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

[RFisher]

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

Yeah. & no doubt I'd learn something from discussing the topic with you. But I'm doing my best to avoid such a discussion in public forums. Heck, I probably shouldn't have even posted in this thread. I probably shouldn't even be writing this post...

I mean, mac users have been the red-headed stepchildren for years, in this respect. Just ask folks using Tivo Desktop, Microsoft products or the vast majority of game software.

My dad stuck with Apple even during the years that I couldn't. (Plus, during that time, I decided Playstation was for games, computer wasn't--with some minor exceptions.) Yet he has never had a lack of Mac games. In fact, we just bought him another one for his birthday.

Once you separate the crap (however you define it) out of the vast majority of game software, you find that a lot of what remains is Mac compatible.

& Microsoft Office has always been available for the Mac. Microsoft clearly felt it when they allowed Office for the Mac to stagnate.

Though I do grant you it may be harder to find someone with experience doing cross-platform design, I don't think it's always a good trade off to hire someone cheaper and less experienced instead.

A moot point. A decent programmer will get up to speed on cross-platform development faster than a lousy programmer will produce crappy code that works.

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.

OK, here's the brief version: I worked for a three man company (only two of us were programmers) that produced shrinkwrapped consumer software that sold well. We supported Mac 68K, Mac PowerPC, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, & Windows NT. (& if you think supporting different versions of Windows isn't cross-platform development, you haven't dealt with a complex product that really tries to fit each platform.) When I started, none of us had Windows programming experience, yet we had our first product on the shelf in 6 months.

I could go on, but that's the job that may be most analogous to the topic at hand.

So, arguments that cross-platform development is too expensive or takes too many resources or results in lowest-common-denominator software, &c.; doesn't hold water with me. Rather, I've seen that the benefits of cross-platform development far outweigh any additional cost.

Where cross-platform development gets expensive is when you postpone it.

So, why doesn't everybody do it? Well, there certainly are situations when cross-platform development doesn't make sense, but that doesn't account for everybody. It is, IMHO, because the decisions are too often make on instinct or "conventional wisdom". I hate to say it, but I believe a lot of my success in this industry is because I refuse to accept the conventional wisdom until I've convinced myself it is right & applicable to my specific situation, not because I have superior coding fu. & I've been lucky to work for some people who respected my experience, research, & opinions.

 

[Tanuki]

Sorry. You might not have deserved it.

Oh, I may have done. Rereading my post, it is overly phlegmatic. I have gone back and used "strike out" to remove the phrases that made me come off as more bull-headed than I originally intended. My apologies.

 

[JDJblatherings]

Since someone mentioned that the poll was in the Computer forum, I'm just going to hazard a guess that since computer software is harder to come by for macs than for Windows, it's likely that there are more mac people in that forum than elsewhere, since part of the reason they're there is to locate mac software.

I don't have any problem finding Mac software. apple has it for sale right ontheir website and there are several other very easy to locate websites for mac software also. There are far less second rate NWN,doom and halo knock-offs available however.

Of course this morning i was playing a DOS game on my Mac which hasn't worked on a Winodows based machine for a couple of years now.

 

[JVisgaitis]

How come every time this comes up it turns into a debate on who knows what about the creation of cross compatible software? We also get the whole I can get what I want on my Mac and have people starting with the whole OS debate. Sheesh! Not trying to thread crap, but this just bugs me.

 

[Scott_Rouse]

That's the problem right there. The percentage of Mac users that play D&D is a lot higher then Mac's current market share.

Just looked at our site statistics and while we get nowhere near the traffic that EN World or WotC would get (we average about 5,000 visits a month), we break down like this:

Windows 70.74%
Mac 26.04%
Linux 2.73%
Undetermined .49%

1 out of every 4 people is a far cry from the percentages a lot of people are claiming and based on these numbers, Charles argument certainly has a lot of resonance.

This poll does not take into account how many people run more than one OS. How many Mac users also own a PC?

 

[kenmarable]

This poll does not take into account how many people run more than one OS. How many Mac users also own a PC?

