Re:On 2016 Apple: What do “Pro” users want?
by blobbles on Wednesday November 16, 2016 @04:32PM
(#12971762)
I think it started even earlier than that, with the launch of Mac OS X. At that time, all dev software on Windows was expensive or pirated, and while Linux had the free tools, the desktop experience wasn't the best. So here was OS X, with all the OSS compilers and such, and you could still run Photoshop and Word.
Now, Windows has free dev tools, and Linux has a much nicer desktop.
Re:On 2016 Apple: What do “Pro” users want?
by jasonjei on Wednesday November 16, 2016 @04:33PM
(#12971778)
I still think OS X is a good environment. Not great. Somebody needs to make OS X/macOS great again, because it has become sluggish, bloated, and over-encompassing.
I think the earliest versions of macOS/OS X since the Intel transition (that's when I joined) were great. UI was intuitive and minimalist, and OS did an adequate amount of functionality, and Spotlight was great. Now Finder lags and caches wrong items all over, and occasionally crashes.
Remember Ruby on Rails and the initial hype? DHH, the author of Rails, is a marketing genius. He was probably one of the first people who introduced a development platform with screencasts. Those screencasts featured beautiful pixel-perfect TextMate editor, available only on Mac OS X.
Everybody said "wow!" and started buying Macs and coding Rails. After sluggishly slow IDEs of the day and geeky vim/emacs stuff with dangling corners and UI flickering, TextMate was pure visual Nirvana. Thankfully, Ruby came preinstalled with Macs.
And thus, the market was created. Apple probably didn't intend to make Macs a solid developer's machine, but it happened, and it was supported until recently.
Now, the support has been withdrawn, and it left many people in Limbo. I have moved to Ubuntu, but I will miss my happy days with OS X.