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Clicked you up but: 1. Seriously, try iWork ;-). Not only does Pages kick Word's butt, it can sit in the middle of a Word-based workflow (e.g. preserving chang

Clicked you up but: 1. Seriously, try iWork ;-). Not only does Pages kick Word's butt, it can sit in the middle of a Word-based workflow (e.g. preserving change tracking). 2. Visual Studio doesn't kill Realbasic (from a tiny developer) or Xcode. Xcode has a different level of abstraction, but the result is that Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs. But yes, it's pretty darn good. 3. Win7 is a tactical success but a strategic failure. If you want an end-to-end picture of just how big a hole Microsoft finds itself in, go to http://microsoftstore.com http://microsoftstore.com 1. Their back-to-school incentive is a free XBox with each PC sold. Aside from just how big a loss this must represent (given the XBox 360 is, itself, a loss-leader) parents are going to LOVE this. Here's $25k college tuition and you want a computer with a free game console? 2. Because they're selling a weird hodgepodge of third-party products they need to provide things like a "recommend a PC for me given I am this kind of person" tool, and it makes no sense (e.g. I picked "develop with power" and got no results). 3. The chief selling point of the PCs they're selling is "no crapware". 4. Try to figure out their Win7 phone comparison tool. And this is what happens when Microsoft goes out and deliberately tries to build an imitation Apple Store.

rbanffy 15y ago
> the result is that Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs. There may be some sort of selection bias here: Mac users are much more sensitive to polish than Windows (or Linux) devs - they have chosen a Mac over a Dell and paid more for it. I am happy with console apps, as long as they do what I need them to, and my Atom-based Acer netbook supplies about 99% of my computing needs.
nxn 15y ago
> Xcode has a different level of abstraction, but the result is that Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs. But yes, it's pretty darn good. Don't you feel like you're ignoring some very important variables by saying that? For example: Cocoa vs Windows Forms, Cocoa vs WPF, etc?
- podperson 15y ago
  No, because I'm actually saying the reverse of what you think I'm saying. I believe Cocoa tends to operate below the level of typical Windows APIs -- low enough to have complete control over the UX but high enough to make things that ought to be easy, easy. Windows tends to be friendly for lousy developers (typical systems integrators, of whom I have a great deal of experience). At a very low level it doesn't make much of a difference -- good coders will deal with the hand they are given. I think you can make a case for selection bias in that Mac development (the old Mac OS toolbox now called "Carbon" and Cocoa today) is too difficult for hacks which filters out a lot of the crap that people who can cobble together junk using Visual Basic or whatever. (There used to be a website devoted to really awful Mac apps, most of which were built using Realbasic, but lousy Realbasic apps are cross-platform :-) )
shriphani 15y ago
With the exception of Keynote, Numbers and Pages have not behaved well for me when given large documents. Numbers in particular struggled with datasets that Excel would handle very easily. I would rather use Google docs than bother with Pages / Numbers.
- podperson 15y ago
  I'm certainly no advocate of Numbers. Pages I use for pretty demanding stuff and I've had no problems. Word has problems editing a simple letter, but it certainly may scale to very large documents better than Pages -- but if you're doing that kind of thing, I'd recommend Framemaker.
o1iver 15y ago
Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs What is that statement based on? It is an absurd idea. If "more polished" means better code then this statement is just not true. I just completed an internship in a big technology company and the code produced there (for automation/control in the energy and utilities sector) is quite certainly "more polished" than any iPhone application or whatever else people develop in Xcode (certainly not automation/control applications). And they use, amongst other more specialized tools, Virtual Studio. Xcode is an IDE with a very small user-base, alone because of the fact that the Mac still has a small user-base within the industry. It probably even still has a small user-base in the developer community (aside from the hipster apps world). I would love to see some evidence that apps developed in Xcode are usually "more polished" than apps produced in Visual Studio. And in my personal opinion Visual Studio, especially IntelliSense kicks Xcode's butt every day. And same with MS Office... Note: I don't use an IDE unless developing in C/C++, C#, Java or Objective-C
- podperson 15y ago
  "within the industry" Ah yes. The industry.
- mikecsh 15y ago
  I never understand people who think that VS is the greatest IDE. Sure, when I first started using VS2003 having been doing all of my C coding on the command line prior to that point it felt revolutionary and the best thing since sliced bread. Having used every iteration since then for my day job programming C# applications, I actually cannot stand VS. My dev machine is a dual core 3GHz processor with 4GB of RAM. Yet, compiling a reasonably sized project takes an age. Frequent recompilations which are unnecessary as no code has changed. I can't make a code change while the application is being debugged. The sliding panels really get on my nerves, it's slow to open projects and to close projects. It's difficult to get fine grained control over the build process within the IDE itself. Every single "visual" feature, such as ASPX designer is dog slow to switch into from code view, or back out of. This has been the case with every version of VS and every dev PC I've had for the last four years. However there are some things which I like about it - it has a good plugin API (Resharper is awesome) and a nice integrated debugger. My biggest issue is that it is a resource hog and incredibly slow. I've also coded in Xcode and before that Project Builder for even longer than I've been using VS. The lack of published plugin support is annoying in Xcode but that is probably my biggest gripe. I make no comments about the level of "polish" that an IDE allows a user to provide as I don't think the IDE makes a difference. I would however say that I find myself probably twice as productive coding in XCode than I am in VS.

