And so it begins

Ever since I bought my first Macintosh computer (“Irulan” a 1.5 GHz 12” Powerbook G4 and still a lovely machine) in July of 2005 at the urging of my friend Beth I have wanted to be involved in MacOSX development. Something about the applications on the Mac just felt “right” and I really wanted to be a part of that.

Arriving just after Tiger was released was good timing on my part. Cocoa had been augmented with CoreData and bindings making it simpler and simpler to build desktop applications. I started in earnest in the latter part of 2006 and struck ground on my first real application in December of that year. By late January I had a first working prototype of an application for browsing & committing changes within Subversion working copies that I would later name Diffly. I made a lot of poor choices when building Diffly that constrained its growth.

In June 2005 having released several updates to Diffly I found myself needing a file management tool for handling large (think 10’s of thousands) of files. Drag and drop and multi-Finder windows proved to be a poor fit for this kind of task and there didn’t seem to be a good alternative. Hence Transference was born. I took a lot of the learning from Diffly and made fewer (although by no means none) of the errors I made in Diffly. Where Diffly took 3 months, Transference took about 3 weeks which is a testament to how easy Cocoa and the other MacOSX frameworks make things even for beginners.

I think every MacOSX developer dreams of making it their living and becoming independently wealthy from the proceeds. People like Allan Oddgard, Will Shipley, Gus Mueller, and Daniel Jalkult are models of how developing apps for the Mac platform can work out. But they all put a lot of work into building good products, marketing them well, and letting success build. I don’t imagine I’m any smarter or more savvy than these guys. So I’m putting my peg in the ground. I have two applications already, one more on the drawing board, and one in production. My next application will be shareware with a view to making a little slush money. With luck in a few years I might be able to call myself a MacOSX developer by trade.

Here’s to the future of MacOSX development and developers!