Cocoa and the Emerging Software Market

Thursday, Feb. 17 2005 | Author: Scrivs

An interesting read concerning Cocoa development on the OS X platform. I remember in the early 90’s being an ISV (independent software vendor) was all the rage. Then came the time where the larger companies were stomping the little people and even if you didn’t have that much competition with your product, you still had to deal with trying to get your name out in front of the other 1million shareware products.

Well if you develop for OS X things are a bit different. I don’t know much about Cocoa, but from what I have read it makes developing great applications easy. Another benefit to developing for OS X is if your application is liked by a few, it is good chance it will be bought by many.

For example, Delicious Library is a cool application, but as I stated before the practicality of it didn’t scream “success” to me. Well damn if I wasn’t wrong. Check this.

I thought that Delicious Library was cool the moment I saw it. I also wondered how many people were obsessive-compulsive enough to scan in all of their books, CDs, and DVDs so that they could look at them on beautiful drawn virtual shelves. I didn’t think that it would appeal to that many people. I kept having the thought, “It’s a really beautiful app, but will it really sell?” Turns out that the application earned them a quarter-mil in the first month after release. And another hundred grand in the month after that. Not bad for working in a coffee shop.

Almost makes me want to learn Cocoa and get started on that porn collection application.