The flourishing community: Mac vs. Windows

An aspect of how successful a technology company is performing is the fan community. Moreover, when we focus on two main rivals in the tech industry – Apple and Microsoft (and their original, core offerings) – the success rate (other than sales and revenue) can be measured by the amount of third-party application developers that support either platform.

For the sake of this argument, let’s take online applications and relegate them to a shelf. No, that’s not where they belong, and we all know that great theory that eventually, all but the most hardware-intensive of our applications will be online apps. However, online apps will also need an offline aspect to them – a way to tie in to either desktop applications or have an offline “mode”, which is being enabled by such products as Adobe AIR. But for the time being, let’s take these out of the equation.

To briefly summarize, Microsoft’s Windows platform has many more developers than that of Apple’s Macintosh platform. However, “many more” does not necessarily mean “better”.

For one, Windows users may have more choice than Mac users when shopping for apps, but when the choice is 10 (Windows) apps vs. 3 (Mac) apps, does it really make a difference? O`n top of that, the additional choice of Windows apps is sometimes inferior in quality to those available for the Mac. This is what I’ve come across in the few years as a Mac user. On top of that, I’ve noticed another little difference between the many Windows and (fewer) Mac developers: the two groups, in general, approach the presentation of their software very differently. So far, as I’ve noticed, Mac software developers put time, capital, and effort into maintaining their web sites and making their design and presentation modern. Not the same for those developing for Windows.

Quite recently, I’ve come across a great software for the Mac called Audio Hijack by a (mostly) Mac-only developer called Rogue Amoeba. It’s a great little app that is available in two different versions (regular and pro) and lets me take any audio stream coming into my Mac and save it to a separate file… for example – Skype conversations, audio playing in my web browser, etc. I purchased it after some days of testing. Then I needed something like it for my Windows Vista machine.

So I did some Google searches and came across a Windows alternative, from a Windows-only developer: Total Recorder from High Criteria. I’ve immediately noticed that Rogue Amoeba’s web site was actually put some design thought into, whereas the High Criteria site looks like it hasn’t been updated since the “Internet tubes” were laid and “turned on” in the 90s. Have a look at their home pages and my descriptions aren’t worth 1 view of it:

 

High Criteria (Windows)

Rogue Amoeba (Mac)

Since then, I’ve come across many more differences in site design between Windows and Mac developers, and I’ve paid more attention to the issue. Here are some more examples: password-management applications for the two platforms:

CP-lab (Windows)

Agile Web Solutions (Mac)By no means is this an all-encompassing review of the different Mac and Windows developers and their web sites, and I’m sure many differences to my observations exist but to my experience so far, this supports the old choice: quality vs. quantity. For example, I’ve already found a modern Windows developer site design here. Let me know what you think and if this was a complete waste of time for you. Cheers. -AL

Posted in Apple, Blogroll, Decisions, Mac, Microsoft, Software