I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the state of software on the Mac, especially in the wake of some less than stellar releases from the big developers. I’ve said this before a long time ago, but platform parity amongst applications is not necessarily the best thing for the Mac. In the past this was probably the best Mac users could hope for, that their favorite applications would at least maintain parity with their windows cousins, but with the rise in prominence of the Mac, I don’t think that’s the case any longer. Applications that are cross platform are missing out on many of the Mac only features of Leopard and this will only get even greater when snow leopard is released. Large programs like Photoshop etc will never utilize the many features of Leopard that could make them really great.
In the last few years there has been some great software coming from small independent developers that really show the potential for the platform. These apps are often small and more focussed compared to the words and photoshops of the big boys, but they are extremely slick and in my mind demonstrate the potential if larger software developers saw past their blinkers and took a bigger chance on the Mac. Applications like Rapid Weaver and the excellent Little Snapper from real Mac software for example are great examples of good Mac only software design The web development App, Coda is another good example. Pixelmator shows what photoshop could have been like. It lacks the power of Adobe’s juggernaut but it’s beautifully designed and very responsive when you’re working with smaller documents, and it opens before Photoshop even brings up the splash screen.
With all the focus on the App store over the past year, I think some of the great work being done by Mac developers is getting lost in the chatter and I hope in 2009 a little more light might be shone on the Mac as a platform, not just as an alternative operating system to windows on which you can run the same software, but as a completely alternative platform with some great software that you can’t get anywhere else. If apple would get back to evangelizing the Mac like they used years ago and shine some of their powerful pr light on some of these programs I think there would be an even greater appreciation for what the Mac can do.
Here’s just a few examples of some brilliantly designed Mac software. (Feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments.)
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Omni Group has been putting out Mac-only software for years. I can’t speak to all of their applications, but certainly OmniGraffle is fantastic and OmniOutliner is solid. http://www.omnigroup.com/
And let’s not forget:
Keynote
Garage Band
Pages
BBEdit
Yojimbo
Delicioius Library
Books
Freeway
Sandvox
I certainly love the assorted shareware that’s available for the Mac. Remember the days when one of the arguments against a Mac was that there was (supposedly) not enough software available for it? How that has changed…
Among my favorites are the Omni Apps, TextMate (even if v2 is taking veeery looong), TaskPaper, Skitch, iWork, Scrivener, Notebook and DEVONthink. Good luck finding anything equivalent for Windows.
I think the way things are right now, Mac users couldn’t be more fortunate. I believe the Mac shareware scene is much livelier than on Windows and the quality and professionalism of many apps is nothing short of amazing. And because the Mac software market is so diverse and not controlled by a dozen or so large corporations, it’s thriving. Let’s hope it stays that way.
“Good luck finding anything equivalent for Windows.”
I believe someone has come up with a text editor for Windows that’s capable of using TextMate bundles. So, actually, there is a kind of equivalence there, I suppose …. although I feel bound to add that TextMate is a superb program. There’s no other text editor on the Mac that even comes close – and it’s all pure cocoa (unlike some so-called OSX editors) and is currently being rewritten in Objective-C 2 to boot. No one else puts as much work in as the TextMate guy.
I’d dispute that iWork is way ahead of Office or OpenOffice.org. It’s indubitably more aesthetically pleasing and nicer to use, but it is lacking in power. I doubt you’d find many physicists, accountants, and other professional users doing spreadsheets in Numbers.