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Apple Developer Profile Changing?
rocketjam writes "According to InternetNews.com, Apple Computer is seeing large numbers of UNIX, Java and Open Source developers moving to its Mac OS X platform. Apple Vice President of Worldwide Developer Relations Ron Okamoto mentions that, in the three years since the introduction of OS X, 'people who have experience in those areas are showing a great interest in our OS. We're seeing a lot of first timers. It's really impressive.' The company said it has recently surpassed the 300,000 member threshold of registered developers. Apparently, the increase in enterprise code writers has prompted Apple to add more sessions focusing on enterprise and IT to its upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference."
I wrote an article on this a while back. Someone else in this thread asked why would anyone lock themselves into a proprietary development platform when Linux is available. Well, it ain't necessarily so proprietary.
Beyond the obvious allure, i.e., OS X is the only easy to use desktop Unix that natively supports the major productivity applications (i.e., Microsoft Office). That combination is just not available. Yea, OpenOffice is nice, but for those that *need* 100% compatibility, it's not ready for prime time. Just like linux for the desktop.
Anyway, ever since NeXT opened the developer spec for OPENSTEP, GNUstep has been doing a great job of recreating a compile compatible version. What this means is that Cocoa really isn't as proprietary as you might think because it sticks to the OPENSTEP spec. The result is apps developed for GNUstep can be compiled for OS X's cocoa with relatively little fuss or muss. In essence GNUstep is someone Mac compatible.
Personally, I wish people would dump GNOME and KDE and adopt GNUstep with display ghostscript, a unified class structure, a great GUI, and Linux underpinnings; it is OS X for Linux. Ok, it's more like NeXTSTEP for Linux. Anyway, if anyone takes it mainstream it could mean big problems for Apple.
However, if you're writing a GUI application, the APIs are totally different.
And demonstrably better. Don't make me haul out the fact that a fella named Tim wrote the world's first web browser in just a few weeks on a NeXT cube using an API that's basically identical to the Cocoa API family for Mac OS X.