are your issues with Transmission on Windows? I have been using it for years and it works like a charm.
- zabzonk 5y ago
  As you say, several of these are also available on Windows - I can't think why anyone developing such software would not make them available on multiple platforms.
  - zepto 5y ago
    > I can't think why anyone developing such software would not make them available on multiple platforms. Because it’s a lot more work, and because it’s next to impossible to create a great cross platform app with a native feeling UI.
    - ficklepoet 5y ago
      > it’s next to impossible to create a great cross platform app with a native feeling UI And who do we have to thank for that? Perhaps there's some business out there that made a chocolate-themed UI toolkit that was notoriously proprietary and unworkable, so much so that it drove the industry into a software drought that only let up when x86 was fully standardized? Maybe I'm just spitballing here.
      - zepto 5y ago
aenis 5y ago
From my purely anecdotal experiences of attending/organizing a few 500-person-plus hackstons and dozens of smaller ones, at least half of the people I meet there use macs. Its definitely in fashion still. I switched to a m1 mac last year after nearly 4 decades of low level x86 work, incl. drivers, rootkits, and the like. These days I code in higher level languages such as rust or, ehm, python, and the mac offers a fine experience. Ironically, what pushed me over the fence was the pandemics; most of the video conferencing stuff causes windows laptops to sound like vacuum cleaners.
- aidos 5y ago
  It did the same to the Macs (even recent models) to be honest. The M1 is the only laptop that seems to not die under zoom strain.
criddell 5y ago
There seems to be a lot more interesting software on the Mac than Windows or Linux and I've never really understood that. Think about how many Mac enthusiast podcasts, websites, and blogs there are. Windows should have many more of these, but they don't. And Linux enthusiast sites are very technical and low level. There's no writing about being a Linux user that isn't also about being a developer. Where are there no companies like the Omni Goup, Cultured Code, and Panic turning out great applications for Windows? In theory, the market is an order of magnitude bigger yet the reality seems to be that there are fewer Windows users willing to pay for great software. Is it because Windows users are not on that platform by choice? Desktop Linux users are definitely there by choice, yet they too seem to be unwilling to pay for software.
- handrous 5y ago
  > Where are there no companies like the Omni Goup, Cultured Code, and Panic turning out great applications for Windows? In theory, the market is an order of magnitude bigger yet the reality seems to be that there are fewer Windows users willing to pay for great software. Is it because Windows users are not on that platform by choice? There are such companies! For video games. Video games and B2B/business-productivity software is where the money is on Windows. Your buyers are PC gamers or businesses. There are also lots of unsophisticated low-needs users who are on Windows at home because it's what was cheap at the big box store, and/or they learned in the earlier PC days to shop based on spec numbers back when those mattered much for basic home users, and the Apple section of the store doesn't look very interesting if you shop that way. AFAI can tell (from watching relatives fitting this profile, which is... all of my relatives, plus many relatives of friends) the only way to make money off them, since the death of actual boxed software in stores (which they did used to sometimes buy!), is to be Microsoft and use Win10 to spam them until they buy (maybe not even realizing what's happening or, once they've paid, what they bought or what it's for or how to ever use it—yes, really) or be a straight-up malware scammer type. The problem with those users, if you want to sell them software, is they basically just want/need a browser, MS Office, and perhaps something to play the unorganized folder of pirated MP3s of 50s-90s music the unsophisticated-user side of the family has been passing around for 20 years. They may want something to organize photos and such, but they'll never figure out how to use it right even if you show them how, unless it's high-lock-in, very automatic ("AI" tagging and such), and probably cloud-based (so, likely some Web crap, not desktop software, oh and because advertising and hoovering up user data to train AI is an endless money spigot if and only if you already have massive scale you'll likely be competing on price with "free", so, have fun with that). > Desktop Linux users are definitely there by choice, yet they too seem to be unwilling to pay for software. Developing for Linux means receiving support load for all its desktop brokenness (driver problems [mostly video drivers]; issues with any basic hardware+software systems your software relies on to work well for all but the most basic operation, like audio for example; xorg/wayland/DE instability) and every crazy configuration out there. Sure you can say "fuck off, we support exactly and only [a couple major desktop distros] with the default config that you get if you keep clicking OK on the OS installer and then not changing anything, and only on [list of hardware], report on any other set-up and you will be ignored" but you're already on such a tiny platform that you can hardly afford to annoy/turn-off/generate-vocal-anti-fans-among users. So instead... you develop for literally anything else, or maybe toss out some electron garbage to Linux as an afterthought. Linux is expensive per-user and doesn't bring you that many users to begin with. Plus, yeah, there may be less willingness to pay for software.

zepto 5y ago

The hackers that bought the Macs built startups.

speedgoose 5y ago

I believe that objective-c and the Apple documentation didn't encourage people to create on Mac for a long time. Now it's a bit better with Swift or web applications using Electron.

