Some interesting stats

I love statistics. Making charts and spreadsheets is sort of my kind of thing. It makes everything look clear and often it allows me to discover new things and gather new insights. In Path Finder 4.7 we integrated a very cool tool to gather some information about our users, it is called Sparkle Plus framework. It sends us your system profile information, such as amount of RAM, processor speed, language that you use, Path Finder version, OS version, etc, and does so anonymously. I thought that sharing this information could be interesting and probably potentially useful to some other developers over there, since we probably all share a similar user base. So here we go.

First about your computers. It looks like majority of you are using new fast machines with the latest version of the OS.

> 60% are running on Intel processors

> 70% appear to have more than 2 GB of RAM installed.

> 80% upgraded to latest OS Version - 10.4.10 - within the first week of it's release

MacBook Pro is the most popular model, followed by various PowerPC desktops as shown on the chart below:

As you maybe know, Path Finder is localized in 17 languages, thanks to enthusiastic volunteers that agreed to help us with translations. Now here's how those translations are actually used:

The "Other" part looks like this:

Now we're not the first to gather this kind of information. Omni group was doing this since a long time, and their charts seem to have a lot of similarity with ours, which is not surprising. Mac developers have the chance to code for technically aware audience, which upgrades to the latest and greatest as soon as it becomes available. As far as I know, this is far from being true on other platforms, however I don't have any statistics to prove that :) .

Now I'm really feeling myself behind the masses with my faithful PowerBook '12 with "only" 1 GB of RAM which I'm writing this post on. But I really love it - it's small and elegant, I can take it everywhere and I will really miss it, if nothing of the kind and size will be released in the near future.