No Macs? Holy crap did WotC do the math wrong!

[JDJblatherings]

Even if 90% of Windows machines were work-only vs 50% of Macs (which I do NOT believe is the case, statistically irrelevant anecdotes aside), personal Windows machines would still be a vastly larger market.

A market of millions is still a market of millions.

 

[green slime]

Java is a LOUSY solution. It has horrible memory management tools, it's slow as molasses in January, and it has problems with certain browsers.

Why am I not surprised that someone would say this?

Because, as Nifft points out, there is a lot of terrible software out there, that gives this particularly public language a worse-than-deserved reputation.

Well designed, it need not run slow.

Yes, once a blue moon, you may on occassion run into memory management problems. I can't say it doesn't happen. But neither can I say that it happens more often than errors I see when other programming languages are used. I can't say I've seen any major problems with the browsers I use.

But nothing, nothing can exceed the frustration of the Windows OK button "An Error has Occured: OK"

WTF?!? How informative is that?

Now personally, I could care less for Mac, but it isn't worth the effort (purely from never having ever used one). However, I'm very much in favour of making software as independant of hardware and operating systems as possible. The gains made in terms of portability, ease of use, and creating a common user experience far outweigh any minor hiccups over perceived "memory management" issues.

 

[green slime]

These two decisions would have been the right decisions, but the hegemony is so pervasive that people don't even think about it.

QFT

 

[Tanuki]

Nifft is correct. Writing good multi-platform code is easy, well, not more than 5% harder than writing for a single OS. You just have to design it that way from the beginning. If you isolate things that need to be platform-specific via an abstraction layer, then you have a tiny percent of code that needs to be actually ported. But there are too many badly trained code-slinging monkeys around these days who don't have a clue how to write good code.

(Why not just do it in web-hosted Java? Heck, it’s not like the graphics they have shown us have been anything close to impressive. It doesn’t need to be videogame quality, 60 fps 1200x1000 widescreen. How hard is it to display a 3-d field with some static entities on it? Beyond trivial.)

So, you want a business case for writing platform-neutral code? Sure, here you go, micro-economics 101: for everyone except the OS vendors, the operating system is a complement. As the price of a complement goes down, demand for your product goes up. If Windows were 100% free-as-in-beer, anyone could pick it up and install it solely for the purpose of accessing the DI. Demand for the DI would increase.

Since Microsoft will never reduce the cost of Windows, that means the only way for Wizards to reduce the cost of their complement is to expand the options for that complement: making Mac, Linux or Java versions would reduce the cost of the complement to those target consumers using those OS's. Since the price of software development is a fixed cost, the cost of porting to these platforms is negligible compared to the gains, amortized over a sufficient period. As the user-base grows, the network externalities grow at a geometric rate, which is just more good news for business.

Arguments to the effect of “you knew you were going to be marginalized when you chose a non-monopoly OS” miss one important fact. I made my OS choice (Linux) with the full knowledge that my ability to enjoy one of my favorite hobbies would be entirely unaffected by that decision. Now, since D&D is moving to an online, Windows-only model, Wizards has deliberately and maliciously marginalized my ability to consume their product.

So far, everything I hear about 4th edition makes to salivate in anticipation. Except the DI. The DI is just Wizards little way of letting me know that I’ve gone from valued consumer to marginalized non-entity in their brave new world. Nice.

 

[Aeolius]

Just to be completely unreasonable, I insist that all D&D insider content be usable on my Treo using the Palm OS!

and the iPhone

 

[SteveC]

I highly doubt what you were doing in school equates with the real world. Academic computer science is far removed from real world software engineering. Assuming the application is written in C or C++ (very likely), two decisions would have made their lives easier and would result in a cross platform product.

Well, you'd be right now, but very wrong at the time. I was in school at the time the Java wave was starting up, and many of my classmates ended up getting hired directly out of college to work for some major development houses that declared that Java and cross-platform compatibility was the future of programming. All of those companies have since either gone out of business or switched back to what you talk about below. I did much of my early college programming in C++ with a freeware compiler, and I would have gone back to it in a second rather than develop in Java. Shudder.

Use an intermediary GUI toolkit (wxWindows, GTK, etc.) which runs on top of the underlying platform toolkit (GDI, Cocoa, X). These toolkits tend to be higher level and easier to use than the native toolkit, saving development time.

Choose OpenGL rather than DirectX. OpenGL has wider support than DirectX both platform and hardware (more video cards support OpenGL). OpenGL is a very mature framework (MS used to push it before DirectX) that is well documented and easy to use. Whether one or the other is easier is probably up for debate, but there are far more tools available for OpenGL than there are for DirectX.

These two decisions would have been the right decisions, but the hegemony is so pervasive that people don't even think about it.

I would comment that these are some good points, but no one that I know who still programs for a living does anything with OpenGL anymore, although they are not necessarily happy about that fact. The type of people who are likely to pitch something to WotC would almost certainly have pitched it as a standalone product written with DirectX in mind.

WotC would almost certainly outsource the entire project, and being located in Seattle will tend to color the kind of proposals you get. .NET and DirectX programmers are available in some abundance out there after all. I have a couple friends who work for Microsoft who would do the project pro bono if given the chance, and you can imagine how they would put it together.

--Steve

 

[Driddle]

People always seem quick to dismiss my experience with cross-platform development in favor of their own guesses about it.

There are also people *with* cross-platform experience (*puts hand up*) who disagree with you.

And then there are some of us who are fundamentally unable to dismiss your experience because we don't know about it to begin with, but who still want to make our own guesses regardless.

 

[Nifft]

If you isolate things that need to be platform-specific via an abstraction layer, then you have a tiny percent of code that needs to be actually ported.

There's something else, too: by coding to an abstract layer, you are protecting yourself from future versions of Windows.

(Have you seen the rage of a VisualBasic programmer when he learns that not only has his chosen language changed incompatibly, but he also has to go back and manually re-write the kludges which were recommended by the maker last year? When the only reason he chose VB was for the "support" and "compatibility" promised by that same manufacturer, and he could have gotten most of the benefit WITHOUT the deliberate knife in the back by instead using an open source tool like Python? It's not pretty.)

Microsoft isn't in the business of making life easy for 3rd party developers. They're in the business of competing with 3rd party developers.

The software industry isn't a pretty place.

Snuggling my safety-penguin, -- N

 

[Tanuki]

Just to be completely unreasonable, I insist that all D&D insider content be usable on my Treo using the Palm OS!

Why not? Once the information is in a database anyway, how hard can it be to make a no-frills version for palmtop users? All the hard work is done by the back end anyway, with just the display information is pushed to the client browser. Heck, being able to read DI articles on my Treo while standing in line at the grocery store is something I would definitely pay for.

 

[TiTi____]

So we all know that the mac is a minority OS. WotC says that their market research indicates that only a small minority of their gamers use macs. If their data matches other data sources, the size of that minority is less than 10% of home computer users.

Great. DDI can be a success with only 90% of the market.

But for DDI to work (or, at least, for the online tabletop to work), and entire group needs to access DDI. WotC is now building the game around the typical group of 6.

That means that somewhere around 50% of D&D game groups include at least one mac user.

Can DDI be a success with only 50% of the market? Or is WotC expecting these groups to say sayonara to their mac-using buddies?

Either way, for a company that's normally very good at recognizing the gaming group--not the gaming individual--as the key unit, I think they've made a fairly serious miscalculation.

If the developers are willing, they'd use Java as their development language. In that case, OS/Platform is of no importance (unless they use OS/platform specific libraries/extensions, but that would be stupid).