4 ms·

If his site was still up, I would read it and then write the comment. But instead, I will make some sweeping assumptions about what it says based on the title.

If his site was still up, I would read it and then write the comment. But instead, I will make some sweeping assumptions about what it says based on the title. We were never their target market. It is a happy accident that what works for their consumers can also work great for developers. There were always pain points adopting the Mac as your development platform. For example, when it first came out, the JVM available for it was woefully old and out of date. Generally you had to wait 6 months to a year to get the last GA version. Now that the latest is built nightly by Oracle, this is a huge improvement. On Mountain Lion, almost every command line utility (that isn't GPL v3) has been updated like git, ruby, svn, python, etc. At the end of the day, this developer loves that it is still a unix command line with a pretty face. More than I can say for any version of Windows or Linux.

pjmlp 14y ago
I used to work at CERN in the early Mac OS X days, Apple came around with a presentation to convince us that using Mac OS X would be a very nice upgrade path than Scientific Linux, given the BSD roots, equal footing between Java and Objective-C for Cocoa development and nice GUI applications for scientific work. How things have changed since those days.
- mpweiher 14y ago
  Just curious, how have things changed? Apart from aligning message with reality wrt. to the Cocoa/Java bridge fiasco?
  - pjmlp 14y ago
    Well, the Darwin layer does not bring that much for scientist used to customize Linux distributions for high volume data processing. Java, which was used a lot on my CERN days for data visualization was kicked out, after having a first class status on the platform. OpenGL was frozen for several years in version 2.1, while Windows and Linux were having OpenGL 3 and 4 drivers available. OpenCL although designed by Apple has better support in the other platforms. The development experience seems to be oriented towards development of iPhone applications. Finally the Apple tax, which doesn't bring much, when compared with hardware volume licenses plus Scientific Linux installations.
AskHugo 14y ago
You might want to take a look at http://elementaryos.org/ http://elementaryos.org/ . It's an upcoming GNU/Linux distribution that has a really "pretty face".
- terhechte 14y ago
  I switched from various Linux distributions in 2003 to Mac OS X, not so much because of the looks, but because it had support for Linux tools in addition to native support for apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, Cubase, Flash, and many more - basically the creative app building blocks. I still follow Linux news because I liked it as an OS, it just lacked some of the apps that were crucial for me. Nowadays app support has grown (Gimp is still no Photoshop though), but I can't say that I find any Linux distribution particularly visually attractive. I don't like elmentaryos much either - I think the current Ubuntu 12+ looks much better. So for me, using a Mac (despite that nowadays I write Mac & iOS apps) was and is mostly about the software that wasn't available on other operating systems.
- Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
  That dock showing favourites and applications that are open (with a dot below those that are) and that top notification bar are strangely familiar... Trying to place where I've seen them before.
  - xentronium 14y ago
    Unless I missed sarcasm, it's docky[1], which in itself is a clone of os x dock. http://wiki.go-docky.com/index.php?title=Welcome_to_the_Docky_wiki http://wiki.go-docky.com/index.php?title=Welcome_to_the_Dock...
    - Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
      It was sarcasm. I was channeling my inner Gruber but I should obviously leave it to him in the future. Looking at it in more detail it's actually rather nice...
- hdra 14y ago
kungpoo 14y ago
Here's the cached version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iLRdV2yvVQUJ:johnkary.net/developers-we-are-no-longer-apples-target-market/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iLRdV2y...

pjmlp 14y ago

I used to work at CERN in the early Mac OS X days, Apple came around with a presentation to convince us that using Mac OS X would be a very nice upgrade path than Scientific Linux, given the BSD roots, equal footing between Java and Objective-C for Cocoa development and nice GUI applications for scientific work. How things have changed since those days.

mpweiher 14y ago
Just curious, how have things changed? Apart from aligning message with reality wrt. to the Cocoa/Java bridge fiasco?
- pjmlp 14y ago
  Well, the Darwin layer does not bring that much for scientist used to customize Linux distributions for high volume data processing. Java, which was used a lot on my CERN days for data visualization was kicked out, after having a first class status on the platform. OpenGL was frozen for several years in version 2.1, while Windows and Linux were having OpenGL 3 and 4 drivers available. OpenCL although designed by Apple has better support in the other platforms. The development experience seems to be oriented towards development of iPhone applications. Finally the Apple tax, which doesn't bring much, when compared with hardware volume licenses plus Scientific Linux installations.

AskHugo 14y ago

You might want to take a look at http://elementaryos.org/ http://elementaryos.org/ . It's an upcoming GNU/Linux distribution that has a really "pretty face".

terhechte 14y ago
I switched from various Linux distributions in 2003 to Mac OS X, not so much because of the looks, but because it had support for Linux tools in addition to native support for apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, Cubase, Flash, and many more - basically the creative app building blocks. I still follow Linux news because I liked it as an OS, it just lacked some of the apps that were crucial for me. Nowadays app support has grown (Gimp is still no Photoshop though), but I can't say that I find any Linux distribution particularly visually attractive. I don't like elmentaryos much either - I think the current Ubuntu 12+ looks much better. So for me, using a Mac (despite that nowadays I write Mac & iOS apps) was and is mostly about the software that wasn't available on other operating systems.
Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
That dock showing favourites and applications that are open (with a dot below those that are) and that top notification bar are strangely familiar... Trying to place where I've seen them before.
- xentronium 14y ago
  Unless I missed sarcasm, it's docky[1], which in itself is a clone of os x dock. http://wiki.go-docky.com/index.php?title=Welcome_to_the_Docky_wiki http://wiki.go-docky.com/index.php?title=Welcome_to_the_Dock...
  - Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
    It was sarcasm. I was channeling my inner Gruber but I should obviously leave it to him in the future. Looking at it in more detail it's actually rather nice...
hdra 14y ago

kungpoo 14y ago

Here's the cached version http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iLRdV2yvVQUJ:johnkary.net/developers-we-are-no-longer-apples-target-market/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iLRdV2y...