Re: alibre on Mac OS - You Miss the Point
Of course you can run Alibre under Boot Camp on an Intel MAC - because you are simply running Windows natively on what looks to it like a stock PC. Since Macs tend to be faster than PCs of the same vintage, it runs great. But that is not the point. We don't want to have to (a) buy a copy of Windows we don't otherwise need, and (b) have to reboot our computers every time we want to run Alibre. Does that sound like a user friendly workflow to you? What we want is a native OS X application.
In 2006 when this thread started, Apple had (perhaps) 2.5% market share. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer used to laugh about how they served their 2-3% market share well, and MS served the other 97%. But that is no longer true. As of February 2011, based on information gleaned from websites that are able to determine the OS of the connecting machine, OS X now has a market share of almost 8%. And since almost all of those machines are used professionally (or by college students, another of your target audiences), the actual penetration into your markets or interest is higher, possibly as high as 15%. This is not a surprise based on the utter market failure of Vista and the concomitant success of Apple's other products such as ipod, iphone, ipad, all of which require OS X to do any software development. At present there are some 300,000 apps for sale in Apple's app store. That's a lot of professional developers and a lot of Macs. All of a sudden it is not such a trivial market anymore.
Someone earlier in this thread noted that many "real" CAD packages are available on Linux. Since OS X is based on the BSD kernel it is trivial to build a single version for both targets. And since both OS X and Linux support Mono (an open source implementation of .NET), porting from Windows is not the task it once was. Large, complex programs like Firefox, Chrome, and Blender have no difficulty supporting Windows, Linux, and OS X from a single source tree and single build. Blender is a particularly relevant example as it is a single program that supports 3D modeling, wire frame, animation, compositing, and rendering. It is capable of running on a single machine or a networked cluster. Even though it is open source and "free", It is stable and sufficiently capable that it is commonly used for commercials, short films, and even effects work in Hollywood productions. Blender happens to be open source, but there is no need for a tool to be open source to sell into the Linux or Mac markets; Adobe has been spectacularly successful selling their "Master Collection" of tools for more than $3000/seat and Photoshop for $700/seat into the Mac market.
I am a Software Developer and former Director at Intel Corporation and I have personally ported, and also overseen the porting, of many programs from Windows to Mac and/or Linux. Of course I can't speak to the difficulty of converting the Alibre code base as I have not seen it. If it is 20 year old Spaghetti that is held together with rubber bands, a port to MAC would be expensive, risky proposition. Not due to the port itself, but due to the need to first unravel the code and its build. But if the code was properly built and maintained, it is not particularly difficult to support all three platforms. You just have to want to do it.
Might be worth another look by the Marketing guys.
