Why no ChessBase for Mac?

ChessBase needs to make a version of the product for Macintosh.  Why they haven't is beyond me.

I know your pain.  The good news is that ExaChess is a very good program, and they are now working on version 4, which should be out in the next couple of months.

 

I installed Chessbase Lite on a Parallels instance of Windows XP on my Mac and quickly realized that I actually prefer ExaChess.  Give it a try.  Word is that 4.0 will be greatly improved/modernized and better looking to boot.  (I've even heard that they are lowering the price for the Pro version!)

 

http://www.exachess.com

One of the things that I wanted to do was buy some of the ChessBase trainers.  I was thinking of Kasparov's ChessBase DVDs on the Najdorf for example.  I suspect that I can watch the DVD without ChessBase at all, but I am not sure.

It's not like it used to be, Macs are taking a bigger market share of the personal computing market.  ChessBase should recognize that and make a product for that market. 

 

My MacBook and I agree wholeheartedly.  It used to be that Mac users expected to

be marginalized (I have been on a "Mac" since Apple ][ ), but with the iPhone and

other Apple products becoming ubiquitous I think it is reasonable to expect more

products released for Mac and Windows.  Of course, with the newer Intel Macs and

the advent of Boot Camp one must wonder if it will get better or worse? 

Wouldn't it be funny if the programs ran faster and better on a Mac? And that fact was the reason that the didn't make Mac releases?

You develop for the platform that gives you profit.  The smaller the user-base, the less likely it is you are going to achieve that goal.

Macs are still a minority compared to PC users. It takes a lot of work to convert software from PC to Mac, especially with significant user interface components. If it is in a 3rd party library such as OpenGL it's easier because the code is roughly the same, but Mac applications are written in a languages called Smalltalk which is far removed from the more common variations on C that you get for PC based code (ie the stuff that makes it easyish to convert C code from Windows to Linux), which makes it all a bit harder, especially if it's not the biggest selling program in the world, and let's be honest, Chessbase isn't making a lot of money in the grand scheme of computer programs. While I appreciate that Macs are individual and want to be speperate from PCs, the continued difficulties in having apps that are compatible with both is not helped with Leopard's broken Java or the iPhone being pretty much locked down, and Apple really are shooting themselves in the foot with regards to development, it's possibly the thing that holds back the market share the most, especially with respect to games. It is a big leap to use the fact that a fair few people have the iPhone (and in the high-quality mobile phone market in the EU, the iPhone sold significantly worse, losing out to 3G) to justify spending almost twice as much time writing code for a smaller user base.

 

As to mfnjc, while I am more lenient towards PCs than Macs, I recently, out of my own interest did a comparison of a Mac system to my PC system price-wise, and found out that for a technically better system I was paying £800 less for my PC, including the cost of Vista,  compared to the equivalent iMac, and roughly the same if not a little bit less for the equivalent Pro (which matched the specs a lot better). If I was to run a program on a comparably priced Mac and PC (as in, a PC that was bought from somewhere sensible and not Dell) I can guarantee that it would run faster on the PC. If it ran faster on Macs then Macs would be more popular, and the PC wouldn't have overtaken them in popularity as gaming rigs. Sorry if this seems a bit ranty, it's a programmer's (systems/games/backend/frontend) point of view.

The post above me is so wrong that I don't even know where to begin. 

 

Mac applications can be written in any language.  The Cocoa bindings (which itself is written in Objective-C) are portable and exist for almost every programming language. 

 

I can't think of any part of the modern (that came out after 1998 and/or that is still in use today) Cocoa or Aqua infrastructure that even uses, let alone requires, Smalltalk.   I can't come to any conclusion but assume that this is just made up.

 

Nevertheless, you do not even have to use Aqua to write a Mac application.  Just like openGL (which isn't relevant here) many cross-platform toolkits could have been used.

 

The reason that Chessbase doesn't support Mac is simply because they are working off of a legacy UI codebase that's still using the precursor to Windows.Forms (not sure what it's called, I don't code for toy computers), because that's all that was available for Windows way back when, and can't be arsed to replace it with something modern.

 

It's not hard to make an application cross-platform, if it is designed from the ground-up with compatibility in mind.  Shredder, which for all practical purposes is a one-man job, maintains current versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

 

When your application is based on a 12 year old library which is by nature single-platform, yes there are going to be complications. 

shakje wrote:

but Mac applications are written in a languages called Smalltalk which is far removed from the more common variations on C that you get for PC based code

---

Um, sorry but this is completely wrong.  Mac frontends are primarily coded in Objective C. There is also nothing to stop you coding in C/C++ for the bulk of the project.  It is a delight of a platform to code for quite frankly.  Games are quite rightly thin on the ground due to impact / return of investment, not to do with system power or whatever. 

