Hug A Indie Mac Developer Day

I hereby declare this day as Hug A Indie Mac Developer Day. What sparked this spontaneous outpouring of appreciation for these Wizards of Cocoa? Apart from just the standard good will towards the likes of Daniel Jaikut, Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch, Fraser Speirs, Gus Mueller (and a host of others that would turn this into an Open Directory category listing rather than a TAB post), I received a hand-written (if it was a font, I seriously want that font since none of the similar letters even came close to matching) post card – an actual put-it-in-the-U.S.-Mail post card – from Adam Behringer, author of Bee Docs’ Timeline. I purchased a license after I upgraded to Leopard since I make enough timelines for work to warrant the spend and because it’s a great program for creating & presenting time/date-based information collections (btw: Adam just added AppleScript support in Feb making an already great product even better).

Have Microsoft developers ever sent me hand written post cards? No. Apple engineers? Nope. Adobe developers? Nada. While no other independent coders have sent me one either, they all have been extremely helpful when it comes to product support and feature requests. For example, Daniel Jaikut responded very appreciatively – and quickly! – and in great detail to a bug submission that he knew wasn’t a MarsEdit problem but wholly an Apple framework issue. Most of these Xcode aficionados have a blog and give you the opportunity to peek into their coding practices & creative thoughts and sometimes even into the murky business of independent software development.

While I’m a huge proponent of open source software, I also have no problem paying someone for a well-made product (many open source programs lack the polish of even the most mediocre of indie commercial Mac software). I suspect your OS X workstation would not be nearly as useful if it weren’t for some of the products generated by these independent coders.

If you use “lite” or even – shudder – hacked versions of indie programs, consider sending a virtual hug today by going pro with a full license. The developers will appreciate it and you’ll wind up having more robust software and choices in the long run.

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