WanderPanda 5y ago
What the M1 giveth, Electron taketh away
- tomxor 5y ago
  vi inspired the concept of the GUI. Then Electron sent many of us back to vi in search of lost CPU cycles. -- A JavaScript Dev
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Just the plain idea that vi had anything to do with GUI is hilarious.
    - tomxor 5y ago
      It is. It's modality was an anti-inspiration, as in... how the hell can we not have modes (a GUI)... sort of... then everyone started burring crap under menus though feature accretion... hence we go full circle, because people get fed up of bloat, leading to both UX fatigue and performance fatigue, which eventually gives you a kind of appreciation for simple modal interfaces.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        These are GUIs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800225.806843 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800225.806843 vi might have visual on the name, but only for those in the Bell Labs silo
pjmlp 5y ago
On the contrary, OS X had first support to Java via the Java Bridge and Apple's own JVM implementation, because they weren't sure if the developer community educated in Object Pascal and C++ would be willing to touch Objective-C, so they decided to play safe with having Java for the ride, doubling down on Java uptake. Objective-C was embraced by the developer community in such a way that they quickly deprecated Java Bridge and eventually got rid of Java development costs altogether.
- speedgoose 5y ago
  I remember running Java applications on a powerpc g4. It was incredibly slow and ugly, no wonder why developers still preferred objective-c over Java on Mac.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    That was certainly not Apple's Java, as it had good JIT compiler with code cache, and the same L&F than Objective-C applications, that wasn't definitely it.
    - speedgoose 5y ago
      I remember the Java IDE like Eclipse or NetBeans being incredibly slow, and ugly, compared to the same software on similar priced computers running windows or GNU/Linux, or compared to more native software like Xcode or TextMate. But perhaps the powerpc g4 was simply a bad CPU for a JVM and Java developers were not very good at designing UIs for Mac. I also remember having to wait a long time whenever the JVM was starting. It was annoying when a website did contain a Java applet because my web browser would be stuck until the JVM was ready.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Yeah, because they did not made use of the APIs exposed by Apple on their JVM implementation, XCode also did Java back then. https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/LanguageIntegration/LanguageIntegration.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/10000112i https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Legacy/JavaBridge/JavaBridge.1.html#BGCDBCJG https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co... https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Java/Conceptual/Java14Development/00-Intro/JavaDevelopment.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001911-SW1 https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ja...

dijit 5y ago

A lot of what works on Mac bleeds into Linux. Linux userland tools in the last 10 years are incredible; it’s not easy to draw a direct line between that and the Mac, but I’m relatively certain there is correlation. I’m talking about castnow, youtube-dl and a whole slew of other software which integrates proprietary things. In the 00s things like those were almost all running exclusive to windows.

zabzonk 5y ago
> A lot of what works on Mac bleeds into Linux I'd say it was the other way around, and it also bleeds into Windows. For example (of course): git.
- herbst 5y ago
  Or literally the whole Linux ecosystem with WSL
csomar 5y ago
> Linux userland tools in the last 10 years are incredible Yet, still waiting for a Git GUI for Linux.
- ptomato 5y ago
  Sublime Merge?
- ficklepoet 5y ago
  Pretty much everyone I know has used GitG since... 2006?

deregulateMed 5y ago

People really don't want to believe that we are chemical reactions and that Apple used psychology tricks on us through marketing campaigns. It's a lot easier to justify buying an Apple product with an excuse than to realize that relentless advertising is what caused people to give Apple money.

onethought 5y ago
I don't buy this. There was something special in that time of having a Unix system with a well considered cohesive UI. Windows was not an option, and 1 click install set-and-forget linux distros weren't (aren't? :P ) really common. There was a clear gap in the market for a unix system that was up and running with minimal fuss, apple capitalised (accidentally happened upon) this.
- fundad 5y ago
  Exactly! Psychology tricks would include supporting Linux commercially which is a wildly successful business (even before counting the likes of AWS which supports an OS as part of hosting). They by definition market their product and win sales. Sales funded Linux and a lot of OSS beyond what hobbyists could possibly have done, an inconvenient truth. People who want to support their own installation of Linux or FreeBSD do so without considering a commercial OS and a few of them constantly shitpost about how anyone could possibly not make the same choice as they do.
  - ficklepoet 5y ago
    > do so without considering a commercial OS You forget that most people are using Linux to replace a commercial OS.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  Dell makes hardware that easily rivals Apple and sells it with Linux pre-installed and officially covered by their support services.
  - 5y ago

makeitdouble 5y ago

The mac’s main advantage to devs/hackers is Darwin, and we mostly use it for linux compatible software. Heck, I’ve switched from FreeBSD to osx just to get better laptop hardware and peripheral support. Most stuff we produce are *nix compatible. I’m no great hacker but everything I wrote to make my life easier is shell based. I think Windows with ASL will have the same impact, with more and more *nix compatible software being produced.

