BKeeney Briefs

REAL Software announced yesterday that REAL Studio 2010 Release 4 will no longer be actively supporting the PowerPC (PPC) framework.  This really means that only major bug fixes will be done to the PowerPC framework and nothing new will be added to it.

At the 2005 World Wide Developers conference Apple announced the move to Intel and many people were shocked that they would give up the PowerPC line of chips they spent a decade promoting as being better than their Intel counterparts.  Intel was the future and blah, blah, blah.  Many people said the Reality Distortion Field was on full blast.

In retrospect it seems so clear.  One could certainly argue that Apple’s resurgence is, in part, because of their move to Intel.  With a growth rates in the 30% range in year to year quarterly sales growths it’s not very hard to come to that conclusion either.

It’s been five years.  Most consumers have an Intel based Mac and most businesses will probably be phasing them out in the next couple of years if they haven’t already.  On BKeeney.com, only 10% of visitors are running a PPC Mac.  BKeeney Briefs and the ARBP site are both less than 2%.  When 90+% of total visitors to your websites are on Intel it’s safe to say the Intel transition is nearly complete.

The reaction to REAL Software’s announcement has been calm, I think, mainly because no one is shocked by the move.  Most developers are most likely on Intel Macs and I think a vast majority of software buying consumers are on Intel now as well.

Since Cocoa is Intel only and the IDE will eventually be built using Cocoa this presumably means that the IDE will no longer run on PPC machines.  This is probably not a big deal for most REAL Studio developers.

It might be a big deal for developers serving the education market, however.  But since they’ve said they will not remove the PPC build option for several years that market should be relatively safe for the foreseeable future.

Transitions can sometimes be painful.  The fact that Apple pulled off a major transition with very few problems is a testament to their engineering staff.  For companies that feed off of Apple this transition wasn’t always easy and REALbasic had its growing pains.  The transition to Cocoa has been painful but in the long run it will allow REAL Studio to grow with whatever is coming up next for Apple.

What do you think?  Do you still work on a PPC machine to do development?  Do you still serve PPC users?

Interesting little blurb at http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2010/05/26/apple-will-steve-ballmer-show-up-at-the-wwdc-keynote/ about Microsoft presenting at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (otherwise known as WWDC) to show off Visual Studio for iPad/iPhone and general Mac OS X development.

Geeze.  How many levels of wrong is this rumor?  You think Apple is going to trust Microsoft with the keys to their iPhone/iPad kingdom?  I don’t think so.  Apple has worked too hard building xCode and Cocoa Touch to let a 3rd party develop for iPhone/iPad.  If this does happen, then Apple might as well give Adobe a call and let them know they can restart their iPhone/iPad programs too.  And we all know where that feud isn’t over yet.

Where this might make sense is desktop applications.  Microsoft, while doing all that work to write Microsoft Office for the Mac in Cocoa, wrote their own Cocoa libraries and other Mac GUI editors and put it into Visual Studio.  Seems like an awful lot of work with minimal gain for Microsoft unless they’ve decided to make a push in REAL Software’s corner.  They certainly have the knowledge and resources to do such a product.

While I don’t think this rumor has legs it does make you think.  No doubt Microsoft is feeling the pinch of developers learning Cocoa which does nothing for Microsoft.  If they developed a cross-platform Visual Studio it stems the bleeding because now developers don’t have an either/or decision to make.  Learning a new development tool and frameworks suck and letting all those Windows developers develop for Mac and Windows using their tool keeps Microsoft in the game.  It doesn’t help them with iPhone/iPad development (now) but in five years who knows.  If it does happen it will generate some serious buzz which is something Microsoft wants (needs?).

What does this do, if true, to our favorite development tools company located in Austin?  I don’t think it would be good news.

Normally I run REALbasic on Mac OS X and remote debug in Windows.  This works 99.9% of the time but late last week I ran into a situation where I wanted the IDE on the Windows side as well.  So I installed RB and downloaded the plugins that I needed.  Then I started to use RB.

