Mac Development Center?

For a long time it has bothered me that Mac Developers seem unrightfully deprived of the Mac hype - Even though you could find a lot of information on the ADC, it's not the same as what Apple has in their stores alone, such as The Studio Series.

Giving a pack of services for starting developers might draw more people into the Apple development world. Cocoa, WebObjects, and just general