I am not a PC person, I do not like them at all. I am a Mac person, period.
I am not creating this thread to argue about what is better.
All I want is the same features in my DDI subscription when using a Mac.
Why does a Mac not have any access to things like the character builder?
As a subscriber, this is extremely frustrating to me!!!
What is the big deal that keeps DDI from allowing Macs the same software? Would it really be that difficult to provide? We're paying for this, so I would expect DDI to get on board with the rest of the world and be compatible with Macs! True there are things that they just don't make for Macs, usually games - I am not a computer gamer. Everything else I have always had access to, just not DDI.
Its honestly causing my overral interests in DDI to wither. I am not going to get a PC just to use DDI to the fullest extent.
Are there any other Mac users out there that feel this frustration?
Please keep your posts polite, respectful, and on-topic, and refrain from making personal attacks.
I'm going to continue being a D&Di subscriber, I really like the service provided, but I do wish we had access to everything PC users do.
I'm a mac user and a D&Di subscriber. I love the magazines, I love the compendium, and I love the bonus tools. That said, I really wish the other programs were made available on mac as well. However, I think there is nothing we can really do about it. Mac users have been very vocal about being shafted since 4e was released, but I think we are such a small minority that it is not worth WOTC's economic interest to listen to us.
I'm going to continue being a D&Di subscriber, I really like the service provided, but I do wish we had access to everything PC users do.
Apparently Macs sold around 50% of computers sold in the last number of months in the US, so obviously market share is going up - and therefore likelyhood of getting satisfaction goes up.
The main problem of porting the DDI tools to mac is they are .Net based - a windows only thing.
I'm a mac user and a D&Di subscriber. I love the magazines, I love the compendium, and I love the bonus tools. That said, I really wish the other programs were made available on mac as well. However, I think there is nothing we can really do about it. Mac users have been very vocal about being shafted since 4e was released, but I think we are such a small minority that it is not worth WOTC's economic interest to listen to us.
I'm going to continue being a D&Di subscriber, I really like the service provided, but I do wish we had access to everything PC users do.
Apparently Macs sold around 50% of computers sold in the last number of months in the US, so obviously market share is going up - and therefore likelyhood of getting satisfaction goes up.
The main problem of porting the DDI tools to mac is they are .Net based - a windows only thing.
Considering that we are in the worst recession since The Great Depression(www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3421) and Macs are on average significantly higher priced than PCs(www.obsessable.com/feature/mac-vs-pc-the... www.macworld.com/article/139901/2009/04/...) and netbook(which are extremely inexpensive PCs) sales are on the rise(news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10285189-92.ht... www.engadget.com/2009/08/31/netbook-sale... mcpmag.com/articles/2009/10/15/netbook-s...), I would never accept a blanket statement with half of all computer sales being premium higher priced models without proper citation
Apparently Macs sold around 50% of computers sold in the last number of months in the US, so obviously market share is going up - and therefore likelyhood of getting satisfaction goes up.
The 50% number is false. It's not "50% of all computers." They had a 47.7% revenue share in October on desktop PCs. This doesn't mean that 48% of all desktops sold were Macs, it means that 48% of all money spent on desktop PCs was spent on Macs. Considering that the average sales price of a Mac desktop is $1,338 and the average sales price of a windows desktop is $491, you can see that it doesn't translate into "50% of computers sold" (which would also include portables and servers) since one average Mac sale equals 2.75 average PC sales in desktops.
All of this courtesy of MacDailyNews.
I tried to dig up information on notebook sales for recent months but was unable to find anything. Most of it had to do with the sales as of July/August which saw a year-to-year profit increase in Mac notebook sales up 50%. That also is not 50% of the sales market (sales were actually up, overall, by about 6.8% according to analysts). So far it looks like analysts haven't reported what the overall market shares are. The most recent ones I could find were for Q3 2009 and the two analyst firms, Gartner and IDC, had them at 8.8% and 9.4% respectively. Of course this is just preliminary data. Earlier this year both firms' Q3 analysis was corrected downward from up in the nines to 8.6% for both of them. Apple previously sat at 5% of worldwide market sahre, but Q3 reports show Toshiba holding that position with 5% or 5.2% depending on which firm's numbers you look at. Apple sits at the #4 position of the top 5 US computer sales, but doesn't make the top 5 in worldwide sales.
