Apple Seeking to Stimulate Mac Development With $99 Mac Dev Program | Hacker News Reader

Apple Seeking to Stimulate Mac Development With $99 Mac Dev Program

macrumors.com

29 pointsanderzole23 comments

You don't need to pay anything to use Xcode to build and publish OS X applications. Why would this stimulate development? Why would someone say "well I wasn't going to develop this application for free but, now that they let me pay $99, I'm on board!"

I doubt that official Apple support and forums are the main thing keeping people back from developing for OS X.

No, probably not, but any app that hopes to compete had better be ready for the next version of the OS, and this program gives developers access to betas.

They're offering a lower price membership to ADC, which previously started at $500/yr.

After all the discussion on HN lately about how the iPad is bad for the future of software development, it seems good that Apple is taking steps to reduce friction for potential Mac developers.

As long as this isn't the first step toward a more iPhone-like development model for Mac.

It's funny to think about it. Apple has managed to do such a good job at building up it's own Karma, that it can release ecosystems to great fanfare using rather similar techniques that would get Microsoft nothing but jeers. An app store for the mac would be pretty horrendous, yet Apple's enthusiastic fanbase just wouldn't consider chiding them as a hole. This would sort of be RMS' worst nightmare.

The most exciting aspect of this for me is that the cost is less than the traditional $129 cost of OS X upgrades. So now I can not only get my OS X upgrade for free, but I can repeated early betas legitimately.

Surely they won't continue to release final builds now the program is at $99/year?

$99/year is more than $129/2 years. Also, providing betas but not finals creates an incentive for cheapskate developers to keep using beta releases, which isn't a good thing. (Speaking from personal experience here, since I ran OS 8.5 beta for a long time.)

I wonder how long it will be before they offer a combined option that includes an iPhone developer certificate and access to prerelease software on both platforms. Surely they'd want developers to feed both ecosystems by building great Mac apps that come with mobile companions.

If you are buying some mac hardware, signing up to the developer program pays for itself with a hardware discount.

They've eliminated the hardware discounts from the new $99 program.

If they really want to stimulate development, make it free and don't require a Mac to do the development.

Less barriers == more developers.

It is (and has been) free to develop and distribute Mac apps. The Mac Dev program just gives you access to some pre-release stuff and a bit of support and some other things like that.

How does it even make sense to not require a Mac to develop native software for the Mac?

Er... I don't develop for Irix, but I know my code compiles on it for some of my work because I've had user feedback from Irix users.

I also don't develop on Freescale Coldfire, I use a cross-compile toolchain, and an emulator for testing.

I don't develop on Solaris, I deploy code and use virtualisation for testing on OpenSolaris.

If you don’t have a Mac to develop on you don’t have a Mac to test on, and who wants to release untested software?

XCode has been free for a very long time. It is not crippled. There is no "XCode Professional". SDKs are freely available, and fully documented. No one needs to pay to develop on Mac, and a good many developers didn't bother with the previous incarnation of the Mac Developer program because it was prohibitively expensive. All it did was get you pre-releases of OS X, hardware discounts, and live technical support for the XCode toolchain.

As to supporting development on other platforms... That's just silly. Would you try to develop Win32 apps on a Linux box? Seriously?

If the OP was referring to iHandheld devices, then it makes sense for anybody but Apple to support multiple host development platforms. For example, a lot of people are crazy enough to do embedded Linux development entirely on Windows. Plus there's no native advantage anywhere, so any host CPU type is as good as any other.

For handheld stuff like the iPad and iPhone, my point definitely stands. You wouldn't try to develop symbian software on a Nokia N95.

As for developing Win32 apps on a Linux box, you can using Wine or Mono. Likewise you can do the reverse.

It is free to develop for OS X.

Why would Apple port Xcode to another OS? You don't hear anyone whine about MS not allowing you to run Visual Studio on Linux or OS X. What's the benefit to porting Xcode anyway? Having more shitty apps written by people who don't use, appreciate, or understand the Mac GUI? We neither want nor need such developers.

You don't need to pay to make apps - you can download XCode free (in fact, it comes with every Mac, no download necessary). Paying gives you access to additional support, OSX betas, etc

I assume you are moaning about not being able to develop iPhone/iPod/iPad apps on non apple hardware?

I know what you are saying but do you seriously expect Apple to port XCode to non-osx platforms?

They don't think they're a software company, and they're addicted to the margin on that $600 dongle to run their tools. Otherwise you'd be able to rent a VM running MacOS, like Linux and Windows.

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