Developing Applications for OS X and Windows...

[corinthos]

For Windows applications development, the main IDE/compiler used is MS Visual Studio.

Here are my questions:

1. What is the top equivalent IDE/compiler for Mac OS?
2. Is cross-platform development realistic and achievable?
3. C# is used a lot on Windows side. Just wondering on OS X side, what is used most?

Thanks.

 

[purbeast0]

Xcode is what you use for OSX development. I am pretty sure there are other tools you can use however, but that is the main one that comes with OSX and it's used to dev for OSX and iOS. I've used it extensively for iOS however never for OSX, well not any time in the past 7 years.

My first job out of school was for a commercial application that was both OSX and Windows. We shared the same code base and used XCode. Everything was written in C++. I'm sure by now however things have changed significantly in the cross platform world.

And btw, Xcode is 2nd worst IDE I've ever used, outside of Eclipse. It's terrible.

If you want though, there are many tools that let you develop in a language and have one code base but deploy to different platforms. I've never used it but Electron seems very cool to me since I do javascript development.

https://electron.atom.io/

You can write full fledge desktop applications in javascript that will build for OSX and Windows (and others).