The Daydream Blog

The next MacMacDev for Edinburgh has been announced for Thursday 10 July 2008, starting at 19:00. The venue is unchanged and is at Baroque, 39-41 Broughton Street, Edinburgh, EH1 3JU. Full details can be found here.

There’s also a new mailing list for the community, full details can be found here.

Hope to see you there.

There is a meeting scheduled for Scottish based Mac developers attending WWDC. Initial plans are for meeting at the Thirsty Bear on Sunday, 8th June at 6PM. Exact timings may change.

If you are interested, please email david at macmacdev dot com. Further details and updates can be found at the MacMacDev website.

There are already 8-9 attendees, so a healthy number. More the merrier, so please let David know if you would like to come along too.

I had the great privilege to meet a number of Scottish based Mac software developers at the first Edinburgh MacMacDev meeting. The group was set up by head Cocoa cheer leader, David Masters of PyrusMalus. there have been a couple of meetings so far in Glasgow and one in Edinburgh.

Since moving to Scotland 18 months ago, I have been surprised by the number of Mac developers based here. I had heard of the Silicon Glen, the idea that there are a number of tech related companies in Scotland, but it was a great surprise to find so many Mac developers here. It makes a huge difference to have a local community, as well as a strong online one.

Glasgow meetings are planned for the 4th / last Thursday of every month, with the next one on 29th May.

Edinburgh meetings are planned for the 2nd Thursday of every month, with the next meeting planned for June 12th. Whilst this is during Apple’s developer conference, WWDC, there should still be a good attendance. Exact venue is yet to be confirmed, and the best place to keep an eye on things is the MacMacDev Website

There are also plans afoot to have a MacMacDev meet up at WWDC, details yet to be confirmed, which will be a good opportunity of East and West coasters to meet up to compare notes.

In the unlikely event that you have not seen this yet (7m already have, in just 10 days), Black Eyed Peas’ Will.I.Am and friends put Barack Obama’s words to music. “Yes, We Can” may take on as much importance as “Ask what you can do for your country”.

Lost in the mists of time and in the obscurity of a niche platform, many do not realise that the Web was invented on a NeXT machine running NEXTSTEP (whichever form of capitalisation was prevalent at the time). And that NEXTSTEP is the precursor to Mac OS X. The MAKE blog has some photos of the NeXT machine that hosted the world’s first website.

The first browser, WorldWideWeb, was written in the precursor to Cocoa, the tools used to create most of the great, new, software on the Mac, including Differencia.

As I mentioned in “Web 0.9 beta“, Tim Berners-Lee always envisaged the web to be read/write, presaging Web 2.0, as can be seen in this screen-shot.

What is fascinating is that if you read the text in the about box, you can see that Berners-Lee already had the concept of helper applications. In this case, specifically for a NNTP news-reader, presaging RSS links on pages being opened by a third party news reader application such as NetNewsWire or NewsFire.

I used to be surprised that Apple did not make more of its Web heritage, but I guess you cannot really say much about how great your current products are, based on a third party product developed 17 years ago for a platform created by a company that you paid $400m to do a reverse take over of yourself.

Over the last 18 months spent developing Differencia, I have been surprised by the number of arguments that have broken out amongst the Mac developer community. Prior to WWDC ‘06, they had mostly seemed to be a cohesive community, with a united goal to promote the Mac platform. Since then there have been several ugly arguments over Cocoa vs Carbon, The Delicious Generation, Code Bloat, Software Distribution formats, Marketing Promotions (MacHeist, et al.) and even racism. Mac developers have not argued this much since Apple’s reverse take-over by Steve Job’s NeXT.

This might feel quite unseemly and create a negative image of the Mac developer community amongst our customer base. It may even suggest that there is some fragility in the traditionally zealot-like support for the Mac. As I suggested in “The Year of Hubris“, there is certainly a new willingness to criticise Apple, by its customers and developers.

Should customers be worried? Should Developers keep their arguments private? Or is Daniel Jakult right, when he suggests that the developer community is still one big happy family?

Well, I would argue “No” in all cases. The infighting amongst Mac developers signals the end of a siege mentality. We are no longer worried that Apple may go bust, that the Mac may disappear as a product and our beloved platform will be swamped by Windows. For the last decade, or more, the Mac community has stuck together to defend their platform. Now that the Mac market is buoyant, Apple is financially healthy and the future looks bright, the need for solidarity is gone.

In fact the Mac market is large enough and growing at such a pace, that there is room again for multiple competing products. Developers want to do their best to differentiate their products, and promote their approach to their customers, as being “better than the next guy”. In short, traditional market forces have come into play.

As with any good, transparent, competitive market, competition is a great thing for customers. It means that developers are desperately fighting to improve their products to steal a march on their competitors. All of the arguments are centred around what is best for customers. Customers who now have a genuine choice.

Why the sudden change? After all Apple has been financially healthy, and the Mac market has been growing, for quite some time. I would suggest that the speed, success and mere fact of the Intel transition has been the catalyst. Apple is no longer one failed delivery from its chip vendor away from disaster. Intel is a reliable partner, and if they stumble, AMD and IBM are waiting in the wings. I have been nervously waiting for a bake off showing how much faster Windows is than OS X on the same hardware. Instead we discover that a Mac is, in fact, the fastest Vista capable laptop.

If the Mac developers stop arguing, start worrying. In the mean time, sit back and enjoy the fireworks.