[fpc-pascal] Re: Porting Discussion

[Richard Ward]

Jonas writes:

>  we even have administrative people at our university who have  
> learned to be somewhat efficient with our SAP implementation, which  
> is universally recognised by everyone here as a the most horrible  
> user interface they have ever used).

------

Funny you mention this because my idea for a new application would  
directly compete with SAP for a particular industry.  What is  
encouraging is that the opinion you cite is the same one I have found  
in my own informal poll of actual non advanced "Joe" users.

The question/comment of web apps is valid.  Actually, you can  
officially create web applications for the iPhone right now and Apple  
has not officially/fully released the Cocoa development kit for the  
iPhone yet - still beta.  So, Apple is a bit bipolar already.

Apple makes it hard for the individual "developer" to think their own  
way as far as human interfaces go.  This seems contrary to their  
advertising - but their purpose is to make the end user's experience  
as unobtrusive as possible navigating ANY application right out of the  
box.  Macs have been typically marketed to artists and if one looks at  
the computers shown in TV shows and movies, you will notice that Apple  
logo quite often.  These artist types usually have a different mindset  
than computer programmers and often even struggle with Mac  
applications much less Windows or command line systems.   If a more  
intuitive human interface was not an important feature, we would  
probably still be typing in commands at the C prompt.   Thus Apple's  
philosophy has been to try to force programmers to think Apple's  
way.   And it works for them.   Their users are very happy with the  
consistency and it is very hard to get mac users to switch unless they  
have to because of pressures at the work place.

Actually, I like being able to let Apple dictate the human interface  
GUIDElines AND supply routines to implement those guidelines.   It is  
a pain at first to have to learn, but after you learn it and have  
implemented a shell with them, you don't need to have to maintain a  
lot of code.   This is Apple's strategy to keep end users happy and  
developers subservient.  My complaint with Apple is (1) they switched  
from Pascal interfaces to Objective C and (2) you must learn their  
entire Cocoa development paradigm and not just the individual HI  
widgets if you want to be a "true" developer.   They bundle an entire  
development system to make it easier for you to do it their way.  That  
is why I haven't been programming for 10 years until now when FPC and  
a nice simple third party IDE came out for it and actually it was by  
semi accident I discovered it.

I fully understand and sympathize the issues of trying to get a port  
out and implementing a HI paradigm is a lot of work.   I did this with  
some of 15 year old Mac programs at first but ended up learning (and  
still at the relative bottom of the hill) and implementing Apple's  
current API.  Yeah, it is work.

What I am curious about is why are people porting programs from other  
platforms to the Mac?   From the discussions, it seems that the end  
users are happy with their current implementation.   Macs are more  
expensive.   Macs have only maybe 5% of the corporate market share and  
maybe 15% (at most) of the home market.  The end users are used to  
their current HI and seem to like it. A lot of work and money is  
needed just to make a bare bones port.   This doesn't seem to be  
logical to me so I must be missing something.   What is driving the  
port?  Many developers have dropped Mac implementations since it was  
too expensive to maintain.

I , myself am thinking I might be able to sell a Mac application where  
there is NO currently available product.   If I was fluent in Windows  
programming, I definitely would write the application for Windows  
since the end users mostly/all are used to and have windows  
computers.  I have ideas how to address this but if I were working for  
a regular software company, I have no doubts that this implementation  
idea would be thrown out as being fiscally irresponsible.  And it  
would be hard to argue.   In this case, one does need to "think  
different" in order to attempt to accomplish this foolish idea.    
However, the converse of porting from windows to a Mac seems very  
problematic and has me scratching my head.