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Is this the one with the loaded question/insult from an audience member about deprecating a framework? Cause I agree that Apple has been too developer-hostile o

Is this the one with the loaded question/insult from an audience member about deprecating a framework? Cause I agree that Apple has been too developer-hostile on Mac OS for a very long time, even though I'm mostly on the user side (but have also done a little Mac dev). They unnecessarily break third-party software too often, to the point where many devs have given up on proper Mac support and just thrown things into an Electron app. Maybe the guy in the audience was right.

sillysaurusx 4y ago
That one was so funny. He may have been right, but Apple’s chess moves speak for themselves. They’ve built one of the most valuable companies in history.
- hot_gril 4y ago
  I don't think the deprecation-happy policy helped them. I think they succeeded in spite of that because they made products that were great on their own. The iMac, iPod, and iPhone were so user-friendly, and that's orthogonal to the Mac dev experience. Also, iPhone OS was actually a great dev platform unlike Mac OS, which facilitated a huge app ecosystem at least initially (nowadays apps are less of a thing). People have their complaints, but it's a paradise compared to creating Mac apps because there aren't too many wrong ways to do something, the OS handles a lot more for you, and initially it was a gold rush because of how readily you could profit from making apps. It became standard for everything to have an iPhone app. Macs, on the other hand, always suffered from a lack of third-party software. Eventually it began to matter less cause of web stuff, but it's still an issue.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    A culture of deprecation certainly helped; you couldn't iMac without it (everyone raged about it not having a floppy drive). And even so they support carbon or cocoa or whatever it was for longer than people expected.
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      They could have an iMac with a floppy drive. At the time, CDs were already popular enough, and external floppy drives were available. They didn't just drop the thing everyone's using. They were nice sometimes, like with Rosetta (and v2).
      - hot_gril 4y ago
        A hardware example of when Apple dropped the thing everyone's using: The 2016 MacBook Pro forced a cutover to USB-C when it was at about 0% adoption, and it was a mess.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    I think the post-OS-X Mac dev experience varies a good deal depending on the type of software you're making. Are you building a Mac-first app using the most blessed toolkit (Cocoa)? You're probably fine, so long as you're not looking to toss out a binary and forget about it for 5+ years (periodically recompiling with newer SDKs and such). Even 20 years down the road getting old FOSS Cocoa projects building and running again isn't too hard, because even though there are a lot of deprecations the deprecated stuff largely still works. On the other hand if you're building lowest common denominator cross platform desktop apps, yeah life might be harder. Same for games. That said I think the bulk of this pain comes from making assumptions that an unavoidably changing world will remain static — the sort of backwards compatibility provided by Microsoft is really the exception not the rule, and even there it's starting to flake away likely because the teams at MS are growing tired of having nearly unbounded backwards compatibility act as a ball and chain on OS development. For running apps that were created without their devs' intent of long-term maintenance I think the best thing is probably third party compatibility layers like WINE, which allow for a pinned API target without locking OS vendors into decades old decisions and emergences.
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      Many devs don't maintain their software the way you describe. I don't think they should need to. If you look at what most software does, it's pretty static. Like you're telling the OS to draw windows with buttons and run your code in response to inputs. More complex with games, but still. The Mac user interface doesn't change much over time. The software should be a lot safer from OS changes. Microsoft showed that it's possible, and they even did it with third-party hardware. Same with the web. If Apple wanted compatibility with less burden, they could've provided better abstractions to devs. "Do things this one sanctioned way, and it won't break." Mac OS was not good for games in the end. It was common for a minor OS release to break a good portion of your game library, sometimes permanently. If I understand correctly, Apple even intentionally let OpenGL go stale to push Metal instead. This was all on top of DirectX being Windows-only. Relying on WINE for an official software release is a kludge, and despite the common claim that it comes at no performance cost, somehow things tended to be much slower in it (not from the WINE translation layer itself but some other consequence of semi-incompatibility).
KerrAvon 4y ago
No, you can't really draw that line from 1997 to today's Apple. (a) Deprecation of a framework is inaccurate. It was halting development on OpenDoc -- which had been sold as the future of software development on Macs and other OS's up to that point (sort of, you had to be there). There is no modern parallel; Apple halting all development on UIKit and removing support and tools for it tomorrow would be something like it. (b) Steve said in the video that the guy in the audience might be right. But he also said that Apple had to focus to survive. Apple just barely made it -- remember that while the iMac was a design masterpiece, it wasn't that big compared to the rest of the industry; Apple was still essentially fighting for its life with every hardware release until the iPod.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hot_gril 4y ago
  Thanks for the insight. As you can maybe tell, this was happening soon after I was born. I got into computers at an early age, and it was 90s hand-me-down stuff, so I got vague exposure to the old state of things.
- sroussey 4y ago
  Somewhere there is a video of me presenting at a WWDC keynote related to OpenDoc, and I was young and unprepared and spoke too fast. I’m glad that not everything is easily accessible online.
mjhoy 4y ago
I think so, at ~50:22.

