{"id":862,"date":"2010-10-21T06:03:51","date_gmt":"2010-10-21T13:03:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/?p=862"},"modified":"2015-09-06T08:14:48","modified_gmt":"2015-09-06T15:14:48","slug":"the-cat-lion-is-out-of-the-bag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/?p=862","title":{"rendered":"The cat<\/s> lion is out of the bag!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In case you missed the news yesterday, Apple held a special event<\/a>, focused on the Mac.<\/p>\n

Aside from introducing a Mac I’ve been waiting for for seemingly forever—the 11.6″ MacBook Air—Apple also gave a very brief sneak peek at Mac OS X Lion<\/a>, coming to a Mac near you in the summer of 2011.<\/p>\n

For Peter and I, this was an interesting day. Neither of us were expecting the next major Mac OS X release to come so soon. And certainly neither of us were expecting it to include an app store…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Mac OS X app store<\/b><\/p>\n

As small, independent developers, we’re both thrilled by and scared of the Mac OS X app store. The thrilling bit is the opportunity to get our programs in front of many more eyes than we could ever afford to if we had to market them ourselves. There’s just no way we could purchase an advertising campaign to reach the number of users that the app store is going to reach.<\/p>\n

The scary part is adhering to Apple’s rules and restrictions, being at the whim of their approval process, and giving 30% of every revenue dollar to Apple.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, we both feel that Many Tricks needs to be in the Mac OS X app store, so we’re going to do everything we can to have our full product suite there on the day the store launches.<\/p>\n

Lion and Many Tricks’ products<\/b><\/p>\n

So what about Lion (side note: notice that Apple never refers to Lion as Mac OS X 10.7 anywhere on their site?) and its impact on Many Tricks’ products?<\/p>\n

For the most part, at least based on what limited information was revealed today, we think most of our apps will run with little to no change on 10.7. There is, however, one app that’s been directly impacted by the Lion announcement: Butler<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On our original 2010 timeline<\/a>, Butler 5 was slated for a late 2010 release, and we were working towards that launch date…until today’s announcement.<\/p>\n

Butler’s feature set means that it relies heavily on the core operating system to do much of what it does…and with that core OS changing within a year, it’d be a real waste of effort for us to spend hundreds of hours finishing and releasing Butler 5, only to find it non-functional a few months later.<\/p>\n

So as of today, Butler 5 has been postponed, at least until we can get our hands on Lion and see what’s there, and how it affects Butler. I know many of you may be disappointed with this decision, but it’s really the best one we can make, given the unknown-yet-out-there Lion release.<\/p>\n

Note:<\/b> We will, of course, honor the free upgrade offer for Butler 5: purchasers of Butler 4 today (and prior purchasers, of course) will still get a free license for Butler 5 when it ships. <\/p>\n

I can’t provide even an estimated ship date for Butler at this time, because Apple hasn’t told developers when we’ll be able to get our hands on Lion to start working with it. Suffice it to say that we both want Butler 5 out there as soon as we can, so we’ll start work as soon as we can.<\/p>\n

Wrapping it all up<\/b><\/p>\n

Overall, we were pretty happy about how today went—none of our programs were given a death sentence by Lion’s feature set (at least, so it seemed). The Mac OS X app store is an exciting, if a bit scary, proposition, and Lion looks like a release that will further interest people in the Mac platform—and for us small developers, that’s a very good thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In case you missed the news yesterday, Apple held a special event, focused on the Mac. Aside from introducing a Mac I’ve been waiting for for seemingly forever—the 11.6″ MacBook Air—Apple also gave a very brief sneak peek at Mac OS X Lion, coming to a Mac near you in the summer of 2011. For […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3,4],"tags":[],"coauthors":[21],"class_list":["post-862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-company-news","category-products"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=862"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3616,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862\/revisions\/3616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=862"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manytricks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}