Comment by archgrove | Hacker News Reader

Comment by archgrove | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, I'm dubious. I can see XCode on Windows, as it increases the developer market share and primes people for a move to Mac. I don't know how they'd do it technically, though - most of the good bits of XCode are based on kernel level dtrace support.

I just can't see them wanting Visual Studio support. It is, pretty much, just better than XCode. Overnight, the superior development platform for an Apple device would be a Windows machine. Unless they're really planning on EOLing OS X and their non iP* businesses, why would they want the best developer environment to be hosted on a rival platform? Killing or abandoning OS X seems insane - desk/laptops still account for 50% of their income, and currently most OS X developers are also targeting iP* devices in parallel with their desktop work. Moreover, the iPhone halo effect is getting them more Mac sales and Mac developers. Whilst they're not hurting for iPhone apps, why give developers the incentive to stop buying Macs, buy Windows, kill off their OS X development, and throw out a hugely profitable segment of Apple's business to gamble on Android not eating their iPhone lunch?

I suspect this is just an analysts "blue sky" nonsense, or a confusion over e.g. development environments for Office 2011 Mac. For reference, this same guy claimed there would be no Mac updates in 2009, and that they'd release a small OLED laptop by the end of 2009. 0 for 2 so far, and I'm guessing 0 for 3.

I think the more significant halo sales are coming from consumers, not developers. How much would Apple really lose by opening up another iPhone developer platform? I use VS at work all day and a Mac at home. Even though I can (and do) run Windows/VS on my Mac, I wouldn't switch away from Xcode (admittedly, I just dabble in Mac development). I don't making VS an iPhone development platform would lead to a significant loss of Mac sales or a downturn in OS X app development, I think it would just encourage Windows developers to create iPhone apps. It's also possible that Objective-C and the Cocoa framework could win over some developers and give them cause to try their hand at OS X development on a Mac. I guess I just don't see the downside to providing a supported development environment on an alternate platform.

At the end of the day, the more quality apps Apple gets on the iPhone, the better it is for them. Better apps = more phone/iPad sales = more halo sales.

I do have to agree with you on your 0 for 3 call, but what do I know. It'd definitely be exciting.

And how would they test apps without the simulator? You'd have to port pretty much all of Cocoa to windows for the simulator to work. It's not an emulator running the real ARM code and iPhone OS; it's more like a compatibility layer between iPhone objects and OSX objects.

> Visual Studio [...] is, pretty much, just better than XCode.

How so? (Genuinely curious, I have too little experience with either platform to judge.)

Mostly, it's that the intellisense and interactive debugger systems are streets ahead. Intelisense is basically useless on XCode, and the debugger support is a thin UI layer around GDB (which, very often, just doesn't work. The number of times it'll tell me that a variable is out of scope when it's quite clearly right in front of its nose is insane).

Call me insane, but I kind of like GDB + Xcode's wrapper. Yes, once or twice it has said dumb things about variables, but no more so than Visual Studio.

Likewise, I can't remember a time when I've seen Xcode's Intellisense-like feature fail, though I can recall several times when Visual Studio's has. (Xcode's method to advance to the next parameter--Ctrl-slash or something--is pretty non-obvious, though.)

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