People like KIT when they see it, but don’t know to look for it. I didn’t agree a price upfront, I didn’t know how it would work, I didn’t know what else was in the bundle, I didn’t know when the mystery would be revealed – nothing. All I did was agree to include KIT in a bundle after being approached via a third party, have a rough idea of the number of copies that would be sold and later write a long story that got edited (to make it even longer, yikes) for the MacZOT site. I’ll try anything once, but for the record I told ZOT that I preferred to be surprised, so I didn’t know any of that was coming. Woah! Check out that elephant! Why is he sitting on my sofa, reading the latest copy of MacUser? Could it be because I featured KIT on MacZOT not too long back? And not just any old ZOT but that week-long StoryZOT? And didn’t TUAW receive some leak that KIT may be been in the bundle, and didn’t that make it onto the front page of Digg, and didn’t I sell tons of copies? I refuse to believe buyers don’t see what’s going on after the same tricks are repeated time and again, but I guess that if people are getting good deals and it’s all good fun, then who cares.
Potion factory voice candy free#
I think it’s up to each developer if they want to sacrifice features for gloss, hand out thousands of free or heavily discounted copies, get everyone and their dog to blog about it, find announcements miraculously appear on the front page of Digg, whatever.
Potion factory voice candy for mac os x#
My real point is to relate my experiences of late and some perspective I have from the last 5 or more years developing software for Mac OS X (around half of which has been running this business) and, er, clear my name. Erik Barzeski (someone I followed when I was setting up this business) sums it up nicely. I do think apps should look good, be a pleasure to use and have the functionality you need. If others follow this trend, by convention, then it really could snowball, but hopefully that’s not going to happen. Sure, you can present new ways of doing things and, by convention, they can be adopted by others and widely understood, but when you start messing around with stuff for no good reason, you’re beginning to go too far. jealous people on other platforms) might dismiss as eye candy must serve a real purpose or the critics will have a valid point.Ĭonsistency is at the core of usability. From the beginning, Mac OS X has made a big deal of looking good in addition to working well and therefore what some (e.g. I don’t mind what anyone else does, although I do worry when I think something could damage the reputation of the Mac platform. Look, it’s not my intention to jump on the bandwagon here. So, that covers Apple and Disco, respectively. I wouldn’t care, but with guidelines out the window there is the risk of a move to the tasteless.
Plus, I think it would have done better to at least try and fit in with the OS a little more, its monochrome look is dark to the point of depressing and there’s very little reason for a lot of the effects it employs. It looked alright in the screenshots, but there was no need to make every window semi-transparent. I know the apps are evolving quicker than the OS but I’m not sure I like the way it’s heading (iTunes).Īlso, I think Disco is butt ugly and simply trying too hard. it would be good to have some consistency and you’d expect that from Apple in its own apps, at least. Nobody is dying in Iraq, after all.Īnyway! I’ve harboured my own reservations about Disco and some other apps out there, which I’ve inflicted on people in private and publicly in a comment on Rory’s blog: Good job also there isn’t an election on in the US that might distract from matters of such importance. Well, it’s good to see people are talking about stuff. There has been a lot of reaction on the web recently to the app Disco that (maybe) started as a result of seeds planted by John Gruber at C4 with The HIG is Dead, moved on to ThinkMac Rory’s Triumph of Eye Candy over Usability (mostly echoed by TUAW’s Dissing Disco), then Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis on the Delicious Generation, which covered a lot of ground and so is now about everything from Delicious Library to MacZOT to MyDreamApp to your second-cousin’s former roommate called Will.