Using RB for Windows was…different.  I’m not sure that I can quantify it other than that it seemed less polished.  It just doesn’t feel like a normal Windows app and it certainly was not as smooth as the Mac OS X version.

The reason I was in Windows to begin with was of tracking down a printing bug that was affecting my product.  Turned out it was the Application.UseGDIPlus property that had been set to true.  The end result was that my reports were ‘blown up’ about 10 times bigger than they should have been.  This has been documented and is <feedback://showreport?report_id=10399>.  Turning off the property fixed the problem.  Some fix, eh?

I don’t think that Windows gets as much attention as the Mac OS X.  Why do I believe this?  The ARBP surveys consistently show Mac users being about 80% of the membership.  Likewise, traffic to this website is roughly 80% Macintosh.  What this means is that beta testers are predominantly Mac based.  I believe that most of the developers at RS are Mac users as well.

Currently, RS is in the transition to get Cocoa out.  It won’t be happening for 2010 R1…so it’s obviously a much tougher nut to crack than they originally thought.  Honestly, I’m not surprised.  Going from Carbon to Cocoa is like creating an entire new platform.  Eighteen months to two years isn’t out of the question for such a big undertaking.

I’m hoping that when Cocoa is out and working great (you think it won’t have some bugs in the first release?) that RS pays a lot of attention to Windows.  They’ve said in the past (sorry no reference for this) that a vast majority of new licenses are Windows users.  But yet, based on observation, the professionals and beta testers are mainly Mac users.  Does that not say something?  Would better Windows support translate into more Professional and Studio licenses?  I don’t know, but I suspect so.

Perhaps it’s time to kill support for Windows 2000.  I’d even suggest killing off XP but I know a lot of places in the world are still actively using it so that’s probably a non-starter.  I believe Cocoa support will effectively kill support for anything less than Mac OS X 10.4 so why not for Windows too?

I suggest that everyone that has a Studio license do a bulk of their work in Windows for a couple of weeks.  More Windows-specific bug reports will (hopefully) get some of the more obvious (and painful) bugs fixed.

What are your feelings about this?  Am I right, wrong, or somewhere in-between?

I’m not entirely sure what Apple changed in Snow Leopard but  we quickly discovered that disk images created in Snow Leopard don’t work the same in Leopard and earlier systems.  When we create our disk images we have something that looks like this:

Looks fine in Snow Leopard.  Acts fine in Snow Leopard.  But when you take it into Leopard you get a disk image that looks something like this (no background image):

Long time Mac users understand what to do but new Mac users were a little mystified at what to do.  Unfortunately we didn’t find this out until after a couple of releases, but we did find a solution.

We use a postbuild script to automatically create our disk image.  The bit of code is:

hdiutil convert -quiet  -format UDBZ -o “${IMAGE_NAME}.dmg” -imagekey zlib-level=9 “./${IMAGE_NAME}.sparseimage” \
|| error_exit “$LINENO: Could not compress the DMG”

This leaves a sparseimage file laying around and normally we get rid of it.  While running this in Leopard we didn’t and copied it.  This sparseimage has the proper graphics and works in Snow Leopard so we now use it as our template when doing builds in Snow Leopard.

We changed the script to delete the OLD file on the sparseimage using:

rm -rf “/Volumes/${MOUNTED_DISK_NAME}/Task Timer 4.app/Contents” \
|| error_exit “$LINENO: Could not delete old build”

Then we copy our newly created RB app into the sparse image.

rsync -a “${MAC_OUTPUT}/Task Timer 4.app/” “/Volumes/${MOUNTED_DISK_NAME}/Task Timer 4.app/” \
|| error_exit “$LINENO: Could not copy into volume”

So, it’s kind of pain to do, and it’s not very efficient but it works.  We are still using RB 2009 R3 because build automation that was released in R4 doesn’t work for us.

Update:  If you want to see the entire script, there is an article in the Articles section on the ARBP members only site, which is available to any paid membership.