[fpc-pascal] Re: Porting Discussion

[Jonas Maebe]

On 24 Jun 2008, at 15:02, Marco van de Voort wrote:

>> On 24 Jun 2008, at 14:18, Marco van de Voort wrote:
>>> prefered way,
>>> and invest massively in some ObjC solution, to not miss some word of
>>> mouth
>>> or a pat on the shoulder from Apple and/or partners.
>>
>> Even several Mac-only developers do not do this because they have too
>> much investments in existing code and skills. And they can make
>> perfectly fine apps.
>
> Hmm, how do they (plan to) deal with the 64-bit carbonicide then?

That's a different matter and may actually be a real reason to invest  
in Cocoa/Obj-C, but for most apps 64 bit needs are still quite far  
off. This can also happen gradually since you can perfectly combine  
Cocoa and Carbon in a single app (they're also adding functionality to  
make that easier).

>> Nobody has asked for this. But flooding the Mac market with
>> quick&dirty Windows ports is going to be as commercially successful  
>> as
>> Kylix was on Linux,
>
> I do not agree with the analogy. The problem with Kylix was that it  
> targeted
> a (not yet) existing market,

And because the IDE was slow, buggy and crashing all the time to the  
point where it was virtually unusable (at least that's what I remember  
from Michael's mails). The reason (or at least one of the reasons): it  
was a quick&dirty Windows port using an early version of Wine rather  
than a native Linux port.

> So you seem to miss my point. Namely that for most of the porters a  
> proper
> budget to do it right is simply missing.

I'm very well aware of that, I'm just saying what the consequences are/ 
will be of that.

> So it's either "quick&dirty" or not. Both for the developers, as for  
> the
> users. And IMHO it is arrogant to state that then there can be no  
> such apps
> at all.

Who said there cannot be such apps? I'm only saying that in general it  
is a bad idea to create them because they won't be received very well  
by the Mac users/market at large (and if someone else creates one with  
a proper interface which does more or less the same as yours, your  
small investment will probably soon enough be largely in vain, except  
possibly for those helpdesks that only want to shut up annoying users).

It's just market advice, not a moral judgement. And obviously cost  
also plays a role in case of taking development decisions, but few non- 
Mac users in this discussion appear to agree on the importance of  
having a native look&feel, which may result in a cold turkey if they'd  
try their hand at the Mac market (you can consider it at least as  
important there as stability and performance).


Jonas