Late last week, 9to5Mac - along with a number of other sites - reported the changes to Apple’s Mac Developer programme with “Mac Developer license falls to $99/year, Mac App Store coming?”. If you’ve read the piece, you may well agree there’s some logical failings, and whilst I try to not question the logic in too many articles for fear of sounding like a complete jackass, the more I read the 9to5Mac article, the more I found myself laughing at it. So here goes some clarification.
A $99 Mac Developer license means the barrier to Mac development is lowered for all of those thousands of developers who’ve had different measures of success on the iPhone.
No. The barrier to entry has always been precisely zero dollars. The tools to develop for the Mac - along with the API documentation for the currently-shipping version of OS X - have always been free of charge. You paid for a membership to receive advance pre-release builds of Mac OS X, a hardware discount, and maybe a ticket to WWDC - not for access to the Xcode IDE or currently-shipping APIs in Mac OS X.
Those developers, who can now port their apps to the Mac platform as widgets or full fledged Mac applications, need a means of distribution as well. … These people don’t have a way to distribute apps or a marketing budget or finance department.
I guess this tiny insignificant thing called the Internet doesn’t count? I mean, it’s not as though companies (like my own employer, or many other esteemed indie shops) have been selling, marketing or financing their applications for the past half-decade or more.
Yes: the Internet lacks the placebo sugar-coating of the App Store and the hands-tied approach to sales reporting that’s known as iTunes Connect, but there are tonnes of ways for folks to build, sell and market their apps via the Internet. Let’s also not forget that the App Store itself is not a marketing vehicle - it’s a listing system and that still requires the developer to proactively market their application.
Call me stupid, but doesn’t this sound much like the Internet to you?
I’m not going to labour this point too much - but I will add some sensible remarks on the new Mac Developer Program. Yes: the iPhone program quite likely influenced thinking on the programme pricing. Yes: it’s a play to encourage iPhone developers to bring their wares to the Mac. And, you know what, yes: it’s lowering the barrier of entry to develop - with pre-release builds of OS X. But to suggest that the drop in price is in somehow related to a Mac App Store - just because the iPhone programme includes an App Store - and base an entire article on such conjecture is missing the bigger picture, and completely downplays why the price change is actually important.
With that out the way, I’ll answer a slightly bigger question: will a Mac App Store ever see the light of day? I’m going with “No”. If Apple were building the Mac today, it’d without a doubt have an App Store. But that’s a little ironic too - because it sounds surprisingly like another certain device, whose mass-market consumer appeal I’ve written about before.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article in no way represent the opinions of my employer.
Yesterday’s iPad ad from the Oscars, complete with blatant-almost-laughable leg-comping behind the device. You can almost see it sat atop a green-screen table…..
When iPhone was announced, the big question was when or if it would support Flash. With the iPad the debate is if Flash is irrelevant.
It makes all the difference in the world that Apple is pushing H.264 rather than, say, QuickTime as the way forward for embedded web video.
[Google’s] don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.
“Why do we do it like this on the desktop?”
That’s the question I imagine Apple asking, again and again when looking at the desktop-like features they wanted to bring to the iPhone OS and create the iPad OS. The iPad OS isn’t an entirely new re-envisioning of computer OS - if only because it is based on the iPhone OS that preceded it - but it’s as scathing and questioning as an all-new OS in some regards.
I spent this morning re-installing Mac OS X, iLife and iWork on a MacBook Pro that I’ve sold. As I watched the OS X installer display things like “Writing Package Receipts”, “Moving Things Into Place”, and “Running Package Scripts” - things that are utterly meaningless to the average Ma-and-Pa computer user - I came to the realisation that the iPad OS makes Mac OS X look old and confusing: and I’m not even talking about the visual design. I’m talking about the assumptions the designers made when deciding what really needed to be shown on OS X.
Do we need to display a textual update saying what an application installation is actually doing on the iPad, when a moving progress bar and activity indicator to reassure the average user that something is going on is all that’s needed?
Of course not. Does the user even know (or care) what a Package Receipt actually is?
Does an iPad user really need to know where their files are stored beyond “In the Pictures Folder”?
For a mainstream user: absolutely not. Mac OS X and Windows have both, for some considerable time, shipped with Photos, Music, Videos and Documents folders. But their intended use as a central repository for a specific type of file was undermined by the fact that people could place files anywhere, and create new folders galore (not to mention the fact that, in all likelihood, they’d be using an application like iPhoto to manage pictures which to some extent, nested the content further). In the iPad OS, you really can say to your parents: open up the Photos application, safe in the knowledge that all the media they’re itching to view and email is right there. With the iPad OS we’re now looking at the merging of an iPhoto-like experience with the filesystem itself.
Yes, it’s an entirely prescriptive way of computing - one that the hackers, tinkerers and geeks will find alien and protest about its lack of openness. But here’s the thing: for the people who the iPad is aimed at it really doesn’t matter that this experience is prescriptive - and the more you look at the decisions Apple seem to have made in building the software on the device, the more you realise that the iPad is perhaps the first high-technology product ready for - and entirely aimed at - a mainstream audience right from the get-go.
The State of the iPad Address - Inevitable, yet brilliant.
The market for potential iPad users is tremendous, possibly larger than the iPhone’s market. There are millions of PC users who are dissatisfied with their virus-ridden, clunky computers who just want it to work better for the simple things they do every day. … For $500 less [than a MacBook] they can own a piece of Apple technology that lets them do almost everything they currently do in a form-factor that’s more convenient, mobile and beautiful. This is the iPad’s intended audience.
Another link courtesy of Gruber, this somewhat gloating piece from the Flash team seems to deride the fact that the iPad doesn’t include Flash.
Upon watching the keynote stream this morning and seeing the broken plugin link, I couldn’t have been happier at the confirmation of no Flash on the iPad. The appearance of the missing plugin icon in the keynote was in absolutely no way accidental: the deliberate display of the icon is a firm F-U to Adobe.
Whilst he doesn’t speak for Adobe, it’s an interesting post to read alongside John Gruber’s excellent piece last week.
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