Ask HN: What do I need to know about Macs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do I need to know about Macs?

4 pointsbendmorris3 comments

I'm working on a couple open source projects right now, ranging from command-line utilities to GUI applications, and targeting people from scientists with little computer experience to skilled developers. One of my big weaknesses is that I have very little experience with Macs (and don't own one myself) - therefore, I don't know what Mac users want or need. For example, I generally provide Debian and/or RPM packages for Linux users and executables/installers for Windows, but I don't know anything about Mac equivalents. Historically my Mac users are stuck installing from source, and not all of them are savvy enough to do so - this has been a big problem.

What general information does a developer need to know, not to use a Mac, but to provide support for Mac users? Is it eventually necessary to just go get a Mac?

From my (admittedly limited) experience, yes, you will want to eventually get a Mac of our own for development. I'm not sure if there is a way to create .dmg packages otherwise, but you will definitely want to be able to take advantage of the Cocoa libraries if you're doing GUI apps. The most common recommendation I hear for strictly cross-platform development is to get a Mac Mini; it can handle pretty much any "normal" development tasks you'd need it for.

>"scientists with little computer experience"

I don't really think that's a viable market segment, and hasn't been since Fortran and punch tape.

I think it is, in certain fields. Nowadays, a lot of scientists need to interface with things like databases which are completely foreign to them, so a whole host of tools has sprung up to take some of the work out of common tasks. For one example, I've been working on an application that helps acquire scientific data from published text files in various formats, clean it all up (removing weird things like -999 being used as Null), and put it in a database. It has received very positive reviews so far.

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