Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 17th Dec 2009 22:16 UTC
Late last night (CET), we reported on the story that the VLC project needed more developers for the Mac version of this popular video player, or else the Mac variant may disappear. Just about every website out there reported on this issue, but it turns out it all got a bit exaggerated (on the internet? Surely you jest...). We spoke to VLC developer Pierre d'Herbemont to clarify the issue, and they've also put up a wiki page about the so-called demise of the Mac version of VLC. He also detailed what, exactly, they meant by "Apple is blocking us".
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Member since:
2005-07-06
For starters, it's Qt. QT is QuickTime.
Secondly, the long line of cross-platform toolkits and development avenues proves you wrong. Porting individually to each platform is a spectacular amount of work that merely ends up creating a dominant port where ports on other platforms, including the Mac, are totally incomplete. It's happened with Firefox and it's happened with Eclipse and SWT, which are both primarily Windows platforms. You're best off starting with a cross-platform GUI toolkit and then making your own slight platform specific changes. For an application like VLC it's possibly less of a concern.
Would you rather there were no applications there at all for the Mac, because that's what's at stake? As your application base grows then I'm afraid the ideas of purity don't continue to hold, which is possibly one of the reasons why few developers in the world are interested in the Mac. That and there not being much of an installed base.