Scrivener 3 is on the way…

Posted by Christian Tietze
Oct 4, 2017 at 08:17 AM

Chiming in from a developer perspective here.

@Hugh:

> Why did Keith start on the Mac, not Windows? The arguments have been rehearsed on this forum previously. But if I remember correctly Keith has written that the Mac developing environment was simply more encouraging. In particular, the “frameworks and tools” that he needed (I take it this means “off-the-shelf pieces of code”) were available for OSX (now macOS) at little or no cost, and they simply weren’t available at all for Windows. He’d have had to code them himself, and that would have taken far longer.

It’s not like there is much copy & paste code for macOS development; I’d argue that programming for the “Windows API” throughout the 2000s was far more rewarding in terms of copy-pasteable code. Because everyone has a Windows machine, obviously. It’s just that the environment is so much nicer for programmers to think in and design with. Apple’s developer tools (the code editor etc) always were very good, clean, and user friendly. Coding Windows apps before .NET was a lot of hassle. It’s the same as with aesthetics and user interface differences between Mac and Windows, only showing in the internals, too. I develop Mac apps, and I think I’ll have to abandon ship one day to create software for more open platforms for ethical reasons, but I’m severely going to miss how developing for the Mac feels.

You probably also know the rumors that Mac users tend to spend far more money on indie apps; the culture of buying online was predominant because there was virtually no boxed software to buy in stores. Crapware like WinZIP bundled with Yahoo! toolbars etc. never became that popular, either. It was (and is) nice being part of this, even though there were (and still are) so many more potential customers on Windows.