Does New Development For Mac OS X Make Sense?

DLWormwood wonders: "As a long time Mac developer, originally as a hobbyist and then a professional, I'm feeling pessimistic about the future of the platform now that Apple is embracing Intel and abandoning the few remaining 'Mac' technologies (like the PowerPC and OpenTransport) left to the platform. With the high likelihood that these new Macs will offer a full speed version of Virtual PC and (what I think is) the almost assurance that some clever hacker will make 'X for x86' run on commodity hardware, I'm doubting the willingness of most IT and development houses to even give the Carbon and Cocoa APIs a first glance. (If it wasn't for the poor past performance of VPC, I would not have gotten my first Mac programming job.) Can anybody with a more optimistic view think of a scenario where a modern development house will do Mac development in an age where the help desk will just say either 'switch boot to Windows/Linux' or 'run Virtual PC?'"

Comments

Re:from a user stand point

[mark_wilkins]

> its just ...too gui for me

Put Terminal in your dock and then click on it once in a while. Your problem will clear right up.

-- Mark

No, it doesn't make sense.

[hunterx11]

It's unfortunate, but endianness is the most important part of an API. You're going to have to reverse to order of the bytes for the string literal in "Hello, World!" to make it work. It's just not worth the effort.