Mac Envy

Posted by Paul Korm
Feb 26, 2015 at 10:21 AM

It is interesting that Windows users often ask why such-and-such app on OS X hasn’t been ported to Windows. I don’t recall often coming across the opposite question, why this-or-that Windows app hasn’t been ported to OS X. ConnectedText? Would it ever get a Mac port?

I think the motivation for Mac-centric developers changed with the iPhone and then the iPad. To develop for iOS one needs to work on OS X with Apple’s developer framework. So that’s a starting point for a lot of development today. After a successful iOS app is launched, then a subset of the iOS developers begin looking at porting their work to OS X—iThoughts, Notebooks, etc. Those stages of a developing business solidify the Mac-directed focus. A subset of the subset then moves on to Windows. Notebooks, again.

But the portion of App Store products that have an iOS/OS X/Windows product offering is probably vanishingly small. As mentioned above, it’s very expensive to have a new product team and support team for all three OS platforms. For non-Java work, the return on investment diminishes rapidly each time a new OS is supported.

Over here, I run Windows 8 on my MacBook Air. That’s the best way to get one’s feet wet in all the oceans of software. Too bad it’s so dauntingly more difficult to run OS X in a VM on Windows.