Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog (Archives)

Yesterday, I was interviewed by a couple of folks who are doing a project about the "indie" Mac software community. Many other people I know have also talked to them. I look forward to the report that they are working on.

It was interesting to reflect about the business, and the community that we have. This community is great — we "see" each other on Twitter (where I've been active for a while), iChat, email, and even in person at conferences like WWDC and Macworld Expo. It's something that certainly didn't exist when I "went indie" and started writing Watson and its unpublished predecessor, Museo, back in 2001.

There are dozens of well-known, successful independent Mac developers now. More seem to be taking the plunge each and every day. It's easier to do now because of the community, I think. Of course it also means more competition, and it's harder to get a quality application noticed amid the quickie applications. VersionTracker and MacUpdate are so full now that they are not particularly useful anymore.

There's one thought I expressed yesterday, which I'll reiterate here. Consider it advice for budding Indie software developers. If I could go back in time and give myself some advice, I'd say to plan for having more than one application, and incorporate that into your development and company infrastructure. Even if you are a one-product company for quite a while (as we have been, though I hope that will change soon), it will be much less painful to grow into a multi-application company. I'd even go so far as to work a "dummy" second application into your workflow, just so that you can easily work with a second real application should you ever have one. The "behind the scenes" aspects of the company, such as the structure of your source code repository, your building scripts and utilities, your payment processing methodology, your customer/mailing list databases, your techniques for looking up lost license keys, your online help documents, and so forth, will scale better if you plan for it early on.

Today I had the unfortunate occasion to use FileMerge to compare a lot of source code files These files had been checked into our Subversion repository in separate branches, and we were having trouble merging, so we wound up having to deal with this by hand.

Almost immediately I noticed that just about all the source files were marked as different from each other, even though we hadn't made any changes. What was up with that?

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People who are used to weblogs know exactly what those little orange RSS (or XML) badges are for ... you drag the link into your newsreader to subscribe to the feed.

But not everybody may know what the heck those little things are. For the nonprofit that I work with, our home page is actually a weblog, complete with an RSS feed. But is the average surfer going to know the power behind the little orange icon? The page that results from clicking on that link would look like pure gobbledygook to the untrained eye!

So I did a little bit of JavaScript trickery to pop up an explanatory window should somebody happen to click on the icon. (Try it below, assuming you are viewing this on your browser!)

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