O
S X is Appleis new baby and Steve Jobs has been preaching that if you intend to develop for the Mac youid better do it in OS X. Mr. Jobs emphasized this notion when he gave his now famous eulogy for OS 9 at the World Wide Developeris Conference this past May, making it clear that Apple considers OS 9 dead technology. That may be how Apple sees it, but what about developers? How has the move to OS X affected them?
Regardless of what Apple may say, moving to a new OS is not a simple thing, especially if you must continue to support a legacy product line. Developers must foot the bill for the time and effort to create new apps or modify existing apps to run in OS X. Better yet, until those new or modified apps are out the door and selling, no money is coming in for the development work that was done. Itis a gamble that sometimes pays off nicely, or nearly as often turns out to be a loss, as was the case with Keralia Software, the makers of Watson.
Econ Technologies is a small development shop here in sunny Oveido Florida. Econ started 10 years ago, primarily creating specialized applications for the Apple IIGS, and then on Macs, for its clients. The company also does some consulting work. While versed in Windows and Java development, Econis current primary focus is developing for the Mac. At the moment Econ Technologies has four applications specifically designed for OS X: Portraits and Prints, Template Maker, ChronoSync, and Image Caster.
TMO met with Duilio Proni, President of Econ Technologies, and Joe Japes, Director of Marketing and Customer Service for Econ Technologies, and spent some time listening to how they view Apple, and OS X.
"I use to worry about Appleis development environment," lamented Duilio Proni when we asked him how he viewed the current climate of OS X development, "Iive been burned by Apple before with things like PowerTalk and OpenDoc. OS X and Cocoa is different. Cocoa allows us to develop applications in a few months instead of the months and months of development time it use to take to get an application out the door, and long development times are rough on small software houses. We can produce better applications with a dramatically shorter development cycle and in the end, we can offer a wider variety of great products that are inexpensive to the consumer. Before OS X, we had ideas for new products, but found we could not reasonably act on them. Now we can. We have several products in the pipeline, and updates to our existing product line on the way."
Joe Japes shows off his antique PB