Comments on: Where are the Native Vista Apps?

By: jj

jj — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:24:06 +0000

** Holy shit! Now I’m a “fanboy”. I just now bought my first Mac, and I’m a “fanboy” **

LOL! welcome to the world of anyone who dares to choose a Mac or some Apple-related product…
I have had macs sin 1994, by choice, and “having to” use MSDOS, Win 3.11, 95, 98, XP, 2000, some Novell stuff, and some Linux flavors. I’ve always been called a fanboy, even when nobody even knew what the hell macs were—I was just that weirdo who didn’t use Windows… that’s can’t be a *real* computer! … :-/

By: Robert Cooper

Robert Cooper — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:52:38 +0000

@Dean Yeah, I mean, I use it on a daily basis. It still crashes all the time. The unmounting of SMB servers when you come back from sleep on a new network will still panic the box 1 time in 10. Finder still has some kind of runaway in it that eats CPU until you kill it every so often.

@Danny That is not true. Cocoa apps are 64bit capable. There is a difference. Literally none of the apps that ship with Leopard are compiled for 64bit, and the JDK 1.6 is the only apple app they have shipped a 64 bit build of. Snow Leopard isn’t “Extending” the functionality, they are actually shipping a 64 bit finder, a 64 bit iTunes, etc. That is a big difference.

By: Moo

Moo — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 04:18:20 +0000

There are no Vista apps because nobody has purchased Vista, and nobody is going to. How many native Microsoft ‘bob’ apps were there, or Windows ME apps ?

By: Eric Burke

Eric Burke — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:43:40 +0000

Thanks @Danny. After installing Vista SP1 and the latest nvidia drivers, I should note that I frequently see this horizontal line across the display when first logging on, or switching users. Fortunately this artifact generally goes away, but it indicates a bug somewhere in the video driver or hardware. So far I haven’t noticed any visual artifacts on my MBP

By: Danny Greg

Danny Greg — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:40:31 +0000

Just as an FYI, I’m a cocoa dev and all cocoa apps are 64 bit “native”. Snow Leopard is just extending the functionality. Leopard currently runs 32 bit and 64 bit apps side by side seamlessly. Without the need for a 64 bit version of the OS.
As for Leopard issues, I certainly have had a few but most have been sorted out now. My current whinge is the video card driver on my brand new MacBook Pro is pretty shoddy. Tearing and glitches all over the place. Apparently, though, this is a known issue and is being patched in the next OS X update.

By: Matt Taylor

Matt Taylor — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:10:18 +0000

I just wanted to say that I love you all.

By: Dean

Dean — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:45:04 +0000

@Robert
Have you tried Leopard more recently? I had stability problems when it came out, but they were largely taken care of with 10.5.2 + a firmware update. That’s the point I upgraded my wife’s MBP. Since then Leopard — including the 10.5.3 update — has been mostly rock solid for me. I don’t have a Time Capsule, but have heard it has issues. I use Time Machine with an external drive and it works great.

By: Mike Peter Reed

Mike Peter Reed — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:12:43 +0000

I’ve been on OS X since Jaguar, having spent the prior years on various flavours of Linux. I switched to Linux because Windows wasn’t (and still isn’t) doing anything exciting for me. If Microsoft get their act together I’d switch back in a heartbeat. Right now I’m holding out for a mouseless multi-touch OS, and my money’s on Apple delivering the first usable instance (arguably it already has with the iPhone).
Microsoft seriously needs to put it’s annual five billion dollar R&D budget to better uses than tax breaks.

By: Neil Weber

Neil Weber — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:24:55 +0000

There are these games http://zone.msn.com/en/vistagames/ that are supposedly enhanced for Vista. But, I think Vista market share has to increase before application writers will bother to take advantage of the new capabilities.

By: Robert Cooper

Robert Cooper — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:18:45 +0000

@Dean,

Sorry, Leopard is just crap, though. I bought my first mac in eons when OS 10.0 came out, because I loved the idea of a modernized next step. I used it here and there, and by the time Tiger dropped, I was hooked, and I moved from Linux to Mac as my primary platform. I had become so impressed with the quality of Apple’s releases. Leopard, however, is crap. I find it hilarious that they poke a Vista when Leopard has already eaten my HD once (I was going to buy a TimeCapsule till I heard about all of *those* problems), had more panics in a few months of use than I saw in all previous versions of OS 10 combined, and has LESS usability with the new dock/menubar/finder sidebar.

@Eric

Of course, everyone who owns a mac is a fanboi! As to “Vista” apps, though. There have only in the history of Windows only been two things that drive adoption of new MS APIs: Office and Direct X. Other apps in the space tend to follow Office’s lead because that really sets the LAF people expect from their “Windows” apps. The only other API MS has that really drives upgrades is DX, and thus far it is seeing fairly slow adoption. The driver problems that persist(ed?) under Windows have cut into that upgrade cycle, but the real issue is, nobody outside the Geek world can actually upgrade an MS operating system. I have never seen their “Upgrade” installer work properly on any version of Windows, and the proverbial “your mom” won’t do a clean install and check the HCLs. Macs (and most Linuxes) make it pretty easy to do a straight upgrade of an existing install, which I think has a lot to do with why people upgrade faster.

As long as nobody is upgrading, and XP still has a 70%+ market share, neither the game companies nor the business ISVs are going to bite down on Vista specific apps.