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In general, not using the platform your users use is a path to trouble. For example, because so many designers in the valley use Macs, we continually have to fi
by gmurphy 14y ago
In general, not using the platform your users use is a path to trouble. For example, because so many designers in the valley use Macs, we continually have to fight an OS X bias in our design process; when designing something, you tend to calibrate it against what you're used to, but when OS X is only 5% of the market, OS X-based designers of client software end up with a massive blind spot when it comes to understanding what comes naturally to the rest of the world.
One example is font and font size choices - because the system fonts and font rendering styles differ between platforms, it becomes very hard to tell what looks broken or 'not quite right' on the platform you're not used to. It's not uncommon to see sites launch with font choices that look rubbish on ClearType, but if you're not used to ClearType, it's hard to tell whether the rubbish is your fault or not.
Apple's excellent execution and Windows' (no-longer-deserved) poor reputation also mean you frequently hear excuses for this behavior like "Windows users won't care because they don't care about design" or "The Apple way is better, so we should do it that way on Windows too". Both of these are infuriating and lead to terribly designed products.
- justindocanto 14y ago5% of 'the market' does not translate to 5% of users on your site. Depending on the site's demographic, as a developer, I see approx 15% Mac users making up traffic. Not to mention an ADDITIONAL 25% iPhone users. That's an average of 40% of apple traffic on the sites I work on. Some of which are getting 30k - 60k hits a month. Obviously this isnt the same stats across the board on all websites... but It is by no means FIVE percent.
- protomyth 14y agoYour Mac number is not far off from Apple's Mac percentage in the US - 12%.
- einhverfr 14y agoIndeed. According to Google, something like 39% of viewers on my blog are running Windows and 9% are running IE. There are more Mac and Linux users together than there are Windows users.... Somehow I don't think this translates to the general market.
- josephcooney 14y agoRight. This was a few years ago, but a major web-site that I was involved with (+1M visitors per day) had more people running windows 3.1 than Linux.
- einhverfr 14y agoI suspect it depends on your audience. My audience is not consumers, but PostgreSQL and Perl folks, so Windows is going to be under-represented.
- andreyf 14y agoWindows 3.1, really?
- josephcooney 14y agoYup, really. I was as surprised as the next person.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- eli 14y agoThe point isn't whether there are 5% or 15% Mac users -- it's that you're ignoring 85%+ of non-Mac users.
- batgaijin 14y agoI have an android 3. Never updated it, never customized anything. This phone is so terribly broken and nonfundtional at times you wouldn't believe me. I decided against focusing on android mobile dev (although I'm a gnu/linux gguy because the experience is so friggin terrible, and Google is just letting the carriers molest the users at this point.
- CrazedGeek 14y agoConsidering that Android 3.0 was never on phones... If you mean Gingerbread (2.3), it was always rock solid when I used it. So no, I don't believe you.
- batgaijin 14y agoHah meant droid 3
- recursive 14y agoI use android 2.3 and it works perfectly.
- jfoutz 14y agoReally depends on how you divide up the market. Mac users will pay a lot for perceived quality, and they will buy upgrades. I'd point you at Wil Shipley's arguments. It might be a lot easier to get $50 from a mac user, or it might be easier to get $5 from 10 windows users. They're just very different. Doing a half assed job on either side isn't going to win you any fans. But, yeah, if half your money comes from windows, you should really focus on windows, The growth potential there is just staggering.
- achal 14y ago> font and font size choices Agreed. I don't know if it's just me, but Helvetica looks rather bad on Windows. I've found that Segoe UI almost always looks more pleasing, and yet Helvetica is omnipresent on the web (partially because of Twitter bootstrap).
- NinetyNine 14y agoI can't verify this, but unless you installed Helvetica manually, windows installations won't have it and will fall back to whatever is specified next in the family (usually Arial or the default Sans Serif).
- coderdude 14y agoA good example of this can be found on SoundCloud. They load a placeholder image that represents the common sharing widgets and then let the real widgets load over them. The problem is that the font rendering makes it look weird on any platform except the dev platform: http://i.imgur.com/lejjI.png http://i.imgur.com/lejjI.png
- aidos 14y agoOh yeah, that's an annoying one and we have that problem too. We have sharing controls that reload as you cycle through images - but the delay / iframes reloading for the share widgets looks terrible. To get around it we use fake versions like soundcloud.
- jiggy2011 14y agoPlatform choice and fragmentation is a pain in the ass. I develop and maintain a bunch of sites. Majority of visitors are on Windows (Many using IE/WinXP). Servers run Linux and I can never seem to get an accurate dev environment under Windows (some libraries don't seem to behave differently there). Also a bunch of the front-end tools that I would like to use only run on Mac. I don't really want to keep 3 uptodate computers.
- nddrylliog 14y agoWhy would you need to run a dev environment on Windows? Keep running your dev environment on Linux and SSH to it using Putty/Chrome secure Shell. Works like a charm :)
- jiggy2011 14y agoBecause I like to be able to use graphical tools and VNC etc feel laggy.