Third-party Mac software is the best you’ll find on any platform. Anyone who disagrees has never tried some of the great Mac apps available from developers like Plasq, Rogue Amoeba, The Omni Group, Bare Bones, Red Sweater, or any of the dozens of other top-notch programming pros. Sure, Windows may have a lot more software-but that may be the most poignant demonstration of the idea that quantity ≠ quality. In this case, it seems quite the opposite.
In fact, the Mac development community is such a unique and amazing phenomenon that Michiel van Meeteren, a student at the University of Amsterdam, wrote a thesis called Indie Fever to study the culture that has produced so many quality apps.
‘Indie Fever' is the first result of a multi-year human geography research program to investigate the social and economical world of so-called ‘Indie' developers on the Macintosh platform. ‘Indie' is the self-chosen nickname of software developers that serve worldwide markets from the Internet, hold their artistic values in high esteem and celebrate their ability to make high quality software as small companies.
With a research grant from SOFA, Michiel used blogs and info from around the ‘net, as well as almost 50 hours of interviews, to study the Indie dev community and its inner-workings. The result was the 105 page thesis, complete with words, more words, pretty graphs and charts, and a lot more words.
You can read more about Indie Fever, as well as download the massive PDF, at SOFA’s Indie Fever website. Michiel also set up a blog for his research on the indie dev scene that’s also worth perusing, if you’re so inclined.
Now go, read the text, immerse yourself in words and develop a whole new appreciation for the individuals who write the software we’ve all come to know, love, and even depend on.
[via Daring Fireball]
