General > General Technical Chat

They are running Altium on MAC?!

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tszaboo:
The computer is just a tool to run the software. You select the tool based on requirements.
And it's expensive enough, so you can easily afford to buy a PC.

Someone:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on January 08, 2024, 11:46:56 pm ---
--- Quote from: mrburnzie on January 08, 2024, 09:03:00 am ---Just watched it in more detail... they are running windows on the mac  :palm: :palm:
I was just so happy to see a slight chance of altium creating a mac variant  :'( :'( :'(

Case CLOSED.

--- End quote ---

AD is probably so tied to Windows that porting it to macOS would probably mean rewriting 80% of it to address a rather small market (although this market is clearly increasing in the last years, while Windows market share is actually decreasing.)

But using a VM is fine. As long as you have enough RAM. (Which on Macs is not cheap.)

--- End quote ---
An alternative that the gaming industry uses: write/test the code against operating platform independent libraries (WINE if you want to take an existing windows codebase).

tooki:

--- Quote from: tszaboo on January 08, 2024, 11:52:07 pm ---The computer is just a tool to run the software. You select the tool based on requirements.
And it's expensive enough, so you can easily afford to buy a PC.

--- End quote ---
I wish Altium ran on Mac. Yes a computer is “just” a host for the programs one uses, but I think people significantly underestimate how much time we spend interacting with the OS itself, in things like file navigation (both in Windows Explorer or Finder, but also in open/save dialogs). I still find file navigation on Windows to be far inferior to the Mac, to the point of being a noticeable, time-wasting thorn in my side. (I feel that one spends far more time on Windows re-navigating to the same places over and over.) I also (for the most part) far prefer window management on the Mac. While I certainly find Windows 10 and 11 to be eminently usable (with them finally having fixed the stability and performance problems that vexed me on Win 7 and earlier), they still aren’t elegant, which macOS decidedly is.

Psi:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on January 08, 2024, 11:46:56 pm ---
--- Quote from: mrburnzie on January 08, 2024, 09:03:00 am ---Just watched it in more detail... they are running windows on the mac  :palm: :palm:
I was just so happy to see a slight chance of altium creating a mac variant  :'( :'( :'(

Case CLOSED.

--- End quote ---

AD is probably so tied to Windows that porting it to macOS would probably mean rewriting 80% of it to address a rather small market (although this market is clearly increasing in the last years, while Windows market share is actually decreasing.)

--- End quote ---

For porting to iOS it would have been easier if they had left the code in Delphi rather than porting to C++, which they did many years back.
If they had stuck with Delphi longer all the cross compile stuff for Windows and iOS would have come out and with a little effort to update the win32 GUI stuff to firemonkey they could have had an version that will cross compile on Windows and iOS.

I assume they ported it to C because the pool of programmers to hire from is so much larger.

tom66:
Delphi is a pretty bad language though.  I should know - I'm a former victim.  It's also hard to find Delphi programmers and it suffers bad vendor lock in because Embarcadero are the only provider of viable development tools.

C++ is fine, as long as you use it right, and a far better choice than Java (Eclipse can die in a pit of fire).  They could (and maybe did) write it with a toolkit that allows multiple operating systems to be used, but there's a lot more involved in building a Linux/Mac port like software testing and support.  If the market is too small they won't be able to justify doing it.

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