Hyperpad for iMac and PC?
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Something we'd love to do eventually.
There are rumours that Apple may make it easy/possible to port iPad apps to mac. If this ends up being true then hyperPad on mac will be much more likely.
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@murtaza would we ever see an iPhone hyperPad editor or an Apple TV viewer?
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Windows tho 😢
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Sadly, you've been sold a lie. By the media telling you to expect cross platform everything... a media controlled (and effectively) owned by Google, a company that stands to benefit more from creating this expectation than anyone else. Hence their reasoning for attempting to create this expectation.
There is NOTHING easy about porting anything to any other platform.
You either
- concede performance, from the beginning, and size (everything will be huge and unwieldy) in order to have chance* of being cross platform... but you still build for one platform 1st. Always. Or go insane.
or
- aim for size, efficiency and performance and forget about cross platform until you can afford to completely rewrite for any other platforms.
That asterix*... there's no sure thing... even if you make these sacrifices, when it comes to getting things to work cross platform.
Please know this: hyperPad took option 2, very wisely.
Objective-C is really STILL the only language capable of running something as elegant as reloading an operating environment within an environment in iOS, as hyperPad does. If you were to try this in Swift you'd be chasing your tail, all the time. Swift isn't nearly finished, either. They still break things with each significant upgrade.
Objective-C is not cross platform. Not even close to it. Beautiful language, far more so than C++, and make C# look like the utterly verbose remake of Java that it is.
There aren't other game engines (other than what they're using, which is cocos2D-iPhone) able to do what they're doing... except SpriteKit and SceneKit, both of which are expressly Apple, too. So no cross platform when choosing that path, either.
Cocos2D-X is a layered, contrived myriad of byzantine dependencies and general build and administration disasters I would not wish upon my worst enemy. And that's if you're only targeting one platform with it. Aim at 2 and you'll need to hire someone just to administer the setup and maintenance of compiling and using the thing. It's a MESS, because it's maintained in a country where teams are big and money is thrown at programming projects at a size and scale that would make you blush, and where workers work HARD.
Porting to Mac engages almost zero people, and makes for no benefit... it's a touch screen focused coding and creation environment, in which there's nothing fun about porting to a mouse driven world. Exporting to Mac... possible, but still requires that they own several Macs, from each genre, with multiple versions of OSX installed... test, test, trial... test... etc. And they can't ship updates now... so.... nah.... probably not.
Porting the exporting to the Apple TV is the easiest thing as tvOS is fundamentally very similar to iOS... but... wasn't a thing when cocos2D-iphone was built and last maintained... and it would still involve an enormous amount of testing and then there's problem solving with the input devices of Apple TV... which, thanks to Tim Cook, are ridiculous. Bad. In the extreme. And handled worse. It seems nobody cared about this, because he didn't.
TL;DR
It's not reasonable to expect a porting from iPad to ANYTHING else anytime soon. Enjoy that it's on the iPad and continue to beg them for Undo in the Behaviour Editor and a fix of the "game loop" so your battery lasts longer and you get a stable 60fps everywhere.
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Pretty much as Deeeds says, porting an iPad app to another platform is no easy task. We'll essentially need to rewrite the entire platform from scratch. (switching graphics engines is only 1 small part of the overall task).
If Apple introduces tools to make our life easier (as rumoured) than maybe a mac platform will be possible in the near future. But at this point it's just rumours.
Apple TV would be really cool, and something I really want to do. But we'd need to change our graphics engine... Or like Deeeds says do a lot of testing. Which would slow down development on other parts.
So to summarize ... At this point we're focusing on iPad and making it better. But cross platform is always in our minds and if we see an opportunity to simplify our process we'll look at it more seriously.
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And how about PC, @murtaza?
Will that ever happen? -
Do you have $250,000?
That'd be a rough costing of the work to directly, at this point, port it.
Is it an investment you'd make.... or suggest, if it's other people's money?
Why?
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@cyber_death I apologise if this comes off as rude.
I see, forever, Linux users asking for ports of everything they love, to their OS.
They NEVER consider the cost of the endeavour, nor the possible benefits of the effort... which are next to zero because Linux users have a reluctance to pay for anything and a bizarre presumption that their OS is saving the world.
Windows users don't have the presumption they'll save the world, but do tend to avoid paying for anything, ever.
An example....
Friends of mine make popular (and famous) plugin synths for Windows and Mac.
Mac copy rate = 4 to 1. 1 sold, four copies
PC copy rate = 25 to 1. 1 sold, 25 copies
iPad copy rate = only China, and irrelevant to sales
Total sales = 1:1:4 = Mac, Windows, iPad
With the price of their iPad versions being about 1/4 of the Mac and Windows versions.
Linux doesn't even rank as being worth their time.
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Funny....I casually ask for stuff like porting and don’t even think twice about the effort or the cost! Always good to get a perspective!
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Today Apple announced iOS apps for mac. The feature is coming in 2019. So still a little off, and not much info yet. But it definitely looks promising to see hyperPad on a mac.
We're doing a bunch of stuff behind the scenes, so not 100% sure if we can take advantage of this. But it's definitely good news :)
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@murtaza OpenGL deprecation now looming...
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@deeeds said in Hyperpad for iMac and PC?:
@murtaza OpenGL deprecation now looming...
Yeah... With Apple you win some you lose some. 🤷♂️
