Sunday, May 16, 2010 Been there, done that.... were you? “As far as not being able to use Flash 5 to create apps for Apple’s App Store goes, it’s déjà vu all over again. Apple tried something similar years ago when it kept its OS proprietary (except for a brief flirtation with licensing in the mid ’90s before Jobs came back).” from Issues with Apple’s Decision to Block Flash First, the legal status of Apple’s operating systems has not changed to the best of my knowledge. MacOS X is just as proprietary as MacOS 7, 8, or 9 was. Second, I have read before that Apple somehow used their “proprietary OS” to prevent or control development on their hardware. I started developing for the Mac right around the time that System 7.5 was available. I would use every discount I could to keep my CodeWarrior subscription up to date for many years, and right up until the end every set of CDs came with a demo of Marathon or another Bungie game. The Inside Mac documentation was written for Pascal, though pretty much all development was done in C. That’s about the biggest “barrier” that Apple put in front of developers. More recent APIs like QuickTime had C examples and documentation. Developer Technical Support was extremely accessible - you could get plenty of help through mailing lists and contact individuals at DTS directly. All of the DTS engineers I dealt with truly liked their jobs, and liked helping people. You had the opportunity to work with Apple in seeding programs, helping to shape new products and APIs. This idea that Apple was somehow restricting development on the very platform they were promoting is absurd. There was never anything of the sort that I saw or heard of. Anyone could write, distribute, and sell software for the Mac without any intervention from Apple. In fact, if the software was really good, Apple may even approach you for a bundling deal. At the time there were few ways to get your software in a user’s hands. You could sell as shareware over the internet, or you could work with a publisher to try to get a boxed copy of your application into a catalog like MacWarehouse, etc. or shelf space at retailers (good luck with that!). There were no Apple Stores. There was no App Store. There were very few developers making a lot of money, but a lot of them doing it because it was what they liked doing. [ 5/16/2010 04:57:00 PM ] [  0 comments  ]

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