Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog (Archives)

The reason that the Mac developer community is thriving so much is the exchange of information among developers to help fill in the gaps in documentation and understanding of the details. Most Mac applications have been developed because of the open access to information about development and the ability to share that information. I can understand the iPhone SDK being under Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) before the release of 2.0, but to continue the silence is making things very bad. It's preventing conferences, classes, books, and tutorials from happening. Is there *anything* good about the NDA continuing? I think not.

I am ready to dive into iPhone development — we have not quite yet take the plunge — but if an NDA continues, I may just sit this one out.

Here is an interesting idea: Gather petitions showing the strong desire for the iPhone SDK to be open so that developers can discuss things. This isn't just for developers to sign! If you are an iPhone user, you are only going to benefit in the quality of the iPhone applications available if Apple lifts the NDA. If they don't, your applications are not going to be as good.

So Please sign the petition here.

Yesterday, Michiel van Meeteren released Indie Fever, his thesis about the "Indie" Mac developer culture. It's over 100 pages, and a bit technical — his field's terminology, not ours, though! But it was certainly an interesting read, and I recommend it for current or future indie Mac developers.

One thing that struck me was the notion that we members of the development community are competitors: "Despite these collaborations they still regard each other as competitors although all sorts of unspoken rules apply to the kind of competition that is allowed within the community."

Yes, there are some competitors in this community, meaning that their products overlap in functionality enough to attract potentially the same customer base. But most of the people I interact with in the developer community are not competitors at all, unless you really stretch the definition by saying that we are competing for the attention and hard-earned dollars of the Mac users out there. Miciel compares the nature of the community to "the close-knit craft communities of Northern Italy or the diamond merchants of Antwerp." I don't know if that's quite accurate, if they are all selling the same things.

To choose a fun metaphor, we're the vendors at an electronic farmer's market. I might be selling peaches, but the vendors around me are selling honey, vegetables, flowers, and jars of curry. I'm not going to have any poroblems with the guy who's selling zucchini in the booth next door; in fact we're probably going to be buddies and help each other out.

And if there are enough people mulling around the market, I'm probably not going to mind the other guy selling peaches across the aisle (unless he's, say, giving them away for free; I'd need to make sure my peaches were better than his).

You see, there are something like 20 million users of current (Tiger or Leopard) Macs out there. Sure, it's less than the numbers of Windows PCs out there, but who cares. This is a large potential customer base. We indies, in order to make a living, really only need to make customers out of a very small fraction of the Mac users out there. An indie developer needs only a few thousand customers to make a living; we're talking only about one one-thousandth of the current Macs out there.

Since there are plenty of potential users of our software to go around, I like the idea of each other helping each other out. We've had a Good Karma section on our website and in our periodic email alert blasts, where we highlight some of our favorite indie apps. This is one of our ways of being part of the developer community.

I may have some more thoughts about the developer community and the business of being an Indie in subsequent posts. Stay tuned.