Earlier this year I acquired two products which are now major elements of my product lineup: MarsEdit and Black Ink.

Since then, there seems to be a tone of acquisition in the air. I’m not sure if I can take any of the credit for prompting this, but it seems that anecodotally at least, my throwing dollars around has put the same idea into other independent developers’ heads.

Consider Scotty from Late Night Cocoa, who last month followed in my footsteps by acquiring two products: TrackTime and Event Maker. Scotty is a full-time Windows (mostly) consultant who realized that the fastest track to full-time development for the Mac might be to start with a couple of salable products.

News also came out earlier this month that Jesse Grosjean of Hog Bay Software had found a buyer for his Mori and Clockwork applications. Today we learn that the buyer is Alfonso Guerra, a friend of mine from #macsb who I met at the C4 Conference last year. No doubt at the C4 conference this year, I’ll be citing him as an example in my speech about acquisitions. :)

In almost, but not completely unrelated news – our beloved mythical Mac-monster, the Macalope, has also announced a bit of transacting. Selling out, in its own words, to CNET. I wish the Macalope luck in its new digs, though it’s going to cause quite a stir walking down 2nd Street with those horns.

Blogged from my iPhone. Psyche!

If you’re in the Boston area and want to meet some other great Mac developers (and aspiring developers!), be sure to check out the CocoaHeads Boston meeting tonight in Cambridge at MIT Building E51, Room 149.

My friend James from the meeting has set up a Meetup.com event for the meeting, so people can RSVP, etc. This is not reliable because many of us just show up on a monthly basis without ever RSVPing, but because a few of us are out of town for WWDC, if you’re planning on going, please RSVP at the Meetup.com site to encourage others to come as well.

PS: Carbon and web developers are welcome, too! CocoaHeads is just a name. We welcome all Mac nerds of all skill levels and of all ambitions :)

Just to prove that I’m not cranky about everything that came out of the keynote on Monday, I’d like to say that I’m very excited about the release of Safari for Windows!

I think Safari is a very serious contender in these new browser wars. It will be interesting to see whether they take more market share from FireFox or IE. My first thoughts? Safari wins.

My only real misgiving about this is the decision to use Apple’s font-smoothing techniques in Safari on Windows. Joel Spolsky wrote about the differences in great detail, and I’m not entirely convinced that I don’t prefer the Windows smoothing for its legibility. I am certainly convinced that if I like my Mac’s smoothing better, it’s probably mostly out of familiarity, and not a proof that the technology is better.

It seems a bit crude to push an alien font-smoothing technique on a massive pool of new customers. It will certainly make it stand apart from other Windows apps, though.

Michael Tsai spots an especially good contradiction in Steve Jobs’s dismissal of browser apps during his interview with Walt Mossberg last week, followed by his celebration of browser apps in the WWDC keynote on Monday.

Glad I’m not the only one who is in a cranky mood about Apple’s flimsy iPhone SDK spin.

To be clear: It’s (kinda-sorta) OK that iPhone 1.0 doesn’t come with an SDK. What’s annoying is jumping through hoops to try to convince an audience of experienced developers (OK, and press) that web applications are a suitable alternative to a real SDK.

Silence on the matter would have been preferable.

For more on exactly how I feel about this, read Paul Kafasis’s excellent analysis.