Cross With the Platform

Tim Bray tweeted, No platform has hit the big time till it's been flamed by JWZ. He was referring to this rant in which Zawinski systematically dismantles any claim the iPhone has to cross-platform compatibility. "I finally got the iPhone/iPad port [of Dali Clock] working. It was ridiculously difficult, because I refused to fork the MacOS X code base: the desktop and the phone are both supposedly within spitting distance of being the same operating system, so it should be a small matter of ifdefs to have the same app compile as a desktop application and an iPhone application, right? Oh ho ho ho. I think it's safe to say that MacOS is more source-code-compatible with NextStep than the iPhone is with MacOS. ... they got some intern who was completely unfamiliar with the old library to just write a new one from scratch without looking at what already existed. It's 2010, and we're still innovating on how you pass color components around. Seriously?"

Comments

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[aristotle-dude]

The parent is not flamebait. It is an accurate description of what issues exists with all of MSFT's platforms. Windows 7 is an attempt to depart from this bloat but I'm afraid that they are throwing out the baby with the bath water.

If you disagree, post a rebuttal instead of wasting your mod points.

I speak as someone who develops for windows platforms on a daily basis at work and yet I choose to run a mac at home and I own an iPhone. Some of my co-workers that work in QA also own macs at home.