Saturday, March 20, 2004

My little case tool

I took a gamble on Thursday and asked the Omni Group's macosx-talk discussion list what they thought of Pattern Builder. I posted a Request for Opinions on its product-worthiness and provided two URLs for people to look at. The first provided a quick, graphical overview and the second was for the main project site. I fired off my post and waited. And waited. Then I waited some more. Then I got a reply. Christian Brunschen sent an extravagant response from which I quote: That looks *really really cool*. I *love* it. I was dead chuffed, and I waited for more replies. I was still waiting three hours later. What is going on I wondered. I couldn't believe there were so few Mac OS X developers that only one bothered to respond to my query. Bastards, they don't deserve it anyway, that's it, I'm porting it to Windows on Monday. Then, of course, the Americans and Canadians woke up and looked in their mail. I got a steady stream of well considered responses from 14:06 onwards, through to the next day. The responses were surprisingly consistent and can be summed up in three lines: - that looks really cool - does it do Java? - shame there's no market for Apple developer tools (too few developers) It was astonishing how many people were sold on just the looks alone. Neil, that looks like a beautiful tool...I think Cocoa developers will love it. It looks to me like just the kind of tool a programmer would want to use. Providing a clear visual framework to the code sounds pretty cool, and it LOOKS cool as well. I think it looks brilliant... - i tend to encourage beautiful ideas regardless of "marketability".. i think a tool like this could be a very good addition to Mac OS X ...it looks impressive. This looks very cool. Everyone was concerned about the size of the developer market. The biggest estimate I got was 5,000. I've tried to get a number from Apple on several occasions, but they always give me the 'confidential information' brush off. I conclude from that that the number is too embarrassing to give out. On the one hand, every copy of Mac OS X comes with the developer tools, so there could be 5 million of them out there. On the other hand, anyone who is serious about developing for the platform has probably signed up with the Apple Developer Connection, whose membership should give us a reasonable working figure. There were a couple of replies that, while not quite saying "don't be a fool," were definitely advising me to think long and hard about it. And that's pretty much what I'm doing. The strong positive response is telling me that if I build it, especially for Java, then people will buy it. But there won't be enough customers to make a living from it. I can however announce that Pattern Builder has sold its first copy. Christian, my first responder, was mad keen to play with it so I've sold him a copy as-is for a nominal sum, just so that I can wave a cheque at some of my friends who think I'm an idiot for having anything to do with Macs. I'm looking forward to some real user feedback that I can channel back into the tool, while I figure out what to do in the long term. 5:49:50 PM