WWDC from a software developer’s viewpoint
When an eagle descends, only the prairie dog it targets runs away. Everyone else sits up and looks at the show. “Will Jack get eaten this time?”
WWDC is exciting for end users. It’s even more so for developers! Of course we all are excited to learn about the latest and greatest, and love unexpected surprises such as DTrace support. However there’s a bad side. Will Apple Steam roll my product?
It happened to Audion with Itunes. It happened to Karelia with Sherlock, and then it seemed to happen again this MacWorld Sandvox.
This WWDC has been particularly ruthless:
- Quicksilver and Launchbar because spotlight will take over their most useful feature: launching applications quickly.
- Virtual Desktop, Virtue and Desktop manager will see their markets replaced by Spaces.
- SuperDuper! and other backup providers see themselves made into niche players by Time Machine
It’s hard to argue that Apple should not improve its operating system, bringing the benefits provided by these tools to the masses. It’s even harder to argue that when its competitor Microsoft does the same thing. As did Google, with its free offering of Google Earth. However it’s also really hard for the developers to compete with “Free!”. And these features are free, because they come free with new computers, or with OS upgrades required to run some other application.
August 8th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
Seems some other people noticed this too!
August 10th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
In fairness, you’ve got to read this great tale of Audion - http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ It could’ve BEEN iTunes
September 1st, 2006 at 2:17 pm
Very good reading. Peace until next time.
WaltDe
September 3rd, 2006 at 7:41 am
Can’t agree on Spaces… both free alternatives are unstable alpha releases, and $40 for a virtual desktop feature; I don’t think so… Built-in on every new Mac, and developers working to make sure their apps don’t crash with Spaces, instead of Apple working to make sure Spaces doesn’t crash on the 10,000+ apps out there; nice.
October 27th, 2007 at 8:54 am
isn’t virtual desktop out of development? and has been for awhile?
@bart
there’s also you control desktop (30) but offers a lot more functionality than spaces (it seems) and is the only one that doesn’t have lots of instability reports
I’d guess that you control will survive, but I haven’t played with spaces yet….