Yeah, I simply don't understand this recent tendency to launch on Mac first. Out of the big 3 (Linux, Windows, Mac), Mac is by far the worst platform to launch on because you have to buy hardware. Please can we stop it now. Just launch on Linux - everyone can access Linux no matter whether they are PC or Mac.
The Mac is a phenomenal platform to launch right now if you make software targeted at developers. There's huge growth in mobile development, and many mobile developers work on OS X. Not just iOS developers, I'm seeing lots of Android devlopers working on Macs too recently.
And if you make a new tool, you should go where the young (in the sense of experience, not age) developers are. Experienced developers already have their workflows all set up and don't try new tools as often.
Even if its inconvenient for those who don't have a Mac, from a business point of view, targeting the Mac is absolutely sensible.
Having just (involuntarily) switched to a Mac at work, I can also attest to the fact that Mac users tend towards impulse buying software... The fact that I have to buy software to get proper window management and a good window switcher makes me furious. App-only switching makes no sense to me. I just want to pull up the last window I was looking at, I don't want to have to think about whether it was in the current app group or not. Also, not allowing that to be customized makes no sense. The OS has all of the info needed, and the market for 3rd party apps shows there is a desire... but I guess I'm just 'holding it wrong'.
Most people in the office have spent $100 on software that just customizes the OS, not even considering the other dev tools that they purchase.
As much as I detest OS X, IF I were releasing desktop software for-pay, I would focus on OS X ($ per user) and Windows (kids & college students).
It is true and I dont like this either but I still prefer working on OS X than windows because in windows I cant use most of the tools I use and than linux because of the pain of running linux on desktop.
OS X is a nix that works well on a very specific puece of hardware. I am not wasting my time and sanity fixing some driver compatibility issue.
> The fact that I have to buy software to get proper window management and a good window switcher makes me furious.
Off-topic, but what window management software did you buy? I use Spectacle (http://spectacleapp.com) which is free, and it seems to fit my needs fairly well, but, uh, I'll live up to your stereotype and admit that I'd be glad to pay for something better. :)
>Most people in the office have spent $100 on software that just customizes the OS, not even considering the other dev tools that they purchase.
What's your point? Most people have spent >$100 on going to a theater to watch movies, which is arguably a much worse way to spend money than improve your workflow.
Windows has much worse window management than OS X, and so does Linux. Just because the info is there, doesn't mean the Apple team should handle ever edge case and scenario ever.. that's why you have applications. Should an OS also come with a perfect and free IDE?
I'm trying to figure out what on earth you mean by OS X having better window management than Windows and Linux. Of the three, I've long considered OS X to have the worst.
>Experienced developers already have their workflows all set up and don't try new tools as often.
Speak for yourself. I'm always trying new tools as they come available, and was thinking that GitUp would be a fun one to add to my toolset. And then I saw "Mac Only" and groaned. I don't own a Mac, and though I will likely buy one soon (for iOS dev reasons), it will always remain my ugly-stepchild dev box, that I own only to do Xcode builds, not any serious development work.
I simply don't understand how so much weight gets thrown behind such a perverse walled garden from DEVELOPERS. We know far better than this and ObjC? Swift? Eat that right up. It's so unhealthy.
Releasing closed-source software on Linux is a pain, unlike Mac where you can assume most people will be running one of 3 recent Mac OS X releases (or even 2)
He missed the word special. You need to buy special hardware from Apple to use OSX (or figure out how to make Hackintosh work), while Linux can run on just about anything. Also, sidenote, some places do give out hardware with open source operating systems, eg Free Geek[1], but of course this sort of thing isn't available everywhere.
? The market share of people actually running a platform probably matters more than the number of people theoretically capable of installing a platform.
IntelliJ IDEA (after a while getting font rendering working properly) has an amazing set of VCS functionality and works quite nicely on Linux (have used on Gentoo and Arch). Of course it's ostensibly aimed at JVM languages, but has good support for PHP/JS/Python/Ruby/etc. There's also an upcoming C/C++ toolchain for it (the CLion experimental builds will eventually be a plugin for IDEA too). Most of the great VCS features are available in the non-commerical open-source branch too:
Similarly Eclipse's EGit is pretty nice too, although, being based on JGit and not the reference git implementations it has a few features here and there that aren't supported. But the on-disk format is compatible so you can always apply the commandline tools if needed.
…and not release under a free/open license for GNU/Linux. Yeah, right. That stinks. No joke. Proprietary software for proprietary OS's ought to not exist.
There also is nothing wrong with proprietary software. Don't run it, or purchase it if you have some moral disagreement with it, but many people don't and are perfectly happy to pay money for it.
There are a lot of people who believe there is something wrong with proprietary software. You don't have to agree with the FSF or their goals, but it does everyone a disservice to conflate the argument for software freedom with an argument against proprietary software. The FSF considers commercial use and distribution of software to be an important part of software freedom and does not consider licenses that forbid it to be free.
And if you think it is unethical to sell proprietary software and refuse to use it oneself, it is also perfectly reasonable to advocate that others follow the same course. A value position that one doesn't believe others should follow isn't a value, it's just a preference.
There's absolutely things wrong with proprietary software. It leaves software users in the position of having technology that they cannot control freely. See, e.g. the arguments from GM and John Deere that you do not have permission to modify your own car or tractor. Or countless other examples.
And basically zero of the people who pay for proprietary software are saying "I'm so glad this is proprietary". They pay because the package of what they get in utility is worthwhile and outweighs any concern about the proprietary nature of the software.
You see, I think this is exactly the kind of entitled attitude that pushes away people from Linux.
People don't give a damn about the intricacies and history of their tools, they care about getting a good work done in the less stressful way.
I stopped using Sourcetree a while ago, and I can't say I particularly miss it.
It's slow, RAM hungry, and their "recent" updates have made the tool unusable in my opinion.
If I pick a range of commits in the log: I can no longer get ST to show me a tree of files which changed between those commits. To add insult to injury: the list of diffs often only shows changes to one file, regardless of how many files are actually changed between those two commits.
These days I just use the command line and w/ Splice[0] I've got a nice diff/mergetool right in my editor.
Apparently it is not the interface I have been missing...
Having a Git tool not available for Linux is blasphemy