And then there were three (at least!). After much anticipation, Matthew Drayton has shipped Iris 1.0, his company Nolobe’s entry into the “Photoshop-like” pixel-pushing market on OS X.

Congratulations, Matthew! I know how hard it is to get 1.0 out the door, even with products of considerably less complexity than a well-featured image editing application.

Over all, I like the interface of Iris quite a bit. There are some niggling jarring points, where I feel the UI could be “freshened” without compromising Matthew’s commitment to a clean, traditional UI. The application takes an “all-one-window” approach which I think is a valid approach and will work very well for some people. But the gray gradients used throughout the framing of this window tend to bleed together in my view. I would like a little bit more contrast, even if it’s just in a bit more highlight on some of the icons.

A Race With No Finish Line

Iris joins an increasingly popular market, already inhabited by the likes of Acorn, from Flying Meat, and Pixelmator from, umm… Pixelmator. The range of choice here is incredible and really valuable for consumers. But I would argue that it’s also valuable for each of the developers participating, or if you insist, competing in this market.

Mike Lee touched on the subject of competition in a recent blog post:

Competition does exist in our market, but it’s mainly perpetrated by visionless hacks who see money in an app and try to recreate someone else’s work in an attempt to cash in. These people aren’t really part of the community, and frankly, I’d like to see it stay this way.

What I think Mike means is that most of the real competition on the Mac boils down to players who are apishly trying to match each others’ products, feature for feature, look for look, shortcoming for shortcoming. Products that are competing in this manner may earn dollars for their vendors, but will not win the hearts of passionate Mac users.

This question of competition on the Mac is particularly interesting precisely because of the “community” that Mike alluded to. I think developers often make too much of so-called competition, either out of fear, or out of a misguided winner-takes-all mentality. But on the Mac, many developers have evolved and embrace the community, in spite of so-called competitions. See my C4-inspired post, We’re In This Together, for more thoughts in this vein:

It’s pretty awe-inspiring to sit in the same room while the makers of competing products such as BBEdit and TextMate, or Transmit and Fetch discuss product design issues, laugh at each other’s jokes, and yes, withhold some of their more strategic plans! But almost everybody in the room, competitor or not, is respecting each other’s work, and having a great time.

Competition is complicated, even in the simplest of markets. Consider a popular driving intersection in your town. You know, the one where cars race by most times of the day, and at least two corners of the intersection, on opposite sides of the road, are occupied by a gas station. Each business sells a similar product, for an extremely similar price. And each is unanimously preferred by a select group of the market: the half that is driving on its side of the road. The two are equally assured success, because of the size of the market and because of their unique position to serve half of it with aplomb.

On the Mac, we’re all racing towards the same goal: mindblowing experiences for users. Even in a niche such as pixel editing, where lots of players compete, we’ll never have a declared winner. To have a winner, you need a finish line. And when it comes to maximizing user happiness and productivity, there isn’t one. Furthermore, the map to that pot of gold has been drawn differently by every user and by every developer.

So we’re left with this beautiful spectacle: teams of developers racing toward perfection in every direction. The crowd shouts and oohs and aahs, cheering the acceleration and cringing at the occasional fiery crash. As they watch, a particular stroke of elegance inspires them to buy a product. And perhaps another. Or maybe the whole lineup.

I said you couldn’t have a winner without a finish line, but I was wrong. In this competition, you win just by being in the race.

Last year Scott Stevenson put together a fun event at the Apple store during the week of WWDC, and invited me to participate. We talked about a variety of indie Mac issues, and also took questions from the audience.

The great news is Scott is doing another event this year: Tuesday, 7PM at the Apple store. I’ll be talking about some experimenting I’ve been doing along the lines of “visual debugging,” in particular visualizing the key focus responder chain in a Cocoa application. Other people will be talking about much more interesting things!

Hope to see you there! Last year the place filled up pretty quickly so I recommend arriving early if you want to get a seat.

Manton and I recorded another episode this week, just in time to hopefully give you a little something extra to listen to on the way to WWDC, if that’s where the winds are taking you.

In this episode we talk a bit about travel and how we keep up on our indie business commitments on the road. We also chat about the recently updated book from Aaron Hillegass: Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. Manton bought a copy but I apparently think I’m too good for programming books.

Finally we touch on the question of distributed source control systems, such as git, mercurial, and bazaar, and whether we should be switching to them or sticking with trusty Subversion.

Enjoy!

My friends at Rogue Sheep and I have a lot in common. Small Mac development companies with a passion for building excellent software, company names whose initials RS spell out a vaguely woolen aspect, and … a bit of a sense of humor.

If you think it would be fun to work for such a company, check out the Rogue Sheep job listings. Notice how they don’t fill you up with bogus demands like a doctorate degree in iPhone theory. They’re just looking for a good Mac developer.

In particular, if you’re looking for a full time Mac development job in the Seattle area, this could be a pretty sweet opportunity!