This is only true of the iPad/iPhone ecosystem. For OSX, they give away development tools better than the ones microsoft charges ridiculous amounts of money for. Almost all apple-made software (even the kind they sell) doesn't even make you enter a license key. If you are honestly worried about a closed app store coming to OSX based on what Apple does with phones and devices that they clearly think of as large phones, you are paranoid.
Sorry, but having worked with both, Visual Studio is miles ahead of Xcode. I even did an app for a client in C++/Qt that wanted it running in OS X ... developed 100% in Visual Studio. That's because at the time (at least) Xcode wasn't even having Intellisense (and Visual C++ does have the best intellisense available).
Visual Studio Express is free to use ... and it's enough for almost every need you might have. And before that you could use the #Develop which is an open-source IDE for C#/VB.NET.
And while Xcode doesn't even support intellisense properly, Visual Studio is in a different category altogether considering that you can also develop with it web applications / Silverlight clips, supports many more languages and has a really healthy plugins ecosystem.
Not to nitpick, but Microsoft is endorsing Mono lately as THE Linux/FreeBSD/OS X alternative. On Linux I can have a dotNet app that uses Windows Forms running ... can you do the same with Cocoa?
Of course Mono for Apple would be an abomination that had to be destroyed (considering how they sued Psystar and even Wired on publishing an article about hackitoshes)
(pretty ironic I'm defending Microsoft, since I've been badmouthing them for years, but compared to Apple they start looking like saints)
> Of course Mono for Apple would be an abomination that had to be destroyed (considering how they sued Psystar and even Wired on publishing an article about hackitoshes)
Cocoa is a direct descendent of NEXTStep which is an open spec. Hence the NS prefix on class names. Here's "Mono for Apple":
Yes it means something ... it shows good will, it shows they are probably not going to sue, and their developers are also contributing/helping out Mono.
> Cocoa is a direct descendent of NEXTStep
Oh please, take any Cocoa app and try running it in Gnustep.
VS is the best IDE out there, hands down. I read a nice rant about how it causes brain damage (by Intellisense pushing you into bottom-up design), but it's great at what it does.
"For OSX, they give away development tools better than the ones microsoft charges ridiculous amounts of money for."
People tend to make this claim and I just don't understand where it comes from. Microsoft has made available the express editions of Visual Studio for the last several years and they are pretty damn good.
I've been a windows developer for more than 15 years and I'd be hard pressed to find an app that I couldn't build with the express tools. The components missing are things I wouldn't use anyhow, that being the integration of Microsoft's version of unit testing, source control, etc... Granted I've only used XCode for the last year and a half or so, but I'd choose VS Express over XCode any day. Aside from that fact, I can't believe that any company puts more effort into their development tools than Microsoft and I think it shows, so if they want to charge for a product that is years beyond anything anyone else offers then that's fine by me.
If you are honestly worried about a closed app store coming to OSX based on what Apple does with phones and devices that they clearly think of as large phones, you are paranoid.
Then I'm paranoid. Like Mark Pilgrim (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/01/29/tinkerers-sunset), I don't believe Apple will be selling general purpose computers to consumers in 10 years. Remember Steve Jobs's plan for Apple: "milk the Mac for all it's worth and then move on the next big thing". The next big thing is mobile computing, and Apple has made it clear that they want absolute control.
I've seen that argument before, and I have to tell you, it's a bit of overdramatization from someone I respect a lot, who should know better. Apple has to sell unlocked Macs, because that's how you develop software for their closed platforms. Nobody mentions this much, but if you want to develop an iPhone app, you need a Mac, and you need the iPhone SDK, compilers, etc. The average person does not need an unlocked Mac. Developers like us do, and Apple will have to provide that. Choice is great for consumers, and not everyone needs a computer to write code on. We developers do, and we're really the only ones constantly beating this dead horse. Consumers don't want to hack their own devices, they just expect it to work.
Apple isn't the only one doing this. I don't know much C# and I don't run Windows anymore, but I want to write XBOX games. Should I be mad at MS for making me buy Windows, learn Visual Studio + C#, and pay a membership fee to write games for my XBOX? They have a developer program too, and a completely closed system. They take a cut of sales. They don't review your apps though, but honestly I like the fact that through the Appstore on my iPod, stuff isn't gonna trash my iPod like it did when I used to have it jailbroken.
It's all about money - if they start making more money on ipad-type devices, and less on osx-based devices, they'll start making more ipad-type devices. Follow that line of logic and you'd end up in the more restrictive world of the ipad-type devices. But I did say if.