 

 The cost is fairly subjective, I spend up to 18 hours a day in front of my laptop - I'd go crazy if I was still using a windows pc, and the saving of a couple of hundred pounds wouldn't make me feel any better.  I do advocate Macs to people but I believe everyone should use whatever they feel most comfortable with, at the end of the day it really doesn't matter to me.

 

 There certainly needs to be more Mac chess software. 

Thanks for the clarification trip_out.  Smalltalk sounded wrong to me but I hadn't got around to checking it yet.  I also agree that, depending on what kind of computer you buy, the few dollars (or pounds) you save isn't really a great deal compared with the lack of quality you get with something like Dell, for instance.

Fair enough, quite happy to be corrected and I apologise for just how wrong my post was.

Purely for my own experience, what part of using a Windows PC would drive you crazy (ignoring for the moment the high number of linux distros)?

For me it's just not how I was raised.  The comment about "toy computers" is a joke, but I was raised on Unix and just don't feel at home with anything else.  I'll agree that 2k and later are very stable, friendly, and secure* operating systems.

 

 

*= I'm sure someone will try to argue this -- and I'm fully ready for it, I am responsible for security architecture for very large enterprise networks and I can't see any problems with *current* windows security

 

 

Like kponds it is simply the way I have been 'raised'.  My use of computers has been on multiple platforms, and my brain is already geared for a 'use the best tool for the job'.  As an engineer this was typically a form of unix, so I am at home here.

 

My overall experiance with windows finds it high maintainace, only last week I had to re-install my sisiters dell laptop because it's system files were corrupt and it simply wasn't working properly.  The days of a yearly format may be behind us, but the memory still remains.

 

But it is mainly the fact I have a set of applications I use on my Mac daily, and I feel awkward moving to a different set of applications on a windows terminal.  Plus in terms of work type stuff I like to use a terminal, and I don't really like Cygwin.

 

It is really all subjective, I don't like the arguments that 'x' is better since it is always a matter of personal opinion.  I do know that processing power on most modern machines is more than enough for most people's use - that is apparently unless you run Vista which according to a colleague yesterday sounds a real pain in the arse.

I have 3 XP CDs floating around, but at the time of sorting my new PC, I couldn't find any of them so I ended up buying Vista. There appears to be a cutoff point. As in, if you have sufficient hardware to attain a certain level it's a bit faster than XP (the memory management is better speed-wise, and it performs admirably on multi-core CPUs), and the added security make it quite good thing really. There are some annoyances about it, but only in the same way that Win 95 had annoyances when upgrading from 3.1. Overall I've found it quite pleasurable, with 4 exceptions. Firstly, internal zip file handling is a mess, since getting round to installing WinRAR this is a non-issue, second, network transfers are still a mess, assuming they will fix this soon. Thirdly, if you want to do any file management inside Program Files it's a real pain, it's understandable, but editing a file just gets really annoying. Fourthly, there is some driver annoyances, my experiences with Nvidia are particularly annoying (their drivers are just pap, using Omega at the moment, which are sufficient), although, other than the Nvidia ones, all my other stuff has worked as expected. It's simple really, if you're buying a new system (which is capable, obviously not trusting MS min requirements) you might as well get Vista, if you're getting a sub-par system, or looking to upgrade, stick with XP. I fully agree that comparing OSes is pretty much subjective, but I'd still rather buy my own system and be able to make that choice, than pay more than twice as much purely so that I can use OS-X.

Shrug, when I bought my laptop, I bought it with the full intent to install linux on it, so I was looking at all laptops.  I found that the macbook was the best value in terms of price (sure there are cheaper laptops, but a comparable PC laptop to the macbook would have been much more than the price of the macbook ($899)).

While it's not ChessBase, there is a Macintosh version of Chess Openings Wizard coming... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO10FqU9Png

Mac is wack..

The Mac may be wack but Macintosh sales were up 18 percent last year while other PC sales tanked.

There are several good choices for Chess Software on the Mac.  ChessX, SCID for Mac, Hiarcs Chess Explorer, and yes soon we will have Chess Openings Wizard.

With each release it looks like Chessbase gets harder for Chessbase to support. Its a very old and large program and like many old programs maintenance becomes more and more difficult as new bugs are introduced. It is hard enough for chessbase to keep chessbase running on new versions of windows, let alone port to a new platform.

I feel Chessbase' pain.

I am familiar with the difficulty in maintaining a legacy application through revisions of Windows. The upcoming Chess Openings Wizard is almost a total re-write with a single code base for both Windows and Macintosh. It's my hope that the last two years of development will result in a program that is much easier to maintain.