Apple's habit of breaking plugins

[fmr]

Customers judge a product just from the user perspective: does it work, or not. Is reaper any better? Yes? Let's try it. Is Windows any better? Let's move. And so on.

I disagree.
Pretty much all Apple users I know are 110% convinced about being on the best platform available. Apple stuff costs more than other, so it must be better.
They usually do not question their platform in a way like "my plugins to not work anymore, should I switch to windows?", but more like "my plugins to not work anymore, f**k that devs, going to buy my plugins from another company now".

If 95% of my plugins work perfectly and one dev's plugin doesn't, why would I question the platform? Doesn't it make more sense that it's dev's fault? That's my case with a certain dev. Actually, every Mac user I know has trouble with their plugins. Every other dev's plugins work perfectly.

In what concerns 10.11 no, it isn't a case of just one developer. There are many developers with their plug-ins broke (mainly, the problems is confined with AU, which, BTW, is Apple's platform), there are problems with USB, and there are problems with several hosts too (Steinberg advised to hold from upgrading for the moment, and even Finale, which is usually peaceful, has issues with the current OS). So, are you sure you can still blame developers for that? Did all of them become incompetent all of a sudden?

That's something that amazes me. In Windows, every time there is a problem, almost everyone blames the OS. On the Mac, every time there is a problem, almost everybody blames the third party developers.

[PurpleSunray]

That's something that amazes me. In Windows, every time there is a problem, almost everyone blames the OS. On the Mac, every time there is a problem, almost everybody blames the third party developers.

Hehe, comes down to marketing and communication policies again.
MS usually is very responsive when it comes to problems on their platform. They care a lot about not breaking existing applications (imho 90% of the win95 apps still run on win10 and there are 20 years in between!) and if they do so they help you out. I even had the case on previous company that win7 broke our application and because it was very popular one, MS released a hotfix for win7 to restore backward compatibility so that our application runs again.
So it is really really easy to just push everything to MS, since they don't really care about if they are the "bad guys" at end or if your are, but they just want to get it work (most of the times.. *g*)

Apple is the complete opposite of it.
They drop a new OS version onto your table and pretty much let you alone with it.
Their philosophy basically is "eat it or die". You hardly get any support on backward compatibility issues and if you do it is something like "this has been changed, you need to adapt, over and out". This philosophy is carried all over - OSX is at it is, it's perfect. If something does not work in your app, it's your fault.

And I think I need to stop now.. spreading too much Apple hate ... not good for the karma

[JCJR]

Logicalhippo's balanced philosophical attitude is admirable. Adult and mature.

I have difficulty being so objective and detached.

I dveloped on mac from 1986 to three years ago, on pc from about 1995. Mac monkey work contributed to the timing of my retirement. With age had been gredually getting burnt out so it was becoming difficult to stay awake even programming pc, but finally freaked and said "to hell with it" after a month into yet another annual mac monkeywork extravaganza.

Might have been able to keep at it another year or two exclusively on pc. Mac was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Apple is dead to me. Never need to send them any more money.

[discoDSP]

Sorry, not an audio developer, but I'm posing this question for audio developers. Why does every release of Mac OSs break plugins (primarily audio units)? I know the "break" is usually the result of validation problems. I guess I have a better, second question. Are the changes that Apple makes to their OS actually drastic enough to merit new validation requirements? Or are they arbitrary, unnecessary decisions that are made without concern for developers and/or users? Thanks.

Not for us (yet).

[masterhiggins]

So, are you sure you can still blame developers for that? Did all of them become incompetent all of a sudden?

Incompetent? No. Lacking in diligence to ensure they're no longer using obsolete libraries or protocols? Yes.

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

Customers judge a product just from the user perspective: does it work, or not. Is reaper any better? Yes? Let's try it. Is Windows any better? Let's move. And so on.

I disagree.
Pretty much all Apple users I know are 110% convinced about being on the best platform available. Apple stuff costs more than other, so it must be better.
They usually do not question their platform in a way like "my plugins to not work anymore, should I switch to windows?", but more like "my plugins to not work anymore, f**k that devs, going to buy my plugins from another company now".

If 95% of my plugins work perfectly and one dev's plugin doesn't, why would I question the platform? Doesn't it make more sense that it's dev's fault? That's my case with a certain dev. Actually, every Mac user I know has trouble with their plugins. Every other dev's plugins work perfectly.

There is a lot of Marketing fish
It is not one developer, dead simple. Just Microsoft released xp, Vista, 7, 8, 10 and you know? Plugins just work. Than there is this Mac osx thing, and each new release something stops working. It could be xcode, au, carbon, Usb, midi, whatever... It is deprecated, announced it will be deprecated, crashing or whatever. But since all marketing, the issue is the developer!!!!: he did not read documentation. And it is true, most of time you don't find a documentation because forums cannot discuss freely apple things, or documents have one million pages, or you should merge 10 documents about the matter starting from os9 and read it all because they are based on diffs, or even worse, on subsequent chains of tech notes. It happens that even code grabbed from tech notes often is deprecated, or wrong, or buggy, or fixed by other tech notes.
Now this is not a question of maturity: I love my mbp and I'm suggesting apple to my friends, they are amazing products. But the apple developer world is an hell. On the user perspective it is ok. Or not. Things stop working and apple is gold, it is just the developer, he did not read the documentation. He was too busy diligently reading msdn, maybe

Side note: x64 on Windows was really a 1 minute job. On apple it was the worst nightmare in the software world. Companies wasted YEARS. Diligently.

