Warts and all, Mac OS X is here, and developers have to live with it. It’s up to third parties to make or break the new operating system now — that’s the message from Apple coming out of the recent Worldwide Developers Conference, said Matthew Rothenberg, writing for Interactive Week . His comments are posted in a new article entitled No Mac Is An Island.
Rothenberg accepted that Mac OS X’s current set of development tools may not make everyone happy. But with Apple shipping Mac OS X on all currently shipping Macs, “the onus now falls on application developers to frame their responses,” he wrote.
Rothenberg also remarked that OS X gives developers a clean slate to start from, to win the hearts and minds of Mac users who are open to new products for the first time in years. Rothenberg’s comments echo that of his colleague Daniel Drew Turner, who recently analyzed third party OS X Web browser efforts apart from Microsoft and Netscape owner AOL/Time Warner.
The efforts of major Mac developers like Microsoft have been slowed somewhat, Rothenberg said.
“The moving target of Carbon APIs and other tools has made the task of synchronizing the feature set of Office’s core applications with their Windows counterparts a tortuous one indeed,” he said.
OS X is also giving established players like Macromedia a leg up on the competition, said Rothenberg. Case in point — Freehand 10’s release. It’s already out, while competitor Adobe still hasn’t yet released a Mac OS X version of its flagship software Photoshop.
“[Adobe] has been muted when it comes to articulating a timetable for delivery of Mac OS X-native versions of its core graphics packages,” said Rothenberg.
“The profound change in the Mac’s OS architecture has shaken up the game board and left Mac loyalists unusually open to considering the advantages of those applications that exploit the new ecosystem to its fullest,” he concluded.