OmniOutliner Position on Cloning Confusing

Posted by Hugh
Aug 7, 2010 at 09:47 AM

Daly

I think you have gone back to the Mac at perhaps not the most opportune moment.

You may know this already, but the Mac developer community probably has for the size of the market a disproportionate number of one-man or two-man bands (thanks partly to Apple’s provision of development tools). It is generally seen as one of the Mac world’s strengths, but currently one could regard it as a weakness.

For the last six months or so, most if not all of those developers have faced very loud demands from some of their customers that they develop for the iPad. Ironically, those demands have been especially vocal from customers of developers whose OS X applications have been most successful; the insistence and stridency of some of them have to be read to be believed. This has been coupled with a fear that may or may not be realistic that Apple itself will end its desktop and laptop development in favour of phones and tablets (FWIW I’m sure it won’t, though it may rein back in the medium term).

As Steve Z. indicates in another thread, this has faced those developers with an acute business dilemma.

Do they simply ignore the iPad market, at least for the time being, even though it may grow to be much bigger than the one they currently serve? Some appear to have chosen this route. Do they add functionality to their applications so that they can “talk” to other developers’ iPad apps? Some have chosen this route. Do they buy up/hire in iPad/iPhone development skills (the iPad operating system is very different from the Mac OS X system) even if the cost threatens their businesses? Several small developers are being urged to take this step, by customers who can have no understanding of the practicalities; as some of the developers have pointed out, if they had the spare resources they’d already be developing for a much bigger market - Windows.

Or do they halt or slow down down OS X development whilst they concentrate on the iPad and iPhone?

This last route has been the one taken by the Omni Group, developers of OmniOutliner. They were frank enough to explain what they were planning to do when Apple announced the iPad, and what it would involve for very long-expected features such as cloning on OmniOutliner, and I think together with the brisk can-do style that is something of a hallmark of Omni’s announcements, their original statement and others since have come over as unresponsive if not arrogant. However, to be fair to Omni Group, when I and someone else pointed out that cloning (for example) had been been asked for by customers and discussed by Omni since 2006, our posts on their forum were completely overwhelmed by many, many other posts acclaiming the decision to develop for the iPad.

So Mac OS X OmniOutliner development, including cloning and perhaps tagging: certainly delayed and postponed. And probably development of some other well-rated Mac applications by other developers, too.

More widely, what the launch of the iPad may mean for the long-term business of developing for Mac laptops and desktops, which has given Mac users several fine and distinctive pieces of software and Apple computers one of their market advantages, I can’t tell.