When iPhone OS opened to third-party developers in 2008, many third-party Mac developers similarly started concentrating their efforts to come up with fun and useful iOS apps to add to their catalogue.ĭid this slow down Mac software innovation? I’m not sure. It’s no mystery that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard took so long to be released because Apple internally turned most of its resources to the development of the iPhone and its operating system. Historically it has had a considerable impact on Mac software development, starting within Apple itself. The first factor to consider is the iOS platform. There are factors that should be considered when observing the current state of Mac software, factors we could use to paint a picture that is necessarily imperfect and speculative. Ideally, at this point in my article I should start the next paragraph with The reasons for this perceived stagnation are - followed by a bullet list. More broadly - and this is an image I’ve already used in the past - the Mac as a platform appears trapped in inertia instead of progressing it feels as if the Mac software train has reached its final destination, and everyone is just building over and around the terminal station. There are always exceptions and things I’ve missed, sure, but it seems to me that the landscape appears to be more tired than vibrant. This may be a completely subjective observation, but I’ve been feeling a certain stagnation in Mac software these past few years. In other words, if I open my toolbox with all the essential Mac apps I use on a daily basis for everything I do, what I see are old (some very old), tried-and-trusted applications: BBEdit, Transmit, MarsEdit, Acorn, NetNewsWire, Reeder, Notational Velocity/nvALT, Graphic Converter, Aperture (yes, still using it under Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra), The Unarchiver, Skim (a solid PDF viewer that’s been around since 2007), VLC, Apple’s Image Capture (still the fastest for importing images from an iOS device), xScope, Find Any File, SuperDuper!, AppZapper, f.lux, iA Writer, iStat Menus… By the way, the impact Acorn had on my workflow can’t be overstated, since it was the application that made me move away from Photoshop back then it’s currently installed on all my Macs, even old machines running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. None of these is a ‘new app’: Word has been around for a long time I don’t know when flickery first debuted, but the fact that its minimum system requirement is Mac OS X 10.6.6 suggests that the app has been around since Snow Leopard Pixelmator Pro is the newest of the three, but still, its first version was released in November 2017, more than four years ago.Īnd while Pixelmator has indeed become part of my essential tools, I tend to use Acorn more often, and Acorn has been around since 2007. ![]() The biggest apps in this short list are Microsoft Word, flickery, and Pixelmator Pro. Most are single-purpose utilities, social media clients, or Safari extensions. I was reflecting on this a few days ago as I was looking at the Purchased section of my account in the Mac App Store app.įirst, as you can see, the apps I’ve purchased or downloaded since 2019 are just a handful. In my case, it’s TextBuddy by Tyler Hall - but it’s truly an outlier in an otherwise flat landscape. ![]() If you’ve been a Mac user for more than a few years, let me ask you a question: what is the newest application you have installed that turned out to be so useful and well-made it’s now part of your essential tools? An app that really got you excited and happy to be a Mac user? For the sake of argument, let’s leave out games (obviously) and single-purpose little utilities.
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