The Daydream Blog

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.

DayTime is taking part in its first promotion, the Easter mEgg Hunt. Find the hidden eggs on participating website and get 20% off great Mac software. As you’re hunting around for the code for the software you want, you will hopefully find some hidden software gems as well.

There’s an egg somewhere on this site and to start looking for more, click on the image below:

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.

As a final word of thanks, here is a list of third party products used in the development of Differencia and the DayTime Website. I like to support the Mac Independent Developer community, but had not quite realised how much, until I wrote this post and saw how many third party products I use and have purchased.

Differencia

Accessorizer, Kevin Callahan. Accessorizer has been of great use, however it doesn’t seem to be under active development, so I will probably be moving to customising Xcode’s existing accessor scripts.

Code Collector Pro, M-Cubed Software. A useful little utility. Whilst I only needed the free version, I purchased the Pro version as I thought Martin Pilkington’s business model was a little bit flawed. He should really be charging for both versions of his product, or drop the free version completely.

FileStorm, MindVision. Simple, straight forward app for creating disk images with background images and licences. A little bit confusing getting the sizing of the window correct the first time, but once the settings are correct, it works great.

svnX, La Chose Interactive. Occasionally Xcode 2′s Source Control system doesn’t cut it, and I need to get a wider overview than the command line can give, so I dip into svnX as my preferred Subversion GUI Client. However with Xcode 3′s improved source control features and my intention to migrate to Git, svnX has unfortunately got a limited life in my tool set.

Graphics

OmniGraffle, The Omni Group. I have employed graphic designers for most of the graphics work for Differencia and the website, but for simple graphics that I feel that I can create myself, I have generally used OmniGraffle. I have had a play with Acorn and have been a long time user of Graphics Converter as well.

iPhoto Library Manager, Fat Cat Software. A great utility that allowed me to keep website and Differencia graphics separate from my main iPhoto library.

Can Combine Icons, ITTPOI. A great little utility that helped to create document icons for Differencia. Again, it seems that it is no longer under active development, which is a shame as it will not be able to create Leopard high resolution Icons files, but it has been really useful up until this point.

Website

Coda, Panic. The harsh reality of Web Development is that WYSIWYG editing is just not possible for anything but simple, template driven websites, without the sledgehammer, expensive, DreamWeaver. Coda is a happy compromise that simplifies web development as far as it can go. I’ve slowly come to really appreciate Coda, as it takes out as much pain from web development as is possible.

CSSEdit, Mac Rabbit. Although Coda includes a CSS Editor, I purchased CSSEdit quite some time ago and still use it, as it is still considerably better than Coda for CSS. CSSEdit has fantastic attention to detail, but more on that in a future post.

MarsEdit, Red Sweater Software. I initially wondered why I would need a Blog Editor for a single Blog. That was until I had to use come to terms with the online editor included with WordPress. With MarsEdit, you really do blog more.

ChronoSync, Econ Technologies. As with many web hosts, 1 & 1 do not provide automated backups for site content. ChronoSync has been an excellent tool for keeping the DayTime website reliably backed up.

MacFusion, Michael Gorbach. Occasionally I dip into direct access to the website’s file system when I need to do something that Coda or ChronoSync can’t handle. MacFusion is an excellent way to do this easily.

Planning

OmniOutliner, The Omni Group. Omni Outliner is one of my favourite applications and I have put it to all sorts of uses. I have, like many others, been using the OmniFocus betas and as of yesterday will be switching to it full time for planning. However, as project manager, the state of Mac project management tools is sadly disappointing and OmniPlan is unfortunately the best of a bad bunch, in my opinion. So in the mean time, I will make do with OmniOutliner or OmniFocus for task planning.

FogBugz, Fog Creek Software. For bug & feature request tracking, I use FogBugz. There is a little publicised, free, hosted version of the software for start-ups & students. You sign up for the trial and when it expires you can “downgrade” to the free version.

TimeOut, Dejal. Staring at a computer monitor all day can be a real strain and can do a lot of damage to the eyes, along with the risk of RSI. TimeOut is a simple utility that helps you to take regular breaks, when you might otherwise be engrossed in work.

Colloquy. Colloquy has been the sanity saviour, allowing contact with other Mac developers, either for help and advice, or simply for a bit of mindless chat to help take a break from work.