A Mac & Daly follow up.

Posted by Hugh
Aug 19, 2010 at 05:58 PM

Neville Franks wrote:

>I wanted to touch on the discussion of Mac applications doing just a few things
>well and using several applications to cover the same bases that one Windows app
>might. I can see some merit in this, however not enough to sway me. The least most
>applications I have to learn and use on a regular basis the better.
> >Another related
>point was a about Windows applications having too many features and Mac applications
>not suffering from this problem. I have two observations here. Maybe the fact that
>there is less competition in the Mac software market plays a part here. ie. Software
>companies aren’t having to keep adding so many new features to match or exceed
>competitors products. There is also an expectation in the Windows world that new
>releases come out regularly and these contain new features requested by customers.
>It is always a challenge for us software developers to weigh things up, maintain a
>sensible balance and still try and keep most of our users happy, most of the time.
>Saying “no” to some new feature request can be difficult, however this is something
>I’ve been getting better at over the years. Cases need to be stated and discussed and
>the merits or otherwise assessed. Again maybe Mac users have different expectations
>and Mac developers are less pressed to continually add new features. Or maybe Mac
>users prefer simpler applications and instead use multiple applications as
>mentioned earlier.

OK Neville, here’s my 2 pence.

I’m not sure that there are big differences such as these between Mac and Windows applications. If you have a look at the forums of some of the major applications, there’s the same clamour for additional features as there are on Windows applications forums. Just like Windows developers, many Mac developers strive to turn out reasonably regular updates (except when they’re chasing iPad apps!)

Some Mac developers, just like Windows developers, do add what seem to me to be features that are “at the margin of necessity”. For example, is it really necessary for DevonThink, which is not fundamentally a writing application, to have writing features with a full-screen mode? And if you want to find just about the most complicated consumer software on any platform, look no further than Tinderbox.

Clearly the Mac market is less Microsoft-dominated and the customers for Macs less “corporate” than is the case with Windows. So this may enable more “quirky”, if not innovative, developers to survive. But I expect even that statement could be contested.

What the Mac does have is a user-interface that allows different apps to behave in similar ways and play pretty well together, so that you can patch together fairly seamless workflows if you want. That may encourage the development of single-purpose applications. I’m not sure. But it certainly does enable a user to develop, for example, a workflow which goes websearch to database to mindmap to outliner to writing tool to word processor, without too much difficulty. This sort of thing never seemed to be particularly easy under Windows. Even NoteMap, one of the most fully-featured writing outliners, couldn’t talk reliably to Microsoft Word!

This may be better now under Win 7, however. And anyway it may not be necessary with the latest generation of Windows tools.

P.S. But, as I’m reminded every time I switch back to my PC, it really is very nice not to have to spend so much time updating security features and scanning for viruses (although this plus for Macs may not of course last forever!).