I got a little idealistic during my talk on application acquisition at last weekend’s C4 Conference. See, last year’s event had been so memorable to me, I thought it was worth trying to focus the audience’s attention on what my aspirations were for the talk, which were roughly “to make people think about acquisition and possibly change their own life in the process.”

I probably succeeded in at least some microscopic way for some person in the audience. But no matter, because if I didn’t succeed, I’m sure some other speaker did. Or some attendee in the audience chatting with some other attendee, discovering that they live in the same town, or that each of them is both a little league coach and a Mac developer. Real life is neat that way: it’s inspiring!

Aaron Vegh caught “Mac Community Fever” at C4 this year, writing in his blog about the dramatic change in attitude he received by attending the event:

I think there will always be this divide in my life: pre-C4 and post-. Because this weekend I learned that while a cluster of web developers in a room might always eye each other as competition, in the Mac universe we’re all in this together.

It’s not entirely true. There is some ferocious competition going on among our ranks, and some hostile relationships between certain parties where feathers have been ruffled in the past. But substantially, what Aaron describes is true. Developing for the Mac is a warm-fuzzy experience. The platform is big enough to be really exciting and offer opportunities, yet small enough that given a few years of attending events like these, you might end up kind of knowing everybody!

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.

Last quarter Apple announced sales of more than 1.7 million new Macs. Market share for our platform seems to be growing steadily as increasing numbers of Linux and Windows users decide to dip their toes into these tranquil Mac waters. It’s a great time to work on a platform where the majority of developers genuinely care for their colleagues, their products, and their customers. We’re in this together.

Rich Siegel, CEO of Bare Bones Software, has cautionary advice in the wake of all this growth. His views deserve our attention, because he represents one of the longest-standing indie software businesses still making software for the Mac. Following C4, Rich picked up on an issue raised in the mostly-disastrous panel discussion, an issue of the so-called “perpetual silly season.”

The question raised by DrunkenBatman was whether the increasing use of gimmick-marketing for Mac products had established a sort of pattern for cheaply made, deceptively marketed software as the wave of the Mac future. He suggests that such gimmicks have always been a component of the Mac market, but that the press used to serve as a more central resource for protecting consumers. Without offering any particularly solution, Rich asks us to consider for ourselves which way we want things to go:

Do we want the industry to continue in its best traditions, combined with the innovation made possible by improvements to the platform and the world at large? Or do we want to stand back and let the Mac software landscape become a mirror of the Windows software landscape: populated by used-car lots, and decorated with tumbleweeds?

It’s an appeal to Mac developers everywhere, that we maintain our high standards and commitment to quality, even as fly-by-night operations may pop up from time to time in an attempt to cheapen the industry. This is great advice, but why not keep it to himself? Wouldn’t it be smart to let his less idealistic competitors flail about and sell their cheap, gimmicky wares? Why go to the trouble of writing a thoughtful essay encouraging his competitors to make better products?

For one thing, I suspect Rich really likes sitting in a room full of inspired developers. The conferences would be a lot less fun if they were filled with shysters and snake-oil-salesmen. But his ambition to elevate his competitors also makes business sense. Consider the most popular, trendiest retail district in your town. There are many shops whose target markets overlap, and to some extent each shop is competing with the others to attract customers through their doors. But the district wouldn’t exist at all without the collective commitment to quality.

With rare exception, it’s the environment that brings the customers, not the individual retailers themselves. This is why Banana Republic would rather be situated next to Abercrombie & Fitch than next to Ross. The higher-quality A&F is certainly more of a direct competitor, but almost every customer it helps attract to the neighborhood is also a potential BR customer. They just have to put something of quality in the window display.

The Mac is a really attractive, trendy retail district. If the shops don’t remain classy, then the customers won’t keep coming. So it makes sense to support our competitors. We’re in this together.

OK – I had a great time at C4, and I would like to write an extensive blog post about all the great, and some of the slightly awkward things that happened at the conference. I would like to, but I’m incredibly busy. Almost too busy to write anything at all. Except I want to help stand up against a growing tide of inaccurate commentary about the deeds of DrunkenBatman at the conference.

Here’s what happened:

DrunkenBatman used his role as moderator of a group panel to explore some theories that did not meet with universal agreement from the audience. The topics were explored longer than they should have been, and some of the ideas were presented in a provocative fashion. The audience and panel were both generally pretty dissatisfied with the resulting lack of meaningful discussion that transpired.

