Best Developer Tools for OS X
NoviceW writes to share that there are plenty of interesting articles written about Mac OS X applications for switchers, but not many guides focused on programmers switching from other operating systems. This guide lists a few of the more prominent tools for Mac developers, what other tools can't you do without?
Apple's worldwide marketshare continues to slide lower and lower. It down to about 2 percent now. And now you can run Windows right alongside OS X.
What is the point of doing native OS X development? What is the point of wasting development resources on a shrinking niche segment of the market?
If you are a software developer which of these two options makes economic sense?
1) Spend time learning an entirely new API. Spend time learning an entirely new set of development tools. Spend time/money supporting two different versions of your product/app.
2) Include a readme.txt that tells Mac owners to either use BootCamp or Parallels to run your product.
The native OS X market is going the way of native the native Mac game market. Only those companies emotionally attached to the Mac are going to bother with the platform.
Regardless, a day with Xcode will probably scare away anyone who is coming to OS X development for the first time. My god is Xcode a piece of shit. I would probably reconsider dropping support of the Mac at our company if I could watch the entire Xcode team get the shit beat out of them by a mob of long time Xcode users.
(Yes, it really is that bad...)
I can't believe no-one has mentioned Textmate. It's an excellent text editor for MacOS X and wonderful for doing any sort of programming work.
http://macromates.com/
If you want to see how easy it makes things, it's used in the Ruby on Rails screencasts.
http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts
Or the foot-shooting ability of C and the unreadability of Smalltalk.
Seriously, though, can we get a C-syntax version of it already? It's FRICKING UNREADABLE.
That is the only thing keeping me from using it. Fortunately, you can still make Java use the Cocoa libraries.