This month brought another high-brow Apple media event, and with it more juicy news for Apple iOS developers. Only this time the news isn’t centred on iOS, its all about OSX. In a nutshell Apple’s much respected and coveted app store distribution model is coming to OSX. As of OSX Lion coming 2011, iMacs, Mac Pros, MacBooks and Mac Minis will all have their own app store – presumably separate from iTunes.
This is absolutely fabulous news for developers. There are literally hundreds of thousands of developers world wide who, although perhaps never having actually done it, are equipped with the skills and expertise to build Mac OSX applications. Personally I was both amused and astonished at how similar the two systems are to build for. This is hardly surprising when you actually think about it, iOS is essentially a stripped out version of OSX and even runs the mach kernel. So this awesome distribution channel extends an iOS developers skill set across across an extra 20 million or so machines, almost instantly.
Developers can start submitting applications to OSX in November and we can’t wait.
So what does this mean for Kumulos? Well you can actually start building OSX apps with Kumulos immediately, and theres nothing stopping a cross over between devices – fancy building an iPhone app that talks to the same database as a native desktop OSX app? No problem, couldn’t be simpler – just load use the same bindings for both apps.
Getting stuff into Mac users hands has always been a little more difficult, but with a 70/30 split on sales this business model makes a tonne of sense. Removing all the distribution headaches from development studios allows them to focus on good software, not payment gateways and invoice processing.
Got an idea for an OSX app that uses Kumulos? We’d love to hear about it.
