Moho Forum

I remember windows 3.1. I distinctly remember thinking, "are you kidding me?"
It was easier to just use the dos prompt for most things. It usually make my computer crawl anyways. Things like police quest or x-com2.
The only thing it had going for it was a color screen while the mac was black and white.
Back then page maker blew the doors off of anything you could hope to do with a windows box. That started to change in Win95.
At least they got there act together and based 2000 off of OS2. And in Windows 7 they have a "dock" thing at the bottom just like a mac! IT makes me want to remove linux and install Win7.
Oh and for viruses. I have a floppy kicking around someplace full of mac OS 6.5 viruses.
I'm really glad this is more or less civil, and that for the most part the consensus is that it is more about what applications do you want to use as opposed to what OS.

The application availability debate is over as far as I can see.

Mac OS X makes distributing a mac and win version of software much easier than in the past. Plus with the mac OS X "dual boot" of Windows that whole issue is not a big deal anymore. You can buy an intel mac and have two computers... of course you would need to buy Windows OS but that would happen anyway if you had to buy a PC and a Mac.

I have a PC and a Mac. If I owned a new fast Intel Mac I could just have one computer with both. Years ago I used VirtualPC on my Mac. It actually did the job fairly well for my limited needs.

Many apps written for Unix are available for Mac (with some extra tools and a bit of fiddling). This opens up a whole new area of application availability for Mac users. The Intel Mac also changes things for Mac.

The one thing that always bugged me in the past was the bias against Mac by developers. I've actually heard software developers say they wish they could just dump the mac OS completely and only work on the Windows version. Or they wouldn't develop for Mac because they would have to buy one. In the past this would have been a money saving option. But now with better development tools developers can almost use the same source code for both platforms. They of course still need to buy and learn to use a Mac for development.

-vern

But when Windows software now runs on Mac WITHIN OSX (using Parallels for example), what IS the incentive to write a Mac version for developers?

Also, I read one interview once where a developer said something like, "What's the point of writing natively for Mac? If you're a success Apple will just write their own version and give it away for free." But that may just have been sour grapes because Apple bought his competitor.

A long long long time ago I own a vic-20 and could program it in Basic and Assembler. Then IBM took over the market for home PC, or they thought they did. IBM Dos was starting to be king, until DR dos and a slew of other copies came out. M$ pushed 3.1 out the door with out really testing it as they done with Dos. Along with the new OS was a shift to compiled languages. One reason was that they were faster it the time, but more importantly was that unless you know assembler, you can't decompile the code. So programs that were written and complied for 3.1 hid how the program worked. C became the prominent programing language.

The next shift was was to C++. That when I stopped programming. Too set in my ways of self taught programming. I have never figured out where the stack index pointer goes when the dot operator is used?

But along with the compiled language was suppose be the advantage of compiling to this or that machine. Only minor changes in the code was needed. Ya right. I don't know who was to blame but programs that were written for windows never got compiled for Apple. Did they make their systems so that it just wouldn't accept each others code or was it the lazy and cheep companies that wouldn't support both OS's?

Look at AS it runs on three operating systems. Windows, Mac and Linux, where Linux is more like 10 to a 100 different OS's

If I knew that I could get my windows programs on a Mac or Linux, I would dump M$.

Dale

cross platform issues:

Doesn't the come more from developers making system calls (and using OS prewritten tools)? It's more like assembling a pile of predefined blocks. Unfortunately, when you do that, it's harder to deal with sticking the different brands of blocks together-which are often different 'shapes'. (and hopefully the code works around bugs and other issues built into the system.)

From what I've seen, the software that makes its own interface, and creates its own tools, tends to get on different platforms quicker-then it's more of a processor compatibility issue, and a smaller system call (or ROM) pile to integrate. Often times, the software is faster running too. I think it comes down to ignorant, and/or lazy developers. (how much software do you suppose is written in assembly anymore?-or Forth or Ada or Fortran or Lisp or...) Looking at the software that I normally use, it tends to be stuff that's 'feature free' (like it looks bland, but it does a job well-and tends to be OS independent).

I wonder, what's Anime Studio written with?

heyvern wrote: The one thing that always bugged me in the past was the bias against Mac by developers. I've actually heard software developers say they wish they could just dump the mac OS completely and only work on the Windows version. Or they wouldn't develop for Mac because they would have to buy one. In the past this would have been a money saving option. But now with better development tools developers can almost use the same source code for both platforms. They of course still need to buy and learn to use a Mac for development.

