[thelist] iBooks, OS X, Macs, Web Development, Laptops, Etc,Etc

[Michael Barrett]

>> if you are on a mac for development, you're just plain crazy.  why would YOU
>> be on a mac if 95% of the real world (and probably your clients) is on a
>> windows client?

I'm not interested in Episode XII the Platform Wars...

There is some truth to the above statement...many or most internet users
will be browsing with some combination of Windows and Internet Explorer.
Naturally you should test for compatibility with the most popular platform
and browser.

Keep in mind though, that "other" 5% of 'crazy' mac users still represents
some 25 million people (in the US at least). That's a large number of
potential viewers and users to snub because they are using a 'crazy'
platform.

Would you apply the same argument to developers who use a UNIX or Linux
development environment? There are certainly more Windows desktops out
there, does that negate how important these "other" operating systems are?
Does it negate developers who use those systems?

--------------------------------

Documents, applications, graphics, multimedia, and such developed for use on
the internet should by ideally be platform independent. (At least the
end-user experience of such things should be.)

The choice of development tools is and should be invisible to the user.

It does not matter to a user what server-side technology serves up the
pages, or which wiz-bang piece of hardware the thing was created on.

The user only cares if things work on *their* machine the way they want or
expect them to.

The choice of development platform (Windows, Mac, UNIX, Linux, other) is a
matter of taste, and choice of particular technologies.

You wanna develop in ASP MS-SQL? Get a Windows machine
You wanna develop in ColdFusion? Get a Windows or UNIX box.
You wanna develop in JSP? Get a Unix box.
You wanna develop in PHP-MY-SQL? Get a Windowss box, a Mac OS X box, or a
Unix/Linux box
You wanna develop in Perl? Ditto
You wanna run Photoshop? Get a Mac

You want to properly test for compatibility and display consistency? Get all
of the above.

No one's choice of development platform is 'crazy'. Most technologies are at
least accessible on all platforms. It's a question of reconciling needs,
tastes, and desires.

--
Michael Barrett
-O^O-
  -

mbarrett at triad.rr.com