I applaud a new commercial application bringing competition to the editor field. But does anyone else think that building exclusively for Mac is a risky strategy? I’m a diehard Apple user and hope I never have to compute in an era when Apple still isn’t producing Macs. But even I see the writing on the wall that Windows is becoming more and more developer-friendly, with VS Code and cross-platform Sublime vastly reducing the friction in moving from MacOS to Windows. Even if the new Coda was heads above the pack, I would be very reluctant to put money and learning/muscle-memory time into a new app that could easily go the way of Textmate after a couple of years.
Keep in mind that Panic has been a Mac-only shop since the early days of the platform, before OS X, back when Apple was viewed as a beleaguered company and Microsoft's dominance of computing was unquestioned.
If they stuck with Apple through all that, I can't see why they'd be worried now.
I can’t see myself doing dev work under Windows at all. Playing games or something else where the OS UI never factors into the experience at all? Sure, but for anything else there are better options.
Some Linux distro seems more likely but I have yet to encounter a DE that gets everything right (for me) right out of the box or anything close to that. A ridiculous amount of config tweaking is required to get things into a state that suits my preferences, and even then there’s tons of stupid little annoyances that I’ll never be able to fix short of forking a bunch of stuff.
Walk into any coffee shop in America and you'll see every hacker inside using a Mac. One or two odd ducks will have some kind of nix ultrabook setup. Even here in SoCal you can go into a Philz and see 5 people coding on a Mac w/ VS Code and Slack open at some time or another.
So I don't think targeting macOS is by any means a bad idea. Based on the echo chamber that is HN you'd think everyone was jumping ship to Surface tablets and WSL but it's really not as common as you think.
I personally have noticed that in the UK the Mac is more of a "fashion computer" to be seen with in the oh-so-trendy coffee shop. Like a handbag.
I'd also question who those people sitting in the coffee shop on a weekday are? Are they a representative sample of professional coders, or are the professional coders actually at work - you know, at the office - rather than hanging out at the coffee shop?
I use a Linux and Mac professionally for coding, and a Windows machine personally for coding. Particularly with Linux running natively on windows now, there isn't really any difference these days apart from the OS's UX IME. Mac laptops are physically nice machines I agree (there is that fashion again!) but I personally find OSX to be a nightmare to use for real work as it seems designed to make multitasking difficult (hiding multiple windows under one icon in the dock, every app sharing the menu bar, beach-balling, touchbar and F- keys, no escape key, no native window layout/arranging/snapping etc etc). It's great if you are just doing one thing at a time, but start to need to have multiple windows/apps at once and I find it frustrating as hell to deal with, while Win10 and photon or cinnamon on Linux are just fine.
I concur. Though anecdotal I catch a buddy of mine frequently when I drop by Dunkin in a rush and he usually is on a windows laptop watching some esport or getting in some MMO time before work.
As someone who’s worked on both coasts I can definitely attest to seeing Macs dominate. When I taught at a university I always fretted about making a Windows version of my keyboard-shortcuts/install process guides until the first day and invariably just 1 out of 20 students would be on a non-Mac.
But that’s not the way it is everywhere (was just at a Chicago hack night). And Windows is not only still the dominant base, but Microsoft’s direction is more trending toward in favor of everyday developers than Apple’s.
It’s not just a matter of market viability, but having enough of a user base to create and perpetuate a good ecosystem (e.g. plugin development) around the app.
