I don't know how many folks who post here actually have created and supported commercial cross-platform builds of the same product -- for Macs and PCs.

We have. And after a couple years of trying to deal with Apple's dot.dot upgrades, we had to finally quit.

The fact is, Apple changes/modifies their libraries in dot.dot updates, which affects MANY programs. For us it was their constant meddling with WebKit which we finally decided wasn't worth marketing our product anymore.

In over three years of development and support, we modified and tweaked our code for Windows once and for Apple at least a dozen times. With Cocoa, their Objective C programming environment, much of this is abstracted, but if you write code for Macs in other environments (Carbon), you're on your own.

Not only do you have to fix the problem, but you also have to provide retro-fixes for past versions as well-- this means we might have to end up supporting over a dozen variation of WebKit on different Macs! Just too much to keep up with for a small shop like ours.

ArtPearl says:

Quote - As a side note - Chipp said e-on feels Apple is unreasonably forcing them to use Apple's tools - I dont know which tools these are, but isnt that inconsistent with the statement I quoted above? they claim to make use of platform specific  'hardware and software'?

Absolutely not. Until very recently, one can program the Mac via Cocoa or Carbon. But the fact is now you pretty much need to use Cocoa (XCode) in order to access the 64-bit capabilities of some Macs. And as we all know, a 8Gig Mac running in 32-bit mode only allows access to a couple of the Gbs-- and with the sorry and varied state of the OpenGL drivers and video cards on Macs-- there's no wonder significant issues arise.

This is not to say e-on is not responsible for making Vue work on every Mac possible, just that for some configurations, it's a serious daunting task.

JCD, it sounds like you have a wonderfully powerful machine there. I suspect, if you decided to install BootCamp and the 64-bit version of Vue 7.4 for Windows, you would see a remarkable change in performance-- one which your highly talented skills would quickly take advantage of!

I do agree with Rutra, while e-on certainly has work to do on the Mac side of things, it may just be easier to try with a PC-- the interface is identical. And, one of the great features of Vue is you can purchase it for one platform, but use it on another at no cost. Certainly worth a try...