Archive for September, 2002

September 11th, 2002

TV Stinks
I’m just sitting here watching a Seinfeld rerun and I must say, that was a great show. Possibly the best sitcom of all time. 🙂 These days all the major networks can come up with are cop shows, cop show spin-offs, lawyer shows, and doctor shows. None of which can hold a flame to a great sitcom….they need to bring Seinfeld back, that’s all there is to it.

Will

# posted at 11:53 pm by Will

September 10th, 2002

The death of OS 9
Well, it’s offical. Apple announced new machines will not be able to boot into OS 9 starting January and I, for one, couldn’t be happier.

We here at ES decided when OS X came out we were going to develop all our new apps for OS X only, even though the vast majority of Mac users are still running OS 9. The reason we did this was two fold; the great developer tools under OS X (can anyone say Cocoa?) and the fact we knew this day would eventually come.

We did loose potential sales going OS X only so early (we had Bookit 2 out on OS X within a couple months of OS X’s release) but in the long run it will pay off. What we gained are apps that are native under OS X which means we get all the changes made to the frameworks for free. For example, in Jaguar the listbox row selection highlight has been changed. Now HIG states the selected row text color is supposed to be white and highlight color is a brand new color variation. Since we are using Cocoa we get that change automatically. If we were using Carbon to support OS 9 and OS X, we would have most likely had to implement those changes ourselves.

Many developers, including Adobe and Microsoft, are happy with this move. Since Adobe couldn’t simply all together drop OS 9 development like we did, because it would kill their revenue stream, they’ve had to spend money and effort trying to support OS 9 and OS X using Carbon. Sometimes that’s easier said than done. Now they can focus on OS X and start really making their apps OS X savvy by using some OS X only features. As for Microsoft, they were unhappy because they did drop OS 9 development but OS X only has around 15% Mac market share right now, so they weren’t selling as many copies of Office as they would have liked. This move will help them as well. As for us, we have continued to see steady growth with our products as more people start using OS X and we plan on seeing this for years to come and I, for one, couldn’t be happier.

Cheers, Will

current music: Portishead – Roads

# posted at 6:27 pm by Will