Why ChordMate started on the Mac.

When I started working on ChordMate, we didn’t plan to release it for Mac first. I was working only on the music engine. I chose the Mac because it had free development tools, and I really liked the operating system.  After working for about two weeks, I realized that I needed some GUI to test my work (initially I was planning to use text output). Because I was already using Mac OS X, I looked at the libraries that they provided for making GUI. I was so impressed that I learned Objective C++ and ended up designing the ChordMate GUI for Mac. I really enjoyed working on it. Everything in Apple’s APIs was carefully designed and quite intuitive. I loved how they hid all the unnecessary complexity. I had to code only the parts that were specific to my application. Apple’s libraries did the rest and did it beautifully.

I’ve been developing the Windows version for a few months now, and every bit of it was a pain. I won’t go into details here and will just say that Microsoft’s libraries are very low level. Almost all the issues that I had to deal with so far could be easily solved by the operating system. For example, Apple makes flicker free drawing completely automatic while Microsoft forces every developer to deal with it on his own.

Apple has to be much better than Microsoft in order to survive at all, but as programmer, I am still amazed how far ahead Apple got. Now I am not surprised that many developers choose to make their programs in Mac OS X even though economically it makes much more sense to develop for Microsoft.

Tags: Mac vs. PC