-vern

Cross compiling?

i've always found that i spend most of my time tinkering when i own a pc... updating things, virus software etc.., deciding between a dozen different products that all do similar things, demoing each one... upgrading hardware, drivers, cleaning my registry, running defrag utilities...

buying a mac made me focus on producing output, because i no longer had so many options to procrastinate on.

pete

I use a Mac. And that's because I basically hate Windows. I just couldn't resist anymore, trying to keep the viruses off my PC (which still wouldn't go away, I mean, I had an antivirus with 2 antispywares, a firewall and a HIPS but still...). No matter how much careful I was, those bitches still got in. I do download a lot, but that shouldn't stop me from having fun, and create problems. And I just hated having to reply to hundreds of stupid popups. Then, maintaining Windows (cleaning it up, cleaning the registry, defragmenting and eventually formatting every month or so, to prevent it from getting slow). I realized that the more I used it, the slower it got. And finally, the interface. Horrible IMO. Really, even Anime Studio looks really bad under Windows. It's not a big deal, but it had a negative effect on my workflow. Oh, and let's not forget the instability of Windows. All the apps I used on Windows crashed much more frequently than on the Mac.
Then I got a Mac. All those problems vanished. I like the stability, the fact that not only the Mac-only apps, but also the other apps (AS for instance) Looked better on it, I don't have to deal with malware anymore, that overall it was faster and didn't really get slower with time...

I know, Macs cost more than PCs, usually, and I'm sure I could have gotten a better PC for what my iMac costed, but yet when I buy a PC, no matter the price, I feel ripped off. When buying a Mac, I find totally worth it.

I hear you loud and clear, empanimator.

Sounds like I wrote the post myself. Except that I didn't really think the apps looked bad on Windows, but I agree with everything else. Big up.

Truth be told I really used to dislike Macs. The lack of a second button and the weird way it used the top bar...then I got a Mac and I see how suckie Windows really is.

Yeah... I do download a lot....

That's like saying I stole food from a the bin behind the restaurant and it made me sick.
If you can afford a mac then you can pay for your entertainment or go without, bitching about being infected by a pirate - that's just plain dirty.

Oh no my tablet PCs stopped working, time for my BSOD. Ironic really.

I kind of want to agree but mac haven't made a tablet yet (not counting mods)....still waiting

chucky wrote:

Yeah... I do download a lot....

That's like saying I stole food from a the bin behind the restaurant and it made me sick.
If you can afford a mac then you can pay for your entertainment or go without, bitching about being infected by a pirate - that's just plain dirty.

Oh no my tablet PCs stopped working, time for my BSOD. Ironic really.

I kind of want to agree but mac haven't made a tablet yet (not counting mods)....still waiting

Ehm...did I say: "I download a lot of illegal stuff"? Because that's not what I do (Except movies, I admit it).

me too

I hate to say, but downloading movies is illegal too.

I really love hearing how people justify piracy to themselves. I used to do it a lot until I canned ALL my pirated software, music and movies one day. ALL of it.

Mikdog wrote:I hate to say, but downloading movies is illegal too.

I really love hearing how people justify piracy to themselves. I used to do it a lot until I canned ALL my pirated software, music and movies one day. ALL of it.

I know, but:

1.Downloading movies shouldn't really cause problems to Windows (especially with all the security measures I was using)
2.I live in a country where movies come out very late, and, really, EVERYWHERE you find nothing but pirated movies. I mean, they sell them in shops. It's actually hard to find non-pirated ones. So, I thought, since it's exactly the same thing, why not downloading the movies instead of paying 5$ for them (which wouldn't really affect the original movie company anyway), since when downloading at least you can get decent DVD rips instead of horrible-quality movies? Yeah, not only they're pirated, they're also bad quality. I made the mistake of actually buying the Simpsons movie, for instance, and it was a Cinema recording! You could see people in the front rows getting up and obscuring your vision!

And no, I'm not gonna buy original movies online, I don't really want to risk using too much my credit card and it usually takes a lot of time (if at all) for a movie to arrive in my country.

Same thing is for software in my country. But I actually buy my soft.

dm wrote:I wonder, what's Anime Studio written with?

The core of Anime Studio is written in C++, with only a very thin layer to handle OS-specific things like windows, mouse handling, displaying an image, threads, etc. This cross-platform library handles just the very basics - once a window is up on the screen, every pixel you see is drawn in cross-platform code. Then of course there's Lua for tools and the Scripts menu, which is totally cross-platform.

I actually enjoy writing cross-platform apps. Once the cross-platform framework is in place it's really no big deal. But sometimes a bug will show up on one side that was somehow hidden on the other side - for example, some kind of memory error. It really was a bug on both platforms, but only showed up on one. (Maybe it would have appeared later on the other platform as a mysterious, hard to reproduce bug.) Running and testing an app on two platforms I find enforces a certain amount of discipline and helps reduce errors.

Plus, I've switched platforms so many times in my computing life that I'd be uncomfortable dedicating myself to an app that wasn't available on other platforms.

-Mike