m12k 5y ago

As someone that uses both Mac and Windows regularly, I find the quality of the software I use on Mac to be generally higher. Cyberduck (FTP), Transmission (bittorrent), Charles Proxy (packet sniffing), Sourcetree (git gui), Pixelmator (image editing), Sketch (vector graphics), Things (todo), 1Password (password management) are all solid applications with polished user interfaces, where I struggle to find anything quite as nice on Windows (several of these have been or are being ported to Windows, with varying levels of polish carrying over).

mkl95 5y ago
What are your issues with Transmission on Windows? I have been using it for years and it works like a charm.
zabzonk 5y ago
As you say, several of these are also available on Windows - I can't think why anyone developing such software would not make them available on multiple platforms.
- zepto 5y ago
  > I can't think why anyone developing such software would not make them available on multiple platforms. Because it’s a lot more work, and because it’s next to impossible to create a great cross platform app with a native feeling UI.
  - ficklepoet 5y ago
    > it’s next to impossible to create a great cross platform app with a native feeling UI And who do we have to thank for that? Perhaps there's some business out there that made a chocolate-themed UI toolkit that was notoriously proprietary and unworkable, so much so that it drove the industry into a software drought that only let up when x86 was fully standardized? Maybe I'm just spitballing here.
    - zepto 5y ago

aenis 5y ago

From my purely anecdotal experiences of attending/organizing a few 500-person-plus hackstons and dozens of smaller ones, at least half of the people I meet there use macs. Its definitely in fashion still. I switched to a m1 mac last year after nearly 4 decades of low level x86 work, incl. drivers, rootkits, and the like. These days I code in higher level languages such as rust or, ehm, python, and the mac offers a fine experience. Ironically, what pushed me over the fence was the pandemics; most of the video conferencing stuff causes windows laptops to sound like vacuum cleaners.

aidos 5y ago
It did the same to the Macs (even recent models) to be honest. The M1 is the only laptop that seems to not die under zoom strain.

criddell 5y ago

There seems to be a lot more interesting software on the Mac than Windows or Linux and I've never really understood that. Think about how many Mac enthusiast podcasts, websites, and blogs there are. Windows should have many more of these, but they don't. And Linux enthusiast sites are very technical and low level. There's no writing about being a Linux user that isn't also about being a developer. Where are there no companies like the Omni Goup, Cultured Code, and Panic turning out great applications for Windows? In theory, the market is an order of magnitude bigger yet the reality seems to be that there are fewer Windows users willing to pay for great software. Is it because Windows users are not on that platform by choice? Desktop Linux users are definitely there by choice, yet they too seem to be unwilling to pay for software.

handrous 5y ago
> Where are there no companies like the Omni Goup, Cultured Code, and Panic turning out great applications for Windows? In theory, the market is an order of magnitude bigger yet the reality seems to be that there are fewer Windows users willing to pay for great software. Is it because Windows users are not on that platform by choice? There are such companies! For video games. Video games and B2B/business-productivity software is where the money is on Windows. Your buyers are PC gamers or businesses. There are also lots of unsophisticated low-needs users who are on Windows at home because it's what was cheap at the big box store, and/or they learned in the earlier PC days to shop based on spec numbers back when those mattered much for basic home users, and the Apple section of the store doesn't look very interesting if you shop that way. AFAI can tell (from watching relatives fitting this profile, which is... all of my relatives, plus many relatives of friends) the only way to make money off them, since the death of actual boxed software in stores (which they did used to sometimes buy!), is to be Microsoft and use Win10 to spam them until they buy (maybe not even realizing what's happening or, once they've paid, what they bought or what it's for or how to ever use it—yes, really) or be a straight-up malware scammer type. The problem with those users, if you want to sell them software, is they basically just want/need a browser, MS Office, and perhaps something to play the unorganized folder of pirated MP3s of 50s-90s music the unsophisticated-user side of the family has been passing around for 20 years. They may want something to organize photos and such, but they'll never figure out how to use it right even if you show them how, unless it's high-lock-in, very automatic ("AI" tagging and such), and probably cloud-based (so, likely some Web crap, not desktop software, oh and because advertising and hoovering up user data to train AI is an endless money spigot if and only if you already have massive scale you'll likely be competing on price with "free", so, have fun with that). > Desktop Linux users are definitely there by choice, yet they too seem to be unwilling to pay for software. Developing for Linux means receiving support load for all its desktop brokenness (driver problems [mostly video drivers]; issues with any basic hardware+software systems your software relies on to work well for all but the most basic operation, like audio for example; xorg/wayland/DE instability) and every crazy configuration out there. Sure you can say "fuck off, we support exactly and only [a couple major desktop distros] with the default config that you get if you keep clicking OK on the OS installer and then not changing anything, and only on [list of hardware], report on any other set-up and you will be ignored" but you're already on such a tiny platform that you can hardly afford to annoy/turn-off/generate-vocal-anti-fans-among users. So instead... you develop for literally anything else, or maybe toss out some electron garbage to Linux as an afterthought. Linux is expensive per-user and doesn't bring you that many users to begin with. Plus, yeah, there may be less willingness to pay for software.