Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

The Quake Guy Talks

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:1/11/1999; 6:32:50 AM
Topic:The Quake Guy Talks
Msg #:1968
Prev/Next:1967 / 1969

This is a great honest narrative from a new Mac developer:

http://finger.planetquake.com/plan.asp?userid=johnc&id=11135

Re the G3 systems, Carmack says: "Basically, it's a great system, but Apple has oversold its performance reletive to intel systems." Right on. Our software, not specially optimized for either Mac or Windows, shows the same thing. The benchmarks Apple quotes don't reflect performance that a user experiences, they may at some theoretic level express the potential performance of the G3 CPU. The problem is that the Mac OS spends a fair amount of time twiddling its thumbs trying to figure out what to do next. Very little of the CPU time is given to the apps. You can totally see this in Frontier/Mac as compared to Frontier/Win.

Re the OS and developers: "My first thought was 'throw out MacOS', but they are already in the process of doing that, and its just not going to be completed overnight." I disagree strongly. The only hope Apple has as a platform vendor is a smoothe transition to whatever they want developers to build on. If they're going to do a whole new OS, they'd be better off going to Windows NT, if they want publishing apps. Or get out the checkbook and fund the transition.

This was an invaluable posting, thanks to Carmack for making it public.

Dave

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