Features

Quite scary, isn't it? But while the man may be sweaty, and he may be unnerving, he has a point. Developers - those hardworking folk who create the applications we use every day - are vital to the Mac and its continuation. Not only do developers provide us with tools - some for fun, some from which many of us earn our living - but they're the ones who push forward what a Mac can do, and who provide strong impetus for the development of the operating system. They help keep the Mac alive too; if we didn't have a wide range of software available - everything from accountancy to zoo simulation games - then many of us would reluctantly have to use Windows just to accomplish the tasks put before us.

Ultimately, developers are the ones who give the Mac its unique mix of slick user interface, power and ease of use. These are important people. And we've talked to them, to find out what life is like as a Mac developer, and learn what their greatest frustrations and greatest joys are, as well as what support they get from Apple and more. We want to know how lucrative it is to be a Mac developer, and why they do what they do. Come with us, as we meet the men and women who help make the Mac great.

The first question we wanted to answer is what makes people become Mac developers in the first place. Cabel Sasser, one of the developers at Panic, which created Transmit and the nowretired Audion software, says: 'It's actually kind-of funny. Steve (Frank, the other co-founder) and I loved making software,

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even as kids, and since the Amiga was clearly dead, there was only one platform we could genuinely love at the time: the Mac. But we always joke that we started Panic at literally the worst possible time to start a Mac software company. Gil was at his peak. Steve had yet to return. They were introducing "Performa 19203CD" models at an alarming rate. The stock was at a total low point, and no, we didn't buy any.'

This love for the Mac is a sentiment echoed by the Ukrainian development team at BeLight Software, for whom one of the reasons to go into Mac development was: 'the desire to stand out from most developers and to see their jealous looks, and the gracefulness of everything Mac-related'.

Dan Wood at Karelia, the company behind the new website-creation software Sandvox, also has tremendous affection for the platform: 'I had been programming since childhood on various computers, but I fell in love with the Mac when I first started using it in 1984. I haven't found anything better.'

Co-founder Terrence Talbot says that he simply fell in love with the programming environment Cocoa '...back when it was called NeXTstep, in 1989. It fundamentally changed the way I thought about personal computing. I've wanted to have my own software company since I was 12. So why not combine the two?'

For many developers, it's the underlying technologies and frameworks such as Cocoa that make developing for Mac OS X such a joy. For the developers at Karelia, one of the most useful tools is WebKit, which gives them a ready-made website rendering engine; it means they can concentrate on creating something new and interesting, rather than having to waste time building the rendering engine from scratch.

The BeLight development team praises Mac OS X's integration of lots of Open Source technologies, and say that while such inclusion means that much in OS X is available to other platforms, 'the superb API' (the system hooks that allow developers to tie technologies together) 'was added for your convenience, which really saves time and improves the quality of development'.