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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

To be frank the "mac exclusive" marketing is a huge turn off for something that should obviously be nearly completely agnostic regarding PC operating systems. Makes me wonder what other poor decisions went into the design of this thing.

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It's not marketing. They're just upfront about limitations (software is single-platform) while trying to present it positively (it will feel native on that platform). The entire page seems to make a point of being upfront about limitations, which is kind of a rare thing. That said I agree that making it cross-platform would have been wise, since the software is entirely secondary to the physical product.

> Makes me wonder what other poor decisions went into the design of this thing.

Haha me too man, me too.

(Edit: I don't mean that sarcastically, I'm genuinely interested how others would make this thing.)

Yeah, I actually physically rolled my eyes when I read the "exclusively for Mac" copy on the website. I get it if you want to build a cool photo transfer/view app as an add on to the experience, and want to do it native, and only have time to build for one platform. But calling that out in that way makes it sound like some sort of "feature", which is a huge turn-off, regardless of whether or not they're building exclusively for my platform of choice.

But the camera itself should support MTP, USB mass storage, or something of that nature, and should just work on any platform. If it doesn't, that's a pretty silly oversight.

It's not an oversight. There are very good reasons for it, which are detailed elsewhere in the comments thread.

> should obviously be nearly completely agnostic

Is it obvious? Is it free (as in resources) to support agnostic platforms and systems? Is the threshold for making anything that it needs to be compatible with everything?

In general, no.

However a security camera that works with all operating systems just needs to expose a drive via USB… as has been done for decades now.

Apparently, to take the processing off of the camera chip, the decision was to:

1. Not use a filesystem on the SD card;

2. Write RAW files only

This means software is needed to both transfer files, and to convert them into an image format.

Personally, I'd put that software on board, with extra dedicated hardware if necessary (it can be powered off of USB), and make the device appear as a massage storage device to a USB host.

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