Sighting: Live Design Magazine—and a note to the Apple Engineers
Live Design magazine just wrote up a great little piece on the new video features: QLab Debuts Video: The Mac App Garden Grows. Jake Pinholster writes:
Figure 53’s QLab software for Mac OS X has gotten some attention lately—though probably not enough—for its live, timeline-based audio playback. [...] But the reason QLab makes it into this Projection Now is that it’s not just for audio anymore. Figure 53 has just released a video plug-in for the software that has launched it into an entirely new—and desperately eager—market. [...] QLab does everything a designer needs for a medium-scale show…
Jake points out that the Video Cue doesn’t have a lot of bells or whistles yet, which is true. It’s worth mentioning, though, that some of the bells and whistles on his list (rotation, screen geometry) are on MY list as well. Plus we’ve got plans for CoreImage filters, and down the road there may just be some stuff no one else has done before. Yes, I’ve got a few ideas up my sleeve…
Anyway, as much as I love reading a positive review of QLab, there was something at the end that caught my attention even more:
With its object-oriented development framework, Cocoa, and the triple threat of the CoreAudio, CoreImage, and Quartz Extreme development tools, Apple has made the development of full-featured applications wonderfully accessible to a brand new tier of developers—the users.
Jake has made a perceptive point here. It’s no accident that the amount of high quality, sophisticated OS X software appearing from one and two-person development shops has exploded recently. It’s no accident that major applications can be built from scratch in a matter of weeks.
The elegance that Apple has achieved with the OS X development universe is hard to explain to non-developers. But it’s a key reason that the Mac is seeing so much activity right now. It didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen without some major vision on Apple’s part.
Basically, my point is this: that sound you’re hearing? It’s the gigantic *clik* as years of engineering, roadmaps, and hard work come together. Apple has made it a truly amazing experience to create software for Mac OS X, and the proof is in the programs.
With waves and waves of new Mac users, a mature operating system that is nonetheless still getting significantly better with every release, and a new crop of indie developers chomping at our virtual bit(s), it’s a damn good time to be a Mac developer.
So three cheers to the Apple engineers. We couldn’t do it without ya.