It is pretty much a proven fact that your Lisp, Cobol, Fortran, or C software has always been, and is now possible to port to any Unix or even Windows box. Not so for Mac, and it's why it's stuck as being a pretty thing for playing with pictures, and has not been in use as a enterprise wide system, say for a bank.

Pretty soon, with the advent of cloud computing, we are going back to the days where the software is elsewhere and your computer is a display. Google has done this with the current version of google docs. The day the entire suite of office software is available and you are pretending to be a vt100 terminal but with today's graphics capability, apple or Mac can take off, however it still will need to compete with cheaper systems that do the same thing.

So if you want to develop software to run an entire sawmill, and hope to keep it in shape and running for 10 years, which platform...?

I have software written in 1984 for a unix system that is still in use, line for line, running 10 million transactions a month to operate a chain of 300 fitness clubs. I've retired but my wife, who I sold with the company!, is still there.....

They've spent millions to replace my code and software, for which I got about 40k, and they still can't get it to happen. I remember some guy who got 50k and said he could do it only to find out that one pass of the database to pick a membership list in dbase took 12 hours and locked the system, and with 50 clubs at the time times 12 hours it took 25 days of all day to run membership lists, let alone key updates, sales, new members etc...and he ran away.

I don't know everything about Macs or Apple, but they have treated developers very badly, because they want you to use their software and apps. And if they don't like your app, the apple store is going to freeze you out.

So much for being open...drm...wow.

John Conley
Musica est vita