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What Macintosh Users Expect

In bringing your UNIX application to Mac OS X, you are entering a world where great emphasis is placed on user interactions. This brings you many opportunities and benefits as a developer, but also some responsibilities.

In this section:

Benefits of Porting to Mac OS X
Responsibilities of Porting to Mac OS X

Benefits of Porting to Mac OS X

Porting to Mac OS X has three primary benefits:

• stable long-term customer base

• good inroad into education

• powerful developer tools

Bringing UNIX applications to Mac OS X can be very profitable if done correctly. Well-designed Macintosh applications of years past are the standards of today. PhotoShop, Illustrator, and Excel are all applications that first made their name on the Macintosh. Now is the time to win the hearts of Macintosh users with the next great application. In a word, possibly millions of paying customers!

Macintosh users are willing to spend their money on great applications because they know that Apple strives to give them a high-quality user environment. Apple developers are known for providing great applications for that environment.

For years, Apple has been known for its commitment to education. Mac OS X targets the education market for developers and is an ideal platform for learning for students. With its standards-based technologies as well as home-grown technologies, you have an ideal platform for use in educational application deployment and development.

Mac OS X also provides benefits in a development environment. Apple strives for standards first, then it adds that little bit that makes it better on a Mac. As a developer, you have access to many of the development tools and environments that you have on other platforms, like Java, OpenGL, POSIX libraries, and the BSD TCP/IP stack, but you also have built-in benefits like the Apache Web server on every computer, the Cocoa object-oriented development environment, a PDF-based display system (Quartz), Kerberos, QuickTime, a dynamic core audio implementation, and a suite of world-class developer tools. By adding a native Mac OS X front end to your application, you can achieve a cost-effective new deployment platform with minimal additional development effort.

Mac OS X adds tremendous value both to you and your customers on a standards-based operating system.

Responsibilities of Porting to Mac OS X

Along with benefits come responsibilities. If you have decided to make a full-featured Mac OS X application, here are some guidelines to keep in mind.

• A Mac OS X user should never have to resort to the command line to perform any task in an application with a graphical user interface. This is especially important to remember since the BSD user environment may not even be installed on a user’s system. The libraries and kernel environment are of course there by default, but the tools may not be.

• If you are making graphical design decisions, you need to become familiar with the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, available from the Apple developer website. These are the standards that Macintosh users expect their applications to live up to. Well-behaved applications from Apple and third-party developers give the Macintosh its reputation as the most usable interface on the planet.

The responsibilities boil down to striving for an excellent product from a user’s perspective. Mac OS X gives you the tools to make your applications shine.

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