4 ms·

Restricting your customer base to those who purchased a new computer in the past year will greatly harm your income (particularly if you're selling business app

Restricting your customer base to those who purchased a new computer in the past year will greatly harm your income (particularly if you're selling business apps). As for the feel: Don't get bogged down by the implementation technology. The vast majority of your customers (presuming you're not targeting the rabid fanboy subset of Mac) will not notice nor care about the language you've implemented your application in. If your software does what a business needs and looks reasonably good while doing it, you'll make a killing.

lallysingh 18y ago
I think you mean restricting your developer base. You know.... as it's Java. It should run (with modest effort) on a few platforms.
- tom_rath 18y ago
  No, I mean customer base. You cannot deploy Java 6 applications to Mac (except 64-bit Intel Mac OS X 10.5 after September, as mentioned above). You can build Java 6 for all other platforms (back to Windows 98, FFS), but to work for Mac customers you have to adjust your build to create a Java 1.5 version. You also have to add in special Java upgrade instructions for those using OS X 10.4 (since the 1.5 upgrade isn't included in automatic updates), and tell anyone with a Mac earlier than that to piss off, because Java 1.5 (released over FOUR years ago, in 2004) won't work on OS X 10.3 or earlier. That is an exceptional pain which isn't present on Windows or Linux. Apple makes wonderful hardware but they treat their third-party developers like crap. Microsoft is absolutely awesome in comparison and realizes that "Developers, Developers, Developers" are the secret to their OS's success.
  - neilc 18y ago
    The Java on OSX situation is pretty deplorable, I agree. But that is not equivalent to "treating their third-party developers like crap." Java is an underprivileged minority on the OSX desktop, for better or worse.
    - tom_rath 18y ago
      It's not just Java. Apple's been awful with backward compatibility for years. Every time Apple upgrades their Mac OS a frantic application re-write is often required from third-party developers just to get things working on the new platform. In contrast, I can pull out an application written 15 years ago for DOS and fire it up under Windows without a problem. Microsoft realizes how important it is to keep third-party software working on their platform and bends over backwards to provide that backward compatibility. For our own software, we've not had to tinker with the base code (written on Win 98) at all under Windows. Building desktop apps for Mac is a (lucrative) pain.
      - tlrobinson 18y ago
        Aside from a) the Mac OS to Mac OS X transition (though existing apps worked under "Classic" mode), b) some apps during the PPC to Intel transition (namely apps with assembly or endian issues), and c) apps that used private / unpublished APIs, that's not really true. It's true Microsoft goes to extraordinary lengths to keep backwards compatibility. Consider the Joel Spolsky anecdote about SimCity: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html In case you missed that, SimCity had a bug where it used memory it already freed. This worked under DOS for whatever reason, but not under Windows. So the Windows team hardcoded a special case just for SimCity. That is going too far, IMO. Why should my OS have all this extra bloat to check for buggy applications? This is why OS vendors seed preview releases to developers, so they can test their own damn software and issue fixes for these kinds of bugs. While it may have been hard to distribute updates 20 years ago, with the internet it's trivial.
        es 18y ago
        SimCity had a bug where it used memory it already freed. This worked under DOS for whatever reason, but not under Windows. So the Windows team hardcoded a special case just for SimCity. It sounds like there was a some kind of bug in DOS that allowed SimCity to work with object freed from memory and Windows team tried to hide it in Windows by making a special case :) In any case I think it's called going an extra mile for the customer, isn't it? (I can't believe I'm writing it about MS)
- demallien 18y ago
  Exactly. Java developers still have the 98% of computers that aren't old Macs as a customer base. They probably don't care that 2% of the market is unavailable, and in the odd case that they do care, they'll just have to target Java 1.5, not 1.6. Not exactly onerous, particularly as the situation is only going to improve going forwards as the last PPC Macs hit EOL. As for Java developers wanting to develop on the Mac, well, I don't know any Mac developers still using PPC Macs as their principle machine. Actually, I don't know any developer, period, using a computer that is older than about 2-3 years as their principle machine.

lallysingh 18y ago

I think you mean restricting your developer base. You know.... as it's Java. It should run (with modest effort) on a few platforms.

tom_rath 18y ago
No, I mean customer base. You cannot deploy Java 6 applications to Mac (except 64-bit Intel Mac OS X 10.5 after September, as mentioned above). You can build Java 6 for all other platforms (back to Windows 98, FFS), but to work for Mac customers you have to adjust your build to create a Java 1.5 version. You also have to add in special Java upgrade instructions for those using OS X 10.4 (since the 1.5 upgrade isn't included in automatic updates), and tell anyone with a Mac earlier than that to piss off, because Java 1.5 (released over FOUR years ago, in 2004) won't work on OS X 10.3 or earlier. That is an exceptional pain which isn't present on Windows or Linux. Apple makes wonderful hardware but they treat their third-party developers like crap. Microsoft is absolutely awesome in comparison and realizes that "Developers, Developers, Developers" are the secret to their OS's success.
- neilc 18y ago
  The Java on OSX situation is pretty deplorable, I agree. But that is not equivalent to "treating their third-party developers like crap." Java is an underprivileged minority on the OSX desktop, for better or worse.
  - tom_rath 18y ago
    It's not just Java. Apple's been awful with backward compatibility for years. Every time Apple upgrades their Mac OS a frantic application re-write is often required from third-party developers just to get things working on the new platform. In contrast, I can pull out an application written 15 years ago for DOS and fire it up under Windows without a problem. Microsoft realizes how important it is to keep third-party software working on their platform and bends over backwards to provide that backward compatibility. For our own software, we've not had to tinker with the base code (written on Win 98) at all under Windows. Building desktop apps for Mac is a (lucrative) pain.
    - tlrobinson 18y ago
      Aside from a) the Mac OS to Mac OS X transition (though existing apps worked under "Classic" mode), b) some apps during the PPC to Intel transition (namely apps with assembly or endian issues), and c) apps that used private / unpublished APIs, that's not really true. It's true Microsoft goes to extraordinary lengths to keep backwards compatibility. Consider the Joel Spolsky anecdote about SimCity: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html In case you missed that, SimCity had a bug where it used memory it already freed. This worked under DOS for whatever reason, but not under Windows. So the Windows team hardcoded a special case just for SimCity. That is going too far, IMO. Why should my OS have all this extra bloat to check for buggy applications? This is why OS vendors seed preview releases to developers, so they can test their own damn software and issue fixes for these kinds of bugs. While it may have been hard to distribute updates 20 years ago, with the internet it's trivial.
      - es 18y ago
        SimCity had a bug where it used memory it already freed. This worked under DOS for whatever reason, but not under Windows. So the Windows team hardcoded a special case just for SimCity. It sounds like there was a some kind of bug in DOS that allowed SimCity to work with object freed from memory and Windows team tried to hide it in Windows by making a special case :) In any case I think it's called going an extra mile for the customer, isn't it? (I can't believe I'm writing it about MS)
demallien 18y ago
Exactly. Java developers still have the 98% of computers that aren't old Macs as a customer base. They probably don't care that 2% of the market is unavailable, and in the odd case that they do care, they'll just have to target Java 1.5, not 1.6. Not exactly onerous, particularly as the situation is only going to improve going forwards as the last PPC Macs hit EOL. As for Java developers wanting to develop on the Mac, well, I don't know any Mac developers still using PPC Macs as their principle machine. Actually, I don't know any developer, period, using a computer that is older than about 2-3 years as their principle machine.