On Nov 28, 2006, at 2:05 PM, Tony Caduto wrote:
> They are serious applications, but they don't exactly have a lot of
> forms and look how long Mozilla was in development.
I think the various interfaces in something like Thunderbird shows it
can do all the standard GUI stuff pretty well.
> The reason there is no highly productive IDE for Linux/Mac with a
> nice forms designer and robust data binding is because in the grand
> scheme of things there are not a lot of
> desktop users for anything other than win32. Sure there are lots
> of geeks that use Linux for their desktop, but not everyday users.
> Everyday users are the ones companies etc want to make software for
> and Linux etc just does not have those kind of users yet.
> The mac does, but they are small in number
> CodeGear(Borland devtools group) will make a IDE for Mac or Linux
> when they can make a viable return on investment. They
> experimented with Kylix, but it failed because they initially
> priced it to high and many open source users will not pay even a
> reasonable amount for a IDE.
>
There are highly productive IDEs for the Mac with all the goodies you
mention. But few are cross-platform.
Your statement about Windows desktop market share is correct, but it
is not the relevant point. Many people are interested in cross-
platform tools because they want to serve the Windows desktop market,
but not have to give up Linux or OS X to do it.
John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL
