Love

The other day I wrote that I was going to radically overhaul my Tcl/Tk apps and move towards open-sourcing everything I write on a cross-platform basis.

Now that I've begun that work, I find my heart simply isn't in it.

My heart is with the Mac.

I've done enough work on Windows and Linux to know that I can certainly develop for those platforms, but there's a reason I stay with the Mac--even using a cross-platform toolkit. It is by far the best environment for developers. I absolutely love developing for the Mac, even in spite of Apple's many restrictions, even as I move out of the Mac App Store for good.

If my work on the Mac isn't very rewarding financially, it can at least be rewarding in terms of enjoyment.

Reading Brent Simmons' recent blog entry, "Love," crystallized this for me:

Write the apps you want to write in your free time and out of love for the platform and for those specific apps. Take risks. Make those apps interesting and different. Don't play it safe. If you're not expecting money, you have nothing to lose.

Hear, hear.

I'll keep open-sourcing key components of my apps, and of course I will continue to do my essential open-source work as maintainer of Tk on the Mac. But I will also continue to do my own commercial work, making what money I can, and making the best apps I can.

You always come back to what you love.

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