3

Only one is a gamer, but nobody likes him anyway.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I don't have any problem finding Mac software. apple has it for sale right ontheir website and there are several other very easy to locate websites for mac software also. There are far less second rate NWN,doom and halo knock-offs available however.

I mean mac-based games and gaming tools. Which is why they are looking in the ENWorld computer forums rather than anywhere else...it being a site frequented by gamers who could point people toward software like CrystalBall, a mac application I first saw mention of in those very forums.

 

[HatWearingFool]

A couple of things...

I work as a programmer for a Post Secondary Education Institute in Canada. And I can tell you that around here Mac sales among students are literally sky-rocketing. Our institution and others that we keep in touch with are all in the same boat. Our services for students are now being re-written to work with multiple platforms due to increasing demand from our customers. Although many services have been moved to the web using standards in the last 5 years so this isn't that bad of a situation for us.

So while many older people might not know someone one with a mac let me assure you many University or College goers sure seem to.

Regardless as to the debate about whether or not cross-platform development costs more. I think most people with a software development background would agree that since WOTC has already committed to DirectX the costs involved in any future cross-platform porting will be considerable. It is very costly to attempt to make software targeted at one platform platform agnostic. So I don't think it's realistic to expect a Mac or Linux port. In fact I would expect that if they were to decide to support other OS's they would decide to simply rewrite everything form scratch to be platform agnostic.

However, if you are still hopeful for a port of the DDI software I have this piece of advice. Every person who uses a hack (virtual machine, wine, bootcamp, etc) has voted for the status quo. Why should WOTC bother to make a native version for you if you are willing to pay for a sub-par experience? This is the problem with these solutions, there very existence removes the motivation for companies to make native ports of their software. I have chosen to use VMware Fusion and Bootcamp to allow me to run critical software on my mac. Since I do not consider DDI to be critical and I wish to get a native port of the software I will not be using either of these solutions to run DDI.

Instead I will probably sign up for DDI for one month and then cancel my subscription with a email to WOTC explaining why (lack of support for my platform of choice). I believe that WOTC will be more inclined to listen to someone who has proved that they wish to be paying customer than some anonymous ranter on the the internet. Also if many alternate platform users did the same it WOTC could actually see how much money they are missing out on. It's hard for them to quantify how many people are waiting for a native port to sign-up.

Hopefully I've made my arguments against using workarounds clear. I have no problem if you are the user of an alternate OS and are willing to live with some kind of workaround. I just don't want to hear these same people complaining about not getting a port after they vote (with their money) to support the status quo.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

A couple of things...

I work as a programmer for a Post Secondary Education Institute in Canada. And I can tell you that around here Mac sales among students are literally sky-rocketing. Our institution and others that we keep in touch with are all in the same boat. Our services for students are now being re-written to work with multiple platforms due to increasing demand from our customers. Although many services have been moved to the web using standards in the last 5 years so this isn't that bad of a situation for us.

I've made this point in previous discussions on mac market share in the past few weeks. It seems that until the corporate world adopts macs at a 50/50 ratio there will always be an excuse that macs are worthy of being left out. When looking at trends in the highly desired target demographic of college-aged laptop users, the affected groups ratio is even more dramatic.

But I also think that Charles Ryan's original post is being lost in the discussion on this thread. Even though macs have a small share of the total marketshare of all computers in the US, statistically it works out that 50% of groups will have be negatively affected by the decision to not target mac users.

Lastly, that so much of the meat of the DDI is being thrown into a client also ignores other important trends in the market and also bothers me. The more that is thrown into a client app means the trends towards web-browsing consumer handsets (highlighted by the iPhone and iPod touch) is an opportunity that is going to be missed.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Lastly, that so much of the meat of the DDI is being thrown into a client also ignores other important trends in the market and also bothers me. The more that is thrown into a client app means the trends towards web-browsing consumer handsets (highlighted by the iPhone and iPod touch) is an opportunity that is going to be missed.

This, I agree with. I would have preferred a robust web-based interface to something run on the user's machine. Also, how awesome would it be to play D&D on a Blackberry with a Bluetooth headseat on a train, or in the park, or while you're wandering down the street to the sandwich place? Pretty awesome, I think.