If you don't mind me asking, what is Mac-specific about it? Is it the GUI toolkit? The PC-program toolkits I've used to transfer data to and from embedded devices using USB-C: (Qt, EGUI) don't care what OS you use. The web-based ones like Electron don't either. So, there would be nothing blocking the release; they just work on any OS you compile on or cross-compile for.
The Mac-specific parts of Photon Transfer (the companion app) are really just the GUI stuff (AppKit) and the GPU shaders (Metal) for the image pipeline. In fact the "MDCUtil" tool should still work on Linux (I haven't tested it in a bit though), and that allows reading imagery from the camera along with lots of other fun debug stuff.
A big part of porting Photon Transfer to Linux would be converting the image pipeline from Metal to... Vulcan (?). The main chunks of that are FFCC illuminant estimation (for white balancing) and LMMSE debayering:
To be frank the "mac exclusive" marketing is a huge turn off for something that should obviously be nearly completely agnostic regarding PC operating systems. Makes me wonder what other poor decisions went into the design of this thing.
It's not marketing. They're just upfront about limitations (software is single-platform) while trying to present it positively (it will feel native on that platform). The entire page seems to make a point of being upfront about limitations, which is kind of a rare thing. That said I agree that making it cross-platform would have been wise, since the software is entirely secondary to the physical product.
Yeah, I actually physically rolled my eyes when I read the "exclusively for Mac" copy on the website. I get it if you want to build a cool photo transfer/view app as an add on to the experience, and want to do it native, and only have time to build for one platform. But calling that out in that way makes it sound like some sort of "feature", which is a huge turn-off, regardless of whether or not they're building exclusively for my platform of choice.
But the camera itself should support MTP, USB mass storage, or something of that nature, and should just work on any platform. If it doesn't, that's a pretty silly oversight.
Is it obvious? Is it free (as in resources) to support agnostic platforms and systems? Is the threshold for making anything that it needs to be compatible with everything?
Apparently, to take the processing off of the camera chip, the decision was to:
1. Not use a filesystem on the SD card;
2. Write RAW files only
This means software is needed to both transfer files, and to convert them into an image format.
Personally, I'd put that software on board, with extra dedicated hardware if necessary (it can be powered off of USB), and make the device appear as a massage storage device to a USB host.