sillysaurusx 4y ago

That one was so funny. He may have been right, but Apple’s chess moves speak for themselves. They’ve built one of the most valuable companies in history.

hot_gril 4y ago
I don't think the deprecation-happy policy helped them. I think they succeeded in spite of that because they made products that were great on their own. The iMac, iPod, and iPhone were so user-friendly, and that's orthogonal to the Mac dev experience. Also, iPhone OS was actually a great dev platform unlike Mac OS, which facilitated a huge app ecosystem at least initially (nowadays apps are less of a thing). People have their complaints, but it's a paradise compared to creating Mac apps because there aren't too many wrong ways to do something, the OS handles a lot more for you, and initially it was a gold rush because of how readily you could profit from making apps. It became standard for everything to have an iPhone app. Macs, on the other hand, always suffered from a lack of third-party software. Eventually it began to matter less cause of web stuff, but it's still an issue.
- bombcar 4y ago
  A culture of deprecation certainly helped; you couldn't iMac without it (everyone raged about it not having a floppy drive). And even so they support carbon or cocoa or whatever it was for longer than people expected.
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    They could have an iMac with a floppy drive. At the time, CDs were already popular enough, and external floppy drives were available. They didn't just drop the thing everyone's using. They were nice sometimes, like with Rosetta (and v2).
    - hot_gril 4y ago
      A hardware example of when Apple dropped the thing everyone's using: The 2016 MacBook Pro forced a cutover to USB-C when it was at about 0% adoption, and it was a mess.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I think the post-OS-X Mac dev experience varies a good deal depending on the type of software you're making. Are you building a Mac-first app using the most blessed toolkit (Cocoa)? You're probably fine, so long as you're not looking to toss out a binary and forget about it for 5+ years (periodically recompiling with newer SDKs and such). Even 20 years down the road getting old FOSS Cocoa projects building and running again isn't too hard, because even though there are a lot of deprecations the deprecated stuff largely still works. On the other hand if you're building lowest common denominator cross platform desktop apps, yeah life might be harder. Same for games. That said I think the bulk of this pain comes from making assumptions that an unavoidably changing world will remain static — the sort of backwards compatibility provided by Microsoft is really the exception not the rule, and even there it's starting to flake away likely because the teams at MS are growing tired of having nearly unbounded backwards compatibility act as a ball and chain on OS development. For running apps that were created without their devs' intent of long-term maintenance I think the best thing is probably third party compatibility layers like WINE, which allow for a pinned API target without locking OS vendors into decades old decisions and emergences.
  - hot_gril 4y ago
    Many devs don't maintain their software the way you describe. I don't think they should need to. If you look at what most software does, it's pretty static. Like you're telling the OS to draw windows with buttons and run your code in response to inputs. More complex with games, but still. The Mac user interface doesn't change much over time. The software should be a lot safer from OS changes. Microsoft showed that it's possible, and they even did it with third-party hardware. Same with the web. If Apple wanted compatibility with less burden, they could've provided better abstractions to devs. "Do things this one sanctioned way, and it won't break." Mac OS was not good for games in the end. It was common for a minor OS release to break a good portion of your game library, sometimes permanently. If I understand correctly, Apple even intentionally let OpenGL go stale to push Metal instead. This was all on top of DirectX being Windows-only. Relying on WINE for an official software release is a kludge, and despite the common claim that it comes at no performance cost, somehow things tended to be much slower in it (not from the WINE translation layer itself but some other consequence of semi-incompatibility).

KerrAvon 4y ago

No, you can't really draw that line from 1997 to today's Apple. (a) Deprecation of a framework is inaccurate. It was halting development on OpenDoc -- which had been sold as the future of software development on Macs and other OS's up to that point (sort of, you had to be there). There is no modern parallel; Apple halting all development on UIKit and removing support and tools for it tomorrow would be something like it. (b) Steve said in the video that the guy in the audience might be right. But he also said that Apple had to focus to survive. Apple just barely made it -- remember that while the iMac was a design masterpiece, it wasn't that big compared to the rest of the industry; Apple was still essentially fighting for its life with every hardware release until the iPod.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hot_gril 4y ago
Thanks for the insight. As you can maybe tell, this was happening soon after I was born. I got into computers at an early age, and it was 90s hand-me-down stuff, so I got vague exposure to the old state of things.
sroussey 4y ago
Somewhere there is a video of me presenting at a WWDC keynote related to OpenDoc, and I was young and unprepared and spoke too fast. I’m glad that not everything is easily accessible online.

mjhoy 4y ago

I think so, at ~50:22.