If ever there was something…
… that perfectly illustrated the difference between the Mac and Windows, it’s this:
A group of Mac shareware developers set up a competition. They call it My Dream App. An ‘X Factor’ for software if you like, the general public are invited to suggest an idea for an application. The prize: some hardware (iPods, MacBooks etc) over the rounds, after which visitors vote for their three favourites. The winners will see their applications built for real, and get a royalty on each sale.
They get some high profile judges, including J Allard, Steve Wozniak, Guy Kawasaki and some other well known mac developers such as Cabel Sasser and Gedeon Maheux. Respected bloggers and podcasters like John Gruber and Amber MacArthur, too.
The entrants demonstrate fantastic enthusiasm and talent. In the end the winners are Atmosphere, Portal and Cookbook.
A certain Stefan Miganowicz of Leominster, Massachusetts is suitably impressed. He decides to create a website. Called, imaginatively enough, My Dream Windows App. Well… look at it. Seriously. Look at it. They’d probably appreciate the hits.
I thought this post about it on My Dream App was incredibly diplomatic.
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November 19th, 2006 at 6:25 am
“perfectly illustrated the difference between the Mac and Windows”
If there was anything that highlighted the difference its the fact an exhaustive competition is launched with leading technologists for the platform and of the three finalists two of the entries already exist.. synching your profile to multiple machines? Shouldn’t that really be part of the OS, oh wait, for win users it is. A weather ‘window’? Great and only 5 years after Lionhead slapped that in as an afterthought in their game, Black & White.
Leaving only a tarted up desktop version of any of the 101 cooking websites out there as the only ‘creative’ entry in a race for a ‘dream app’.
If storing mom’s Apple Pie instructions is the best dream all those minds can come up with, there’s something seriously wrong.
November 19th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Shouldn’t that really be part of the OS, oh wait, for win users it is.
Really? Sounds like I could use that at work, where is it?
The weather screensaver looks like a bit of fluff, no doubt. I wouldn’t buy a shareware app to show me that its raining outside in Manchester!
‘Cookbook’ wouldn’t be of much use to me, cos I don’t exactly make a big effort in the kitchen. That said, if you bothered to read the idea properly, I think you’d see it does rather more than ’store mom’s apple pie instructions’.
I’ve bookmarked ‘My Dream Windows App’ and will watch its progress with interest. If the Windows user/developer community is so good natured and buzzing with ideas of genius and innovation that it proves “something’s seriously wrong”, I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
November 19th, 2006 at 5:51 pm
“Sounds like I could use that at work, where is it?”
If you have an AD domain, you can turn on Roaming profiles. Most admins don’t like it though becuase it means all data is stored on the server, not the local machine.
” That said, if you bothered to read the idea properly, I think you’d see it does rather more than ’store mom’s apple pie instructions’.”
It adds speach and iPod synching to any of the already established ‘iTunes for reciepe’ apps that already exist. Considering that the whole push of the Apple side of the fence is the fact the market has a great many of the Creatives, you can’t help but feel unimpressed. Going through the list of other simliar ideas of taking an existing app and simply bolting on a couple of features and I wonder where this astonishing creative talent is actually lurking.
So one guy rips off My Dream Apple app and you all piss yourselves? How’s that for elitist. He’s hardly doing it with a bunch of people or the community involvement the Apple project is, yet so desperate for any chance to off this inferior chip on their shoulder, they all have to lay into him and laugh.
You also talk as if the windows app community was devoid of creativity… Strange then how the vast majority of ported apps that are used are Windows apps moving to other platforms. How about windows apps, you yourself used Trillian, is that not a creative solution? Or PKZip, quite possibly one of the most used applications in computing history?
If the ‘My Dream App’ winner makes it off the Mac platform, Satan will go to work on skies. Heck, if it is still being used/supported 3 years after release *then* you can maybe say this contest created a decent app.
November 19th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
he’ll also go to work on skis
November 19th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
The scorn he’s got from the readers of My Dream App isn’t because he lifted the idea, its because of the nasty, pissy way he did it. He couldn’t resist describing other people’s efforts as “second rate and unsatisfactory garbage
November 19th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
Furthermore, I don’t accept whether an app gets ported from one platform to another or not as a measure of how good it is.
For example, Transmit is the best FTP client I’ve used by miles, and I’ve tried quite a few on both Mac and PC. It’s so closely tied to the Mac through features (Dashboard, Spotlight, .Mac, Docksend, Automator etc) and its interface that it just wouldn’t port.
If Panic wanted to create an FTP client for Windows, they should do it from scratch and make use of the features of Windows to built an excellent app. That wouldn’t port.
November 20th, 2006 at 2:29 am
“its because of the nasty, pissy way he did it.”
and the apple guys are behaving in an equally pissy manner by using it as a platform to undermine all windows development.
“a great deal of time”
That’s clearly not visible from the ideas, as I mentioned.
“he should shut his ignorant trap and get on with some work”
He’s not going to as you mentioned, he’s a troll. It doesn’t make slagging him off any more noble, nor using it to ridicule Win Developers and Apps. That’s just equally childish and makes it incredibly hard to give any credibilty to these so-called ‘Professionals’.
November 20th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
Some of the people on the forums have let themselves down by behaving in that manner it’s true, the MDA site people have not. I quote from the site blog:
“I certainly would like to point out that we were about providing something cool and new to the Mac community, and not about showing the Windows community ‚”how to do it”, but hey, we each have our own motives, right?”
“Perhaps our own Windows-using members can help jump start this little venture, though if you‚’re a Mac user like me, something tells me you might not be quite welcomed into this contest. (We had Windows developers as finalists, Stefan has an entire forum devoted to “My Dream App Ranting”.)”
So obviously noone that built MDA believes that there’s no creativity among Windows developers.
That’s clearly not visible from the ideas, as I mentioned.
What can I say. I disagree.