[fpc-pascal] Re: Porting Discussion

[Marco van de Voort]

> What I am curious about is why are people porting programs from other  
> platforms to the Mac?

Simply because there is demand. Most of what is said goes for direct sales
to mac people, which is often not the case for these ported software. It is
a distinction that I somewhat miss in these discussions. 

It is about selling your windows/Linux software that wants a "solution" for the
one demented mac user that maintains the companies newsletter (and which the
helpdesk was already glad to be able to wane from classic Mac OS, let alone 
move to something "horrible" as Windows).

The constant questions get fatigueing, so you search for some way to shut
them up, and if you have to do it, at the same time make something out of it
to add a bullet to your marketing. (we support Mac).

However it shouldn't cost too much, specially not something like reschooling
a developer. (in Objective C and the Mac Way(tm) in general, exorcism
included)

Of course this is an a bit cynical and slightly exagerrated (but true!)
description, but the point is to try to avoid looking at this situation from
a too Mac angle. Keep in mind that the home-user is not the bulk user of
custom software, that is the industry.

If the devels targeting Mac with portable suites were so Mac centric and
perfectionist as described in this thread, they would go the Apple 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.

So apparantly the porters are (in general) are not putting the Mac central
to their world, so trying to force them to is useless. You can only enable
them by making things easier. (which are often small things, like Lazarus
introducing a widget to make dialogs that have the same button order under
OS X)