Slashdot Mirror


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?

5 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. OS X Native Development Pointless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    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...)

    1. Re:OS X Native Development Pointless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      "Why, then, has Linux application development not shrivelled up? "

      Gee, could that be because there is virtually no native commercial application development for Linux to begin with?

    2. Re:OS X Native Development Pointless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      "So do rather a lot of other developers."

      Bzzzt!!!

      Wrongo dumbshit. The number native OS X developers is tiny.

      Keep hugging your overpriced Mac dummy. At the rate Apple continues to lose market-share Apple isn't going to have anything but iPods to survive on.

  2. TextMate by EvilGrin666 · · Score: -1, Troll

    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

  3. Re:Objective-C by Mattintosh · · Score: -1, Troll

    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.