On Jan 05, 2007, at 8:21 PM, Andy Dent wrote:
On 06/01/2007, at 1:35 AM, Norman Palardy wrote:
On Jan 05, 2007, at 8:40 AM, Lynn Fredricks wrote:
Metrowerks - Even if they wanted to, very little money and Apple
coming with
a free development tool (ie the platform they support is their worst
competitor).
MW did very well, they just happened to exit the Mac game recently
They had numerous products for all kinds of development all based
on their core IDE and intermediate code generation
Yes, but they struggled to make payroll for quite a while and may
have gone under if Motorola hadn't bought them, according to some
histories I've read from ex-MW staff.
Entirely possible. Lots of small companies struggle with payrolls at
some point for various reasons.
MW ditched their entire previous line of compilers for Modula and
other languages when they started building CW from what I know
I could easily see them having issues at that point and for quite
some time til the developer releases were into several revisions
To the outside world MW was doing at least well enough to keep
shipping very good products on a very regular basis esp when the
initial CW developer releases were coming out rapid fire
The product matured very quickly and added a lot early on
Eclipse and XCode would have finished them off eventually.
Sheer compiler excellence and Apple's refusal to support anything
other than Mach-O kept them going for a couple of years, IMHO.
Eclipse and Xcode are decent free environments and may have totally
sunk MW for desktop platforms
But they have a ton of embedded stuff and were also the suppliers of
some game SDK's so they may have just moved into different products
One thing that is overlooked in this is even if there were bugs in
the frameworks you got all the source so it could be fixed right away
I'm sure very few people ever did directly tweak the PowerPlant
frameworks, but I do know a few instances where the bug report was
submitted AND we tweaked the code
The next rev of CW had a fix and we could drop our customization of it
It wasn't perfect but it was at least malleable. Perhaps that's where
MW distinguishes itself from REALbasic.
The frameworks in RB are closed and bugs are sometimes allowed to
persist for fairly long times.
If they were open then it would not be an issue as a developer could
submit a bug report and a fix and fix it for themselves and move on.
But they can't so bug fixing needs to take a higher priority than it
might for a tool like the PowerPlant frameworks.
Just a thought
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