Thursday, April 24th, 2008
WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio for Mac
Category: JavaScript, Utility
It seems a little funny to have an Ajax app announcing that it now works on Mac, but there is good reason:
This week, we are releasing WaveMaker for the Mac (OS 10.5 Leopard to be specific) and Safari. Although the Mac is a visual platform, it has always been behind on WYSIWYG development tools. With Wavemaker, the Mac is leaping back in front.
That was from Christopher Keene, talking about the new Mac friendly version.
He then indulges himself in a pro-Mac explanation that goes like this:
- Ajax platform of choice: Safari is lightning fast and leads the pack in standards-compliance. I can’t remember the last time I saw any web app demoed on Internet Explorer, and if Firefox ever gets ported to Safari, Firefox will be in trouble.
- Video platform of choice: we just went through a 3 week death-march to create a new screencast for WaveMaker. Of that time, about 8 hours was spent creating content – the rest of the time was spent wrestling with the brain-dead video software we were using on the PC (Camtasia). In contrast, my 12 year old niece just created a 30 minute class presentation using i-movie. Enough said.
- The Incredible shrinking desktop: with more and more compelling web applications, I find myself spending less and less time working within my Windows desktop.
- The disaster that is Vista: given that I have to relearn the whole user interface to move from XP to Vista, I might as well relearn an interface that actually makes sense.
- That cool backlit logo on the Mac laptop: let’s face it – the knowledge that you will look good in a coffee shop probably sells more laptops these days than Ghz or RAM stats.
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I have to ask because I’m having one of those “I couldn’t go to college because of my horse” (Lewis Black) moments. He says, “and if Firefox ever gets ported to Safari, Firefox will be in trouble” — what does that mean?
“…and if Firefox ever gets ported to Safari, Firefox will be in trouble…” Huh? Chrisdpratt, you are so right. That mess of English is what I will have as my take-away from this article, not a new AJAX dev’ tool for MacOS X.
I think he probably means if Firebug is ported to Safari, Firefox will be in trouble. I can agree with that; Firebug is a killer app for Firefox.
Regarding the rest… One of the reasons I use Mac is the general high-quality interface design not just from Apple, but from third-party developers too. In that sense, WaveMaker’s post is somewhat ironic, because their Mac application clearly shows little regard for Mac interface guidelines or conventions.
@tizz66 – right you are. I confusingly said Firefox when I meant Firebug, creating the almost perfectly tautological sentence without even trying. A great example of the trying to make sense of monkeys typing on keyboards paradox that plagues the blogging world.
While I’d love firebug for Safari, my sanity would really rather have it for IE. It would have saved me a day already this week chasing bugs that only appear there.
Well, if that’s the case (“Firebug” not “Firefox”), the latest version of Safari offers Web Inspector. Web Inspector offers at least 90% of the features that Firebug offers.
What does Camtasia have to do with the totally different product iMovie? How does a 3rd party app for Windows vs. an Apple product of a totally different genre bear any weight in comparing the two operating systems? If you had to relearn how to use Windows to go from XP to Vista, it means nothing more than that you’re retarded, because they’re basically the same, with different graphics. Furthermore, why is it an achievement that your web application now works on Mac? Shouldn’t that be a requirement from the get go? I like Macs and Windows, I own both systems, but completely flawed reasons why Mac is better just dilute the actual reasons why its better. FAIL
@Jeffrey – I do admit to being retarded (thanks mysterioushref ;-), but I wasn’t able to see how to get Web Inspector from the webkit nightly build link. What I would like would be a Safari plugin that I could use on Mac or PC that does roughly what Firebug does. From what I could see, it looks like you are close, but not quite to the seamless plugin stage yet.
A Google Summer of Code applicant is porting the Firebug APIs to WebKit:
http://rossboucher.com/2008/04/21/safari-web-inspector/
@ctkeene: Web Inspector is included in all Safari and nightly Webkit builds since 3.0, and just needs to be enabled. On OSX, open a new terminal and enter the following:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras 1
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1