All this data is from CNN Money.
So you have to be careful when throwing around such numbers.
DISCLAIMER: This is in no way meant to bash Macs but simply to present some fact in light of a casually thrown out number.
I'm not being sarcastic either. The character builder isn't rocket science as far as applications go. But the data is constantly changing and there's all kinds of none-to-simple business logic. A lot of it is visible right in the .dnd4e files.
Give it a shot.
This is from elf, one of the (ex)-devs on DDI tools and macs:
I would have love to have done a mac version. I have a mac. I also have an iphone.When I originally joined the project though I was given a 6 month time frame to full release, 3 months to beta, and by the way, that includes the time I could spend hiring a staff. Staff was, fortunately, hired in short order, and I was lucky to get some great people on the team. With the short schedule though we were making decisions between releasing it as a web app, or perhaps winforms. We mocked up a web app and it wasn't responsive enough, we mocked up a winforms prototype, and it was slow and lacked the ability to do all the things we wanted to do so we ported to WPF which set us back a week but was so worth it. We were able to do more things, have better control of the UI and development time was very fast.
Given the short schedule that we had it wouldn't have been reasonable to make a multi-platform version. Once we were done with the initial build I did cost out what it would take to make a mac version, as I think it is short sighted not to make one. The problem being that Wizards just doesn't have enough mac customers yet. They would need something like 10 times as many in order for it to break even, and that's not counting the fact that the majority of mac users can run windows apps in some sort of vm setup.
It's also entirely possible that by the time there are enough mac customers there will also be either native osx support for wpf, or some sort of rapid development tool for mac/iphone that could be trivially ported too. It's also possible that with the coming release of windows7 that XP will drop in price so much that it doesn't make sense not to have a copy running in a vm with your mac.
Now, does this mean that WotC will never port the tools to macs?? No. However (and this is just my opinion, and is not based on any insider info or anything like that) right now the focus of WotC is on delivering high-quality tools. While I am reasonably certain that porting the tools to macs are on a list of things to do, getting out the rest of the tools is much, much higher on the priority list.
Switching to porting now would mean a complete change in focus, in addition to the hiring of a new development team (I assume that the current team has no experience in porting fromone OS to another), which would significantly delay any further tools release.
DDI is a relatively (for a company that needs to look at the long term) recent addition to the WotC stable. Before they start changing how it works or dramatically changing the offerings, they need to obtain some decent baseline statistics, over several quarters at the very least, of subscription numbers. When a tool is released, how long does the hump last? Is there a change due to holidays? Summer? Campaign settings being released?
The fact is that as much as I hate it when companies ignore us, I am thrilled that the one that makes my favorite hobby is making a digital product like this at all.
Also, if you have a Mac, and it won't run Windows your **** is old. If it will run Windows and you refuse, you are making a mistake. Running Windows on a virtual machine to run a couple of programs works pretty well. It's not like you have to actually suffer through using it for other stuff.
A while ago, I stumbled across Mono, an open source, cross platform version of .NET. Apparently, it's really powerful and The Sims 3 was even written in it (and released for both Windows and Mac). Looks like it even can build stuff for Linux and the iPhone too.
I've always wondered how much work it would be to take the Character Builder code and compile it with Mono, especially since there's a lot of very helpful documentation about porting applications. I won't pretend to actually have an idea of how difficult it would still be, but I always thought it would be worth it for the developers to look into it.
I run linux most of the time, but I also run Mac OS on my laptop, and sometimes windows.
Sun has created Virtual Box (vbox) and it works on both systems and even windows.
You start your Windows xp virtual machine and connect to the character builder just fine.
Most PCs nowadays have the necessary resources to run a virtual machine just fine.
Plus, it will actually help you run the other apps that won't work on your Mac.
Easy alternative. And yeah write them a letter, if they get enough, they might want to support a Mac version.
-MawOfAcamar