Developers speak out on the big switch (part III)

As promised, here is the third last part of our "Developers speak out on the big switch" series (read also part I and part II), which is a collection of the comments from several big and smaller players of the Mac software industry, questioned on Apple's announcement to switch to Intel for its Macintosh computers.

OpenOffice.org, Louis Suarez-Potts, Community Manager :
"At the moment, OOo works great using X11 on 10.x; a wholly separate derivative, NeoOffice/J, is more Aqua-fied and also runs well on 10.x. It uses java to integrate into Aqua. Java is platform independent, of course.

Now here is the cool part. The X11 build is a community endeavors. It exists because community developers want it to. Given that the developers are rather keen on technology, I'd expect them to take to updating the code as efficiently as they can.

As to my opinion overall: I think that Apple has made a wise choice. Consider the potential: By moving to Intel, Apple may make itself more relevant to Linux developers and to Linux users. Who cares about Windows? The future is really Unix-based systems :-)

The Little App Factory, Mathew Peterson:
"From day one we will be support Intel powered Macintoshes because we care about quality above all else. Fortunately Apple has made the road extremely pleasant for us and we thank them for their dedication to the developers who are after all the heart and soul of Apple."

Luxology, William :
"The very same day Apple announced their move to the Intel chip, Luxology engineers sprung into action and had modo compiled as a Universal Binary and fully operational on an early development system. Thanks to our next generation architecture and incredibly clean code base the "migration" took less than 20 minutes."

Fidelity Median, Jason Cox :
"We are very excited about the big switch, and our porting efforts should be very painless. We plan full support of the new systems from day one. In fact we will most likely start shipping a universal binary of our MegaSeg DJ software well before the first Intel based Mac arrives; especially if we have a major upgrade before then."

Objective Decision, Aurélien Hugelé, Project Manager :
OD4Contact is mainly developed in Cocoa on xCode, so the switch to Intel doesn't represent major changes for us. We guess it's an opportunity for Apple and by the way for our products."

Red Barn Goat Farm, X. J. Scott, Chief Musical Instrument Designer :
"We plan to support the new Intel architecture in our software, including Li'l Miss' Scale Oven. We enthusiastically look forward to seeing the new Apple hardware designs."

Propellerheads Software, Markus Zetterquist, Founder and Directing Software Engineer :
I think we are in pretty good shape. All our software already runs on Mac OS X and on Intel processors - just not at the same time! We already have SIMD-optimizations for Intel processors - we'll just use those on Mac OS X too, instead of the Velocity Engine-versions of our code. We are not using Xcode for our software today and Xcode seems like a must for the future. We do have an working experimental version of Reason built using Xcode so we're not too worried about changing tools. Propellerheads has been around for some time and we have already worked through many similar transitions: 16bit Windows to Windows 95, 68k Macs to PowerPC and Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. We're quite used to all this :-) It's just an extra hassle during the transition years where we have to support both the old and the new in parallell. This means extra work for us and makes life for our users slightly more confusing.

I don't know when we will ship Mac OS X Intel versions of our software. We prefer not to make statements about things that don't yet exist."

That's it, now you have an idea on how the developers felt the announcement of this big transition. Comments were overally positive as you see. However, there are a lot of developers that did not see it so positively, especially game developers, as reported in our part II.

We also tried to have Quark's opinion on the switch, but we gave up as it was getting a bit complicated to get an answer. We did not question Microsoft, Adobe and Wolfram Research, as they publicly commented on Apple's move since day one. You may also take a look on the thoughts of Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy here.

To finnish, we'd like to thank all of the developers that answered to our mails. It's not likely that we publish more comments on the Intel switch, however, your feedback is always welcome as it's always a pleasure for us to be in contact with the Mac developers community.

[part I] [part II] [part III]