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Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

Weird - so you were uniquely position to capitalize on the growth period, but because you predicted that it would ebb a decade later, you decided not to take part?

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After 20 years working on the same platform maybe he didn't want to go into that fight, knowing the eventual outcome anyway.

I have seen that quite often with my ex-colleague. Some people have been working on the company for ages, solving issues in the same business realm and just at the beginning of the next big thing in the company, they decide it is time to go someplace else.

I used to think they were just afraid they could not compete, or were technically rusty. With many more years in the industry, I understand that the most likely reason is that they didn't want to commit to another round of the same bullshit with new shiny tech on top of it and they simply needed some fresh air.

We are lucky to be employed in an industry where you can still say fuck it and find something else to do instead.

Yes, because I'm an engineer, not a gambler or a marketer. In that time, I also saw OSX become more and more iOS like, with fisher-price grade APIs replacing old, working ones, etc.

Quite frankly I still compile my old stuff now and then, but I have no regrets leaving it all for the hipsters to fight over.

I can definitely see where you're coming from, but I would have still gambled if I had been in your position :)

I'm curious what OSX APIs you saw being replaced?

While not the person to whom the question was directed, I'd offer that the move from QuickTime to AVFoundation (taken directly from iOS) & friends (CoreMedia, CMIO) was one such example. Core Media I/O was released a few years ago to replace vdig and/or sequence grabber IIRC. Despite being released a few years back, the only documentation available for CMIO is a sample project. AVFoundation was limited in terms of codec support relative to QuickTime offering only support for built-in codes. Just as an example. Of course QuickTime had no 64-bit future so Apple had to do something but it was and still is a bit of a mess years down the road.

Are you kidding?

AVFoundation is in nearly every way superior to QuickTime, minus the fact that you couldn't make ref movies with it until El Capitan.

QuickTime's API sucks in comparison.

Source: I write a video editor for macOS.

Not kidding at all. There was a lot of noise during the transition on various mailing lists, as I recall. Even as an end-user the issue presented quite a few problems. While AVFoundation is generally a better API it remains less capable than the QuickTime umbrella was. Again refer to the functionality provided by vDig and Sequencer APIs. A simple case: try to slap together a video mixing app sometime that takes input from the camera or other source, processes some effects on it, and dumps the output back as pseudo device that can be used by other apps. Unless things have changed drastically the last time I looked into the matter, such a thing isn't possible within the constraints of AVFoundation itself. You have to resort to the essentially undocumented CoreMedia IO API. Apple does provide similar functionality for other types of devices at a higher level i.e. scanners, digital cameras via some other API I can't recall off the top of my head at the moment. =]

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