The Ohanaware Weblog
Why Mac development is so much easier
Did you know we were planning on shipping our amazing Mac Photo Software, Funtastic Photos for Windows? We still might, but here’s a little insight to why we didn’t to begin with. We decided midway into the project to focus solely on one platform and stabilize the product. We choose to focus on the Mac for a whole bunch of reasons, not least due to the fact that Apple’s toolkit is much more extensive than Microsoft’s.
An example is using Apple’ Image IO Kit allows us to read a large number of images, including raw images. MS’s offering does only a couple of formats JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF and BMP. While most people will mainly be using JPEG, we want to support RAW. We also used Apple’s Quartz for a lot of the graphics, again Windows has a graphics engine, but it lacks some of the nice effects that Quartz has.
iWatermark is another product that I develop and its for both Mac and Windows. Recently several Anti-virus companies flagged iWatermark as being a virus, this was quickly rectified, however it caused several customer into panic refund demanding. The other problem we come across is troubleshooting, when an application crashes on the Mac, Apple create a nice crash report which contains a very helpful stack report. On Windows, nope, nada… Guess where the crash is occurring buddy! I have one customer who is running Windows Vista on several pieces of Dell hardware, however it refuses to start on one machine. Doesn’t matter what he does to that machine, it just crashes and we don’t know why.
While the Mac having technology that Windows doesn’t, is a pain (and can be expensive) its the last two issues that worry me the most. Troubleshooting appears to be next to useless unless you can have that machine in front of you and debug on that machine. The AV companies can cause you all kinds of pain, and you’re left with the angry customer! We’re still keeping our options open, and who knows what might happen?
Tags: Windows