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No More Codewarrior for Mac OS X
wandazulu writes "According to an announcement posted on the Carbon developer's mailing list, Metrowerks announced at AdHoc that the forthcoming release of CodeWarrior 10 will be the last for Mac OS X. This isn't surprising given that Apple is transitioning to Intel chips and Metrowerks has exited the Intel market, but it's still the end of an era. CodeWarrior literally saved Apple's bacon during the transition to PowerPC in the early 1990s by shipping the first working set of developer tools for the new platform. And since then CodeWarrior has been the main toolkit for commercial development on the Mac (especially pre-Xcode)."
do they have enough business in the embedded sector that this isn't going to hurt them, or has apple's move to intel basically screwed them beyond hope of recovery?
Some interesting statistics:
83% of Mac developers use XCode primarily
74% of commercial Mac developers use XCode primarily.
Commercial being Microsoft, Symantec, and companies of that size.
CodeWarrior was a great product, but this isn't near as big a loss as the story text implies. Most CodeWarrior users have long since moved over to XCode.
Mainly because PowerPlant was much harder to use imo.
In Soviet Russia, Television Can't Do Thát On You.
MetroWerks officially leaving the Mac development market is a move that has been a long time coming. They started up in the early 90s about the time Symantec began to lose interest in Mac development. Symantec's management got their eye on other technologies and the Mac Dev group and their products suffered from managerial disinterest. CodeWarrior swarmed the scene with a fast compiler, a good debugger, a nice GUI, and a really nice class library (PowerPlant). It wasn't long before PowerPlant had won over the lionshare of Mac development from MPW/MacApp and ThinkC/TCL. Unfortunately after they went public in 1994 they never really managed to turn a profit. They held on for quite a while because Apple subsidized them with development contracts, a huge site license, and even gave out $100 MetroMoney coupons with paid developer accounts to buy MetroWerks shwag.
Apple's subsidies were propping up MetroWerks and when Apple started looking like a losing horse they started porting their dev tools to every platform they could. They haven't really put much effort into their Mac product since the late-90s when they started their shotgun approach to product development. They basically took their IDE and debugger and ported them to every damn platform they could find. None of their ports were really planned out, they just hoped one or two would stick and pay for the rest of the company. As they moved into new markets they put their existing products essentially in maintenance mode. They were on the verge of bankruptcy when they got Motorola to buy them out in 1999. When Motorola spun off their chip division as Freescale they sent MetroWerks with it.
There was little chance of MetroWerks supporting Apple's move to Intel, they hardly support Apple on PowerPC chips. Most of what used to be MetroWerks is now Freescale supporting Freescale products. What used to be the MetroWerks of old is long gone.
Apple is smart to release their own usable IDE and give it away to anyone that wants it. It lowers the barrier of entry to Mac development to simply purchasing a Mac. If you want to write the Next Big Thing you can plunk down a few bucks for a Mac mini and sign up for a free ADC account and a couple of mailing lists. Just a few years ago the only feasible option would be to fork over a few hundred dollars to MetroWerks or suffer with a painfully outdated MPW. Apple also gets to be really flexible with their architectures as the Intel switch is showing. Symantec's decline in interest on the Mac could have doomed the PowerPC lines if MetroWerks hadn't come along when it did. What happened to Symantec is now happing to MetroWerks. Instead of waiting for someone else to rescue Mac develop efforts Apple made Project Builder good and called it Xcode.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The more significant news this weekend is that this was the last MacHack/ADHOC conference. It was one of the best, and will be missed.
Reality has a liberal bias
I make a really good living selling games for Mac (most indie developers think that if a game isn't a big hit on PC it won't be on Mac.. oh well less competition).
:P The game is already well paid back for now tho.
The news about CW are terrible. xcode is really, really bad; it's probably easier to use gcc with your own build scripts and text editor. I've made Atlantis (http://www.funpause.com/atlantis/) in about 250 hours with codewarrior and ptk; with xcode I don't know how long it would have taken. Even compilation on xcode is slow, thanks to gcc 4.0-apple
83% of Mac developers use XCode primarily
74% of commercial Mac developers use XCode primarily.
Source?? This is FUD, and that's the reason the parent poster was AC--ugh!
If you read the xcode apple maillist or develop mac os software for large scale apps, you'd know the figures are actually around the opposite. The truth of the matter is that the latest version of Xcode, 2.1, still has *major* potholes for any medium sized or larger projects. A simple read through the last few weeks of the xcode users apple maillist will reveal this--CodeWarrior users are furious since they're effectively being told that they need to use Xcode (b/c of the intel switch) while Xcode is a far cry from being able to swallow medium (or larger) projects (I myself am in this situation).
Xcode 2.2 promises to stop of the bleeding, but even one of the apple xcode devs said point blank that many of the UI inadequacies won't be addressed until the "next major release" (meaning Xcode 3! -- how far is *that* off?). And then there's GCC 4.0 being broken for certain things. Sure, this has nothing to do with Xcode, but it's more reason CW people like myself are still totally turned off from making the switch.
Anyway, what's more scary is the wacko who posted the parent comment--to just blatantly make up weird shit like that--wtf.
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