Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba has a rather insightful post over on Rogue Amoeba's blog about what seems to be a growing divide between "oldschool" OS X developers (who aren't really all that old) versus the "newschool" generation of OS X developers.
Anyhow, the three of us realized that after developing on Mac OS X for just a few years, we felt like not just part of the old school of Mac developers, but the crotchety old men of the Mac software industry. In the past year or so, Mac development had shifted from applications providing new functionality that appeared at the dawn of OS X to applications (and ideas) built around flash and sizzle, with plenty of marketing hype to fuel the fire.
Paul & the gang has dubbed the new generation of Mac developers the "Delicious Generation," named because of the rapid succession of new software that proudly touts inspiration from Wil Shipley's Delicious Library. It's flashy, it's snazzy, it's fun to play with and watch on the screen... and then it leaves you without saying goodbye in the morning and stops returning your calls.
This is causing a rift among Mac developers, they claim. On the upside, the apps look great and receive a lot of hype on the Mac web to sell their products with despite not having a lot of information available. Paul cites a few examples (such as Disco, AppZapper, and the entire My Dream App contest) as evidence of the above.
My Dream App has drawn in thousands of people and gotten them interested in Mac software. It's also been the subject of countless articles across the web. Many small developers would kill for the kind of press that My Dream App has received. What can we learn here? The old cliche "Sell the sizzle, not the steak" certainly applies.
On the downside, there's that whole content/functionality thing.
A fellow developer joked that Disco would be released to much fanfare, and then the developers would realize they'd forgotten to hook up the disc burning functionality, having been so busy with the Smoke. This didn't strike me as too far off the mark. Caring about the UI is A Good Thing. Focusing on it solely to the detriment of user interaction or even features, is not.
He mentions that sites like MacZOT do a good job at promoting software quickly, but there's more to that than just gaining users. There are support costs to consider and you can't survive on discounted software alone.
If an application appears with a slashed price on one of these sites, will new full-price sales follow, or will people simply hope to find it on sale again? Are these loyal users who will buy upgrades and new applications? My sense is no.
The thing is, the oldschool developers (or so Mr. Kafasis claims) don't want to start a war. At least most of them don't. Maybe. They ultimately want to strike some sort of balance between their "generation" and the Delicious Generation, because both sides have something to bring to the table.
The thing to realize is that we shouldn't be thinking of this as a battle between the old school and the new school. The new school has some good ideas, and they're shaking things up. It may be scary, but shaking things up is ultimately a good thing. If no one shakes things up once in a while, everyone gets complacent and forward progress stops. Find the good, avoid the bad and the ugly.
The entire article is definitely worth a read, but what do our readers think of this growing tension between the older generation of OS X apps, ones that touted functionality as their number one priority, versus the new generation of OS X apps that are almost all flash & bang?
The thing is that some of these newschool apps do do something—at least one thing. And according to those crazy folks at 37signals, sometimes all your clients need is a good tool to do less, not more. Do these new apps do that? Thoughts?