[fmr]

So, are you sure you can still blame developers for that? Did all of them become incompetent all of a sudden?

Incompetent? No. Lacking in diligence to ensure they're no longer using obsolete libraries or protocols? Yes.

Wrong. It has nothing to do with obsolete libraries and protocols. Where did you get that idea? (I klnow, it was the first posts, by the usual Apple supporters of the day). The software is well done, and is working. VST versions are working. Is the change in the way Apple is doing things (basically changing security policies, and the places where things should be placed, like User Library instead of System Library and so on). Can you hold for a minute on the idea that companies like Steinberg and Native Instruments (which currently have some of the best audio and DSP programmers in the world) are using "obsolete libraries and protocols"? Give me a break

[masterhiggins]

How can you account for developers that rarely have problems with Mac releases? Like u-he, Valhalla, madrona, applied acoustics, slate, etc? They must be damn lucky.

[t3toooo]

Sean (Valhalla) works on a Mac and and is developing for Windows on a Mac too.

[fmr]

How can you account for developers that rarely have problems with Mac releases? Like u-he, Valhalla, madrona, applied acoustics, slate, etc? They must be damn lucky.

Current problems are due to changes in security levels by Apple, and the protection schemes used. Pace (which is on the Mac since ever) had problems, and was broken in Beta 4. USB in general was also broken in Beta 4.

Applied Acoustics had problems in the past, several times, and had to release updates to specifically address issues that appeared in newer version of Mac OS X. MOTU (another company that is in Mac since ever, and even collaborated in the release of Core Audio and Core MIDI) had to change their protection scheme with the introduction of Lion (I think it was Lion), because of Apple changes. Authorization was impossible, and I had to wait a while for an update.

Urs is among those who helped defining Audio Units, so, he knows the specification inside out. His protection scheme is also very little intrusive, therefore, U-He plug-ins hardly suffer from problems caused by changes in security policy. But he is an exception, not the rule. The rule is that basically ANY developer work can suffer issues in every new OS X release, and the best policy is always keep the working system one or two versions behind, and keep experimenting with a secondary system installation - that's what I do. My main system is 10.9. I was experimenting with 10.10 and upgraded it to the 10.11 Beta. But I only do this to test the system - I would never jump on it right from the beginning for some serious work.

[machinesworking]

The gist of every conversation I've ever seen about this is simple really, if you started out coding for Microsoft, Apple and AU will be a PITA, if you started out on Apple, Microsoft and VST will be. Same as the end user experience, same as it ever was.

[Mayae]

The gist of every conversation I've ever seen about this is simple really, if you started out coding for Microsoft, Apple and AU will be a PITA, if you started out on Apple, Microsoft and VST will be. Same as the end user experience, same as it ever was.

Sure. In the context of the topic, though, I find it very rare (if ever) to find threads about Windows breaking backwards compatibility.

This is a policy from Microsoft, and it does affect development cycle.

[Mayae]

Doublepost.

[PurpleSunray]

The gist of every conversation I've ever seen about this is simple really, if you started out coding for Microsoft, Apple and AU will be a PITA, if you started out on Apple, Microsoft and VST will be. Same as the end user experience, same as it ever was.

Hmm.. I might be a DSP hobby-noob, but VST or AU doesn't really matter to me (maybe to others?)
The DSP/processing code (that code that actually does the work) does not depend on audio framework. That is code which runs on mac, win, linux, x86, x64, arm, ..... low-level/algorthmic C coders usually don't care a lot about the OS. Those "the OS I'm used to is the best!" battles are going on in the UI and application teams usually. My operating system is POSIX (mixed with some #ifdef win32 where MS had to re-invent the wheel).

This piece of DSP code is then wrapped by a win/VST or mac/AU or whatever layer, depending on the platform for which you build currently.
So really.. as a audio plugin dev I have no real PITA with OS types, as if I would if need to change from .NET to Swift.
All I know is that my win/VST wrapper has been implemented 10 years ago and works w/o a single change since then. While the mac/AU wrapper needs maintaince with every new OSX release to continue working.

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

The gist of every conversation I've ever seen about this is simple really, if you started out coding for Microsoft, Apple and AU will be a PITA, if you started out on Apple, Microsoft and VST will be. Same as the end user experience, same as it ever was.

Sure. In the context of the topic, though, I find it very rare (if ever) to find threads about Windows breaking backwards compatibility.

This is a policy from Microsoft, and it does affect development cycle.

Which sums everything