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by eradicatethots 3162 days ago
For Mac users t is a feature, it means 100% dev focus on their platform and tight integration/up to date ness with all Mac features. It’s also obvious a problem, if they have windows users team mates or friends. It’s got pros and cons.
1 comments
OJFord 3162 days ago
Does that matter without knowing the size of the team? If the team's 10x bigger than you'd have guessed, is it still worse if they're working on Windows & Linux platforms too?

FWIW, I do use macOS, I just thought it was an odd 'feature', not least because it makes it unportable and contributes to lock-in.

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pfranz 3161 days ago
The people that seek out Mac-only software may have dwindled, but from the mid-90's through the 2000's there was a lot of pride in how Mac software looked and felt way better than other OSes.

When you have cross-platform software, even with a large dev team, there has to be huge compromises. For example, do menus go at the top (macOS) or do you have menus on each window (Windows)? Does Quit go under "File" (Windows) or under the app name's menu (macOS)? If you look at the Google apps on the iPhone, they originally looked like native iPhone apps, but since then Google apps look and work the same between OSes. This makes sense for a branding and development perspective. The few users who switch platforms for whatever reason are pleased, but for people who just use a Mac don't care about other platforms and want all their Mac software to look and work the same. Some people use Safari just because it's a native Mac app. Many people used Camino for that reason, too (Camino was a native Mac browser using Mozilla's Gecko engine developed between 2002-2012, first released a year before Safari).

As an extreme example, personally, I avoid almost all Java apps. Yes, they're cross platform, but they're ugly, slow, and usually integrate poorly with the rest of my system. JetBrains apps are the only exception that come to mind.

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eradicatethots 3162 days ago
Hmm that’s a good point, I hadn’t thought about team size. Although even with a large team, there may be limits to what you can do if the product must be cross platform. It’s funny I use windows myself so this is not a feature for me, I’m really just trying to see it their way that’s all.
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