The brightest minds in independent Mac software development gathered in Chicago last weekend. What the heck was I doing there?
If you know the old song by Sting, “An Englishman in New York”, you might be familiar with how I felt in Chicago last weekend. Everything’s different, but it’s close enough! C4 is a fairly new conference; this was only the second time it’s been run. But the formula is a winner: invite the independent Mac software developer community to a three-day confab where you mix plenty of social time with some pretty interesting talks about all things Mac.
But wait, you might say. Aaron Vegh may be pretty passionate about the Mac, but he’s no software developer. Indeed. But while I cast my lot with web development some years back, I’ve always kept an ear to the ground on the systems side, and C4 was my first solid opportunity to expose myself to the Mac developer world. What I found there was, to put it mildly, explosively influential.
Ironically, I’m not going to talk much about the conference itself here. Others have done so, but I’ll link to John Gruber’s summary as one that most accurately reflects my opinion.
To understand the impact of C4, you have to see the difference between web development and Mac application development. With the former, you have a massive crowd of service providers — and I’m one — who all provide a fairly undifferentiated service. And while it’s true that more people need web sites than require Mac applications, there’s vastly more competition. This was my chief worry when I set out with this business, but it turns out that differentiating yourself is as much a matter of showing up in the morning as it is being good. Having both is a real advantage. 
Still, Mac application development — especially these days — is a pretty compelling market. The market is significantly smaller: an installed base of some 25 million Mac users. However, it’s a market more than big enough to support an independent developer. Consider: some of the biggest software companies you’ve never heard of were represented at C4: Panic Software, makers of the FTP client Transmit and the new web development environment Coda; Barebones Software, makers of the classic text editor BBEdit; Delicious Monster, makers of the hit Delicious Library… the list goes on. Even though you haven’t heard of these guys, you’ll understand the appeal of their work. Take Delicious Library. When Wil Shipley and Lucas Newman built it from a coffee shop in San Francisco, it became hugely popular. I once read a post (and curses, I can’t find it now!) saying that they’d made about $200,000 in the first two months of the title coming out. At $40 per copy, they would have sold a mere 5000 copies in that time. That’s the kind of cash that an independent developer or two can hang their hat on!
In the independent software developer pecking order, there are big guys and little guys. But for every Daniel Jalkut or Jim Matthews, there was a Manton Reece or Mike Piatek-Jimenez — guys who develop lesser-known titles but who nonetheless make a living on the damned thing. I met and spoke with everyone mentioned in this article so far (well, except perhaps Wil Shipley; I was put off by his manic reputation and constant mentions of his ass), and they’re all people who surprised me with their similarity to my own world. They work from home, they have wives and kids, and they love what they do.
My book on developing applications for Mac OS X lies partially read on my desk; whenever I get a chance, I push a few chapters further into it. I have a couple ideas for some interesting Mac programs, but I don’t yet have the confidence to try them out. But the overwhelming attitude from everyone I spoke to at C4 was “get started now!”. Because unlike Microsoft development skills, boning up on the Mac can’t be done at your community college in night classes. You have to teach yourself. And when you run into something you don’t understand, you use Google, and you lean on those who know more. Amazingly, they are a warm, inviting group. Nerds seem to recognize each other, and instead of the disdain you might expect from those in the upper reaches of Mac software-dom, I found only kindness and a welcoming attitude.
That, more than anything, keeps me inspired as I sit here post-C4. I think there will always be this divide in my life: pre-C4 and post-. Because this weekend I learned that while a cluster of web developers in a room might always eye each other as competition, in the Mac universe we’re all in this together.
Is this the beginning of a transition in my career? Too early to say. But if it ever does happen, and I leave the crazy, frothy waters of web development for the slightly calmer deeps of the Mac, you can look back on this weekend as the turning point. See you on the other side.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Fun Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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