On Nov 28, 2006, at 2:05 PM, Tony Caduto wrote:
They are serious applications, but they don't exactly have a lot of
forms and look how long Mozilla was in development.
I think the various interfaces in something like Thunderbird shows it
can do all the standard GUI stuff pretty well.
The reason there is no highly productive IDE for Linux/Mac with a
nice forms designer and robust data binding is because in the grand
scheme of things there are not a lot of
desktop users for anything other than win32. Sure there are lots
of geeks that use Linux for their desktop, but not everyday users.
Everyday users are the ones companies etc want to make software for
and Linux etc just does not have those kind of users yet.
The mac does, but they are small in number
CodeGear(Borland devtools group) will make a IDE for Mac or Linux
when they can make a viable return on investment. They
experimented with Kylix, but it failed because they initially
priced it to high and many open source users will not pay even a
reasonable amount for a IDE.
There are highly productive IDEs for the Mac with all the goodies you
mention. But few are cross-platform.
Your statement about Windows desktop market share is correct, but it
is not the relevant point. Many people are interested in cross-
platform tools because they want to serve the Windows desktop market,
but not have to give up Linux or OS X to do it.
John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL
