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Why does camming software have a lot of limitations with Macs?
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Probably the same reason the Macintosh software library overall is a bit limited: It's a much smaller market, so software producers can't justify making the same kind of investment in that platform as they do in Windows.
A lot of business software won't work natively with Macs. Apart from MS Office and browsers, none of the software I use to do my work has a Mac version. Some B2B sites I have to deal with still only work properly or at all using Internet Explorer, for that matter. Our design department gets along fine with Macs, though. Unless your business revolves around the arts, like graphic design or video editing, Mac OS is a poor choice if you rely on your computer to make a living.
If you're curious about the technical issues:
Writing software that works with a webcam on Windows requires an understanding of DirectX/DirectShow or MediaFoundation. Microsoft has been using a variant of this DirectX/DirectShow for the past 20 years and so people are VERY familiar with how to use this API. Until MediaFoundation completely replaces DirectShow, Windows is easy to program for in respect to webcam software.
That brings us to MacOS. To write webcam software for MacOS, either AVFoundation or CoreMediaIO needs to be used. They are both very poorly documented and the examples given in the documentation do not work without being edited (which would require you to already know the APIs). To make things even more difficult, these are currently being ported into Swift, which is intended to replace Objective-C as the primary app programming language. To put it simply, there are a lot more choices you have to make in designing webcam software for MacOS, and absolutely none of the options are appealing.
There are open-source options available as a workaround, but those come with their own issues and faults, and generally just do not work as well as the platform-specific options.
Edited to add an apology for answering a question in 'Ask-a-Model', given that I'm not a model...
Writing software that works with a webcam on Windows requires an understanding of DirectX/DirectShow or MediaFoundation. Microsoft has been using a variant of this DirectX/DirectShow for the past 20 years and so people are VERY familiar with how to use this API. Until MediaFoundation completely replaces DirectShow, Windows is easy to program for in respect to webcam software.
That brings us to MacOS. To write webcam software for MacOS, either AVFoundation or CoreMediaIO needs to be used. They are both very poorly documented and the examples given in the documentation do not work without being edited (which would require you to already know the APIs). To make things even more difficult, these are currently being ported into Swift, which is intended to replace Objective-C as the primary app programming language. To put it simply, there are a lot more choices you have to make in designing webcam software for MacOS, and absolutely none of the options are appealing.
There are open-source options available as a workaround, but those come with their own issues and faults, and generally just do not work as well as the platform-specific options.
Edited to add an apology for answering a question in 'Ask-a-Model', given that I'm not a model...
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