One of the ideas DrunkenBatman tried to convey was that the Mac market might not be as diverse as other platforms, particularly Linux. His theory was that by improving the diversity of the platform, it would lead to a greater atmosphere for future product development, and be a particular boon to the open source movement on the Mac.

In the course of presenting these ideas he filled the screen with one particularly provocative slide, which read “Black People Don’t Use Macs.” He then employed some statistically inappropriate anecdotes, and took an informal poll in our room of 150 Mac developers, where only person raised his hand, self-identifying as black. While he didn’t particularly convince the audience or panel that his theory was accurate, at least we understood where he was coming from in his speculation.

DrunkenBatman did not do a great job making his points on Saturday evening, or of managing the panel he was supposed to be moderating, but that does not make him a racist. Conference attendee Ian Baird snapped a photo of the aforementioned slide, and posted it to his Flickr account, where it received a fair amount of misguided and inappropriate venom. I trust that Ian was not trying to encourage accusations of racism – he was just posting an interesting snapshot from the conference.

But today some idiot on Digg (is that redundant?) took it upon himself to post a link to the Flickr photo, with the extremely inappropriate caption “DrunkenBatman goes on racist tirade at C4 Mac dev conference.” This gets my blood boiling, because although there were aspects of DrunkenBatman’s overall presentation that bordered on tirade status, his comments regarding diversity among Mac users were by no means racist. It’s offensive and slanderous of Digg user AmazingSyco to imply that they were, let alone that it was “a racist tirade.”

If you were at C4, or even if you weren’t but trust my description of how things went down, I would urge you to help bury the story on Digg. The way this works is you log in as a registered Digg user and “Bury” the story with a rationale. If enough people do it, the story disappears from searches and from the popular stories pages.

It won’t undo the damage of the slanderous statement, but at least it will help prevent it spreading wider or faster than it should. I rarely believe that stories should be buried, but in this case the caption and associated commentary are so hurtful and inaccurate, I believe it’s the right thing to do.

Thanks for listening, and I hope to have a less adrenaline-inspired post about C4 at some point in the near future.

Tom Harrington has written a couple articles recently about running a customer mailing list for an indie software business.

Running a customer mailing list

Return of the mailing list

The second one’s ominous title has to do with the fact that Harrington’s hosting provider, pair Networks, has a restrictive policy about using their servers to send out large quantities of email. Tom’s “solved” the problem by signing up for another account at TextDrive, which is more relaxed about the behavior.

It’s amazing how common it is for Pair customer’s (myself included) to be simultaneously ecstatic about the company’s well-deserved reputation for stability, while also perennially bummed about the failure of the company to support some “basic” functionality that is taken for granted on other hosts.

Perhaps that’s why they named the company “pair.” You’ll need to pair it up with another shared hosting provider if you want to run your own mailing list, run Django or Ruby on Rails, host a Subversion repository, use your database to expose usage statistics to users, and any number of other useful web developer inclinations you might have.

This is why Red Sweater runs as a sort of chimera, distributed between DreamHost and pair. I realize that pair’s stability is in some significant sense due to their strict use policies, but in some cases the decisions seem to be more political or inertial than technical.

If some hosting provider can strike a balance between DreamHost’s reputation for indulgence and pair’s reputation for stability, it will be a force to be contended with.

Two of my independent software developer friends (on non-Mac platforms they’d probably be called competitors) have released substantially new versions of their products today! It’s probably hard for non-developers to appreciate just how much work goes into even a modest set of improvements.

Software is hard work. And the hard work isn’t all in the functionality, but in the fine-tuning. Woodworkers will appreciate that the amount of time spent sanding, shellacing, etc. often far outpaces the time spent crudely cutting out the shape of an object.

LicenseKeeper 1.2 is an unbelievable streamlined way of keeping track of all the software licenses you’ve purchased. For most of us I expect our current solution is a dedicated email folder, at best. License Keeper takes all the work, and stress, out of managing your software assets.

Hazel 2 is a full-time housekeeper for the files on your Mac. What if you could be a slob about files and just drop them wherever you please, cluttering up your desktop and clogging your home directory with hundreds of downloads, notes, and temporary files? Well, most of us already are slobs in this way, but Hazel makes it incredibly easy to let your computer keep itself tidy!

Let’s give Jon and Paul a big hand by downloading and trying out their latest masterpieces!