One of the curious aspects of Leopard has been the relative dearth of funky application updates following its release. It’s still quite early days, but I’m starting to wonder if OS X is now sufficiently large – in API terms – that the tiny indy developer teams who’ve served us so well these last eight years are now simply too small.
This is, perhaps, one of the attractions of the iPhone SDK. To long-term OS X hacks it’s an entirely familiar environment, but there’s less of it to wrangle with. Also, Apple is taking payment processing and distribution off their hands. And there are an awful lot of iPhones: a nice, stable, homogenous platform to code against, with tools and APIs the Mac devs know better than anyone else. Dream situation, right?
Sure. But what of the little OS X application companies? Are there enough Cocoa hackers to go around?
I worry that the iPhone application goldrush might lead to stagnation in Mac software development.
[update: as evidence, I cite Daniel Jalkut. Ironically enough, the author of the software I’m using to write this blog post. QED.]