[Pythonmac-SIG] Mac User Python newbies

[Bob Ippolito]

On Feb 9, 2005, at 12:07 AM, Roger Binns wrote:

>> This is a very valid point, but since when has that really mattered 
>> to people writing open source software?  Windows certainly doesn't 
>> seem to have more support from the open source community than 
>> anything else.
>
> http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=418

Yeah, exactly.  There's not even twice as many Windows projects as Mac 
OS X projects, and far more Linux projects that Windows projects.  
These numbers aren't very good anyway, NetBSD's pkgsrc has over 5300 
packages, and there are 204 marked NetBSD on sourceforge!

>> As a counter-point, deploying software on Mac OS X is cheap and fast. 
>>  You save god knows how much time and money in development and 
>> testing (especially testing), so you have much higher profit margins.
>
> It doesn't matter how cheap and fast it is for 5% of the market.

Sure it does, if you release OS X first it can fund Windows development 
and testing.  Worked fine for us.

> If you look at open source graphical toolkits that support at least
> two platforms, you won't find any that started on the Mac.  These
> are the ones I know of that can be used from Python and where they 
> started.
>
>  - QT (Unix)
>  - GTK (Unix)
>  - wxWidgets (Windows)
>  - Tk  (Unix)
>  - Fltk (Unix)
>  - Fox (Unix)
>
> Consequently the Mac versions of these (if supported at all) is often
> not as good as the original platform.  That results in a bit of a
> chicken and egg problem.  There is no/little Mac support by other
> developers because the toolkits are poor, and the toolkits don't
> improve because noone uses them.

I think we're probably going to have real GNUStep support for PyObjC 
sometime in the next few months.. though I'm not sure whether the NeXT 
roots count as Mac or not.

> Fortunately it just takes some sustained efforts, even just bug 
> reporting
> and things get better.  wxWidgets has gotten a lot better although 
> there
> are still holes.
>
> For the OP, one choice is to try and help improve a toolkit at the same
> time as doing their own project.  It will end up improving things for
> many more developers and users.

That's definitely an option with any open source dependency :)

-bob