Re: For Dan Johnson: more app rewrites

"ZnU" <znu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:znu-74FE31.22244120012008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In article <13p796kffnemkf0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Daniel Johnson" <danieljohnson2@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Uh, yeah. I guess we'll be hearing more of this "less is more" thinking from
Mac fans. :D

You've been hearing it from Mac fans for a couple of decades. If it were
an excuse, rather than something they actually valued, they'd have left
the platform a long time ago.

Yes, that's true. Apple has never behaved well towards its developers, but it used to also ship a lot of really awful products. You had to be even more into "less is more" excuses to stick with Apple back then. Hence the marketshare collapse.

The notion is spreading more now as Web 2.0 type companies push it with
web-based apps (many such companies are Mac-based -- not a coincidence),

Presumably because producing a *real* Mac application is considered too risky, what with Apple's behavior, so they favor the web-based model?

Too bad Web apps, you know, suck.

as Apple's success in consumer electronics and media distribution is
causing other companies to pay more attention to what Apple does, and as
information technology goes ever more mainstream and regular consumers
get fed up with ever-increasing complexity.

Well, I would expect this: consumer electronics companies should now be paying attention to Apple. That's "other companies" if anything is.

[snip]
It's a lot more likely than your theory, which, as nearly as I can tell,
is that Intuit is doing this because there won't be a 64-bit version of
Carbon. Who would ever need a 64-bit version of a personal finance
application?

I'll argue with that excuse some other time. You are simply misunderstanding my 'theory' here: I think they saw that Apple will no longer enhance Carbon, and they knew that meant Carbon was dead. Therefore they wanted out. And with this Cocoa product underway already (I guess), they had an easy way out. So they took it.

Of course, this simple explaination falters somewhat if they do not also cancel QuickBooks.

[snip]
This isn't entirely meaningless. If this new product is successful, Intuit
might port the thing to Windows. By contrast, there is no way Office 08:mac
is coming to Windows.

It doesn't look like a particularly portable app.

That depends a lot on internal details of which we know nothing. But, yes, Cocoa does make porting harder.

Which is interesting
in itself; Intuit seems to have hit on the idea of leveraging its brand
and its expertise to create different apps tailored for different
platforms. Contrast with the Adobe approach of trying to make everything
as similar as possible on both platforms, down to implementing their own
file picking dialogs.

My personal view is that Intuit is right, and Adobe wrong, on this one: you wind up producing inferior apps if you insist on ports being identical.

Of course, you can do what MS did with Office back in the day: Do a first class Windows version, then a cheezy Mac port. But this does not appear to be what Adobe is doing.

[snip]
Well, usually the idea is that you'll make an app that does stuff the
old app couldn't, not one that does less stuff.

This is precisely the problem. The goal should be that each successive
version of the app better meets users' needs. Approaching this goal by
simply adding more bullet points to the feature list with every release
is a solution that is obvious, simple, and wrong.

Why is it wrong?

Admittedly, usually "less stuff" is the result. That's why rewrites
are not usually done. It's also one reason why Apple's endless
transitions are bad for Mac users: you get more rewrites this way,
and more rewrites means less stuff in your apps.

Once again you advance a theory that, followed to its logical
conclusion, seems to mean that new apps can never be better than
established apps.

Well, that's a pretty decent rule of thumb. Established apps usually are better.

[snip]
[snip- InDesign]
(One does rather wonder why they didn't just make the file format
XML-based, like all of Apple's pro apps these days.)

Because that is wretchedly slow.

It's just awful in Apple's iWork apps, and even Office 2007 suffers by comparison to the old Office and it's binary format.

Office 2007 also benefits, since its format is documented so you can write programs that parse it or generate it- something that was dreadfully hard to do with the old binary Office files. But they are paying for that with markedly reduced performance.

I wonder what iWork's excuse is. It's not like Apple documents those formats.

[snip]

.

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