rbanffy 15y ago

> the result is that Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs. There may be some sort of selection bias here: Mac users are much more sensitive to polish than Windows (or Linux) devs - they have chosen a Mac over a Dell and paid more for it. I am happy with console apps, as long as they do what I need them to, and my Atom-based Acer netbook supplies about 99% of my computing needs.

nxn 15y ago

> Xcode has a different level of abstraction, but the result is that Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs. But yes, it's pretty darn good. Don't you feel like you're ignoring some very important variables by saying that? For example: Cocoa vs Windows Forms, Cocoa vs WPF, etc?

podperson 15y ago
No, because I'm actually saying the reverse of what you think I'm saying. I believe Cocoa tends to operate below the level of typical Windows APIs -- low enough to have complete control over the UX but high enough to make things that ought to be easy, easy. Windows tends to be friendly for lousy developers (typical systems integrators, of whom I have a great deal of experience). At a very low level it doesn't make much of a difference -- good coders will deal with the hand they are given. I think you can make a case for selection bias in that Mac development (the old Mac OS toolbox now called "Carbon" and Cocoa today) is too difficult for hacks which filters out a lot of the crap that people who can cobble together junk using Visual Basic or whatever. (There used to be a website devoted to really awful Mac apps, most of which were built using Realbasic, but lousy Realbasic apps are cross-platform :-) )

shriphani 15y ago

With the exception of Keynote, Numbers and Pages have not behaved well for me when given large documents. Numbers in particular struggled with datasets that Excel would handle very easily. I would rather use Google docs than bother with Pages / Numbers.

podperson 15y ago
I'm certainly no advocate of Numbers. Pages I use for pretty demanding stuff and I've had no problems. Word has problems editing a simple letter, but it certainly may scale to very large documents better than Pages -- but if you're doing that kind of thing, I'd recommend Framemaker.

o1iver 15y ago

Xcode devs consistently produce far more polished apps than Visual Studio devs What is that statement based on? It is an absurd idea. If "more polished" means better code then this statement is just not true. I just completed an internship in a big technology company and the code produced there (for automation/control in the energy and utilities sector) is quite certainly "more polished" than any iPhone application or whatever else people develop in Xcode (certainly not automation/control applications). And they use, amongst other more specialized tools, Virtual Studio. Xcode is an IDE with a very small user-base, alone because of the fact that the Mac still has a small user-base within the industry. It probably even still has a small user-base in the developer community (aside from the hipster apps world). I would love to see some evidence that apps developed in Xcode are usually "more polished" than apps produced in Visual Studio. And in my personal opinion Visual Studio, especially IntelliSense kicks Xcode's butt every day. And same with MS Office... Note: I don't use an IDE unless developing in C/C++, C#, Java or Objective-C

podperson 15y ago
"within the industry" Ah yes. The industry.
mikecsh 15y ago
I never understand people who think that VS is the greatest IDE. Sure, when I first started using VS2003 having been doing all of my C coding on the command line prior to that point it felt revolutionary and the best thing since sliced bread. Having used every iteration since then for my day job programming C# applications, I actually cannot stand VS. My dev machine is a dual core 3GHz processor with 4GB of RAM. Yet, compiling a reasonably sized project takes an age. Frequent recompilations which are unnecessary as no code has changed. I can't make a code change while the application is being debugged. The sliding panels really get on my nerves, it's slow to open projects and to close projects. It's difficult to get fine grained control over the build process within the IDE itself. Every single "visual" feature, such as ASPX designer is dog slow to switch into from code view, or back out of. This has been the case with every version of VS and every dev PC I've had for the last four years. However there are some things which I like about it - it has a good plugin API (Resharper is awesome) and a nice integrated debugger. My biggest issue is that it is a resource hog and incredibly slow. I've also coded in Xcode and before that Project Builder for even longer than I've been using VS. The lack of published plugin support is annoying in Xcode but that is probably my biggest gripe. I make no comments about the level of "polish" that an IDE allows a user to provide as I don't think the IDE makes a difference. I would however say that I find myself probably twice as productive coding in XCode than I am in VS.