Yes, Image Line, maker of FL Studio, hates Macs, so it is a reasonably big deal that they’ve just announced they’ll be porting a newly-ported plug-in to Mac.
Well, sort of a big deal, anyway. Technically, porting plug-ins between platforms is not an enormous issue; it’s primarily an issue of testing. Testing, though, means hauling Macs into your office. (I knew something was up with Cakewalk, for instance, when I saw a shiny Power Mac G5 in their testing studio.) And Windows users who touch Macs generally have to find a way to make their peace. In Image Line’s FAQ on whether they’ll ever support the Mac, they link to this movie by a guy who, erm, obviously knows nothing. Maybe he’s better with Windows? (Then again, it’s kind of fun watching him freak out.)
Anyway, it’s nothing personal that’s keeping FL Studio from running on Macs. Anyone who’s visited their FAQ in the last few years can see the answer, put plainly:
FL Studio was developed in Delphi therefore it’s almost impossible to port FL Studio to the Mac OS (or any other OS) without a complete rewrite.
Delphi? Really? Fun side note: Object Pascal, the primary language in Delphi, was developed (wait for it) at Apple (to enable the early Mac application frameworks, no less). Now, I know some people who love Object Pascal and I know nothing about it, so I’ll just stay quiet — and, as I recall, Reagan was still President when Borland was aggressively touting Pascal on the Mac, so I’ll take Image Line at their word. But beyond technical issues, as Adrian notes, shipping Mac software is indeed going to be a philosophical change for IL.
Programmers: anyone want to recommend some handy tools for the Image Line folks to port their Delphi software to Mac? Heck, I’d be more likely to run FL Studio on my PCs if I could also run it on my Macs. (That’e been my experience with Ableton Live.)