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Tue, 12 Jan 2010
Postmortem on 2009, and looking forward in 2010
At the end of 2008, I posted a blog entry on what I learned that year. I didn't have time to do anything similar at the end of 2009, so I'm carrying it over into 2010. Which is appropriate, given that I am now more interested in looking forward than looking back. 2009 was mostly a transitional year, in which most of the lessons of 2008 provided irrelevant. In 2008 I talked a lot about the importance of marketing. Regardless of my marketing strategy, the Great Recession kept sales down, down, down. I also complained about the difficulty of learning Cocoa and swore I'd never do it. But most of my technological work in 2009 was spent in learning various aspects of Cocoa and applying it to Tk, which itself was ported to Cocoa by Daniel Steffen. And finally, I said I'd add a lot of new products; instead I revived one I previously discontinued, and released incremental updates of everything else. (The single biggest upgrade of all my apps was moving them from Tk-Carbon to Tk-Cocoa and 64-bit capability, as well as UI freshening.) I now enter 2010 a much stronger developer than I was a year ago: I can delve into lower-level technologies when necessary (Cocoa), while still taking advantage of the rapid development features of my primary programming languages. My toolbox is much richer than it was a year ago, and with drag-and-drop, native icons, custom dock icons, sheet windows, and AppleScript and Services support, my programs will be much better Mac citizens: these are real improvements in usability, functionality, and the user experience. Now that I've greatly broadened my development skills, however, it's now time to begin applying it to my programs in a substantial way. The first task, of course, is to integrate these new features into my programs in appropriate ways. The next task is to explore opportunities for new applications, opportunities that my new skills now make available. I have lots of ideas, and lots of interests: the challenge will be to translate those ideas into products that users find compelling enough to pay for. I want to improve my sales in 2010 as much as I improved my development skills in 20009. I think I'm finally in a position to do that. Sales really surged in the last two months of 2009, to the point where sales finished at the same level as 2008--a pleasant surprise, given how slowly the year started. There's still a lot of room for improvement, but like a last-place football team that wins its last four games, I've gained some momentum. I attribute the sales spike to moving my applications to Cocoa: some of the user feedback I've gotten suggests this has made a big difference. As far as marketing, my product mix, and pricing, I've gathered some data about what works and what doesn't, and will keep working on that as the year goes on. Bottom line: despite the difficulties of the past year, I feel more optimistic about my software business than ever before. I'll be working hard to bring cool and useful products to the table in 2010. This is a bit late, but I'm pleased to announce the long-awaited availability of TkDND on the Mac. This package allows you to drag files and text from other Mac applications to Tk applications. This basic GUI functionality has been a sore omission from Tk on the Mac, but George Petasis (with some assistance from myself) has done a major update of the package, including Mac support. I'm looking forward to integrating this essential library into my applications.
Inter-application communication on OS X: AppleScript and Services
One of the nicest features of Mac OS X is the operating system's support for inter-application communication. Of course, OS X's Unix underpinnings do a great deal in this respect, but the application level also provides many useful features as well. Specifically, OS X includes AppleScript and Services. AppleScript is the Mac's system scripting language, allowing different applications that support AppleScript to communicate with each other, exchange data, and more. AppleScript can be used to combine applications in unusual and unique ways, leveraging the strengths of each application to build complex workflows. It's not unusual to see AppleScript-based workflows that combine Microsoft Word, Adobe InDesign, and the FileMaker database to create elaborate publications, for instance. And AppleScript hooks into the lower levels of OS X as well, with a Unix-level command-line tool. No other scripting language touches as many aspects of the Mac as AppleScript. My applications make extensive use of AppleScript internally to communicate with various aspects of the OS. Services are a smaller, but still powerful, aspect of OS X. Services allow an application to expose part of its functionality to other applications, which can then be accessed from a system-wide menu. In accessing Services, you might highlight some text in TextEdit, select "Search with Google" from the Services menu, and then watch Safari fire up and run the selected term in the Google site. You can't really chain Services together into complex workflows the way you can with AppleScript--but, on the other hand, Services are just a menu click away. Most professional-level applications on OS X support AppleScript and Services to at least some degree. Not only is it a sign of the application's polish and integration with the Mac OS, it's just an added dimension of usability, of utility. My own applications have lacked this dimension, and that My own applications have not done so. As I've given this more thought, I've come to regard this as a pretty serious omission. How much more useful would NameFind be if you could highlight a search term and launch a search for a filename with that term in a specific directory? Or if you could write an AppleScript that would search for a particular software package in both PortAuthority and Phynchronicity? I've spent the last few weeks exploring ways to add AppleScript and Services support for my programs, and after some trial and error, I think I have the hooks in place to provide basic support for both. It will take some time--and imagination--to figure out what types of functionality to export via AppleScript and Services, but that's the fun part. And, once I'm finished, my applications will be better Mac OS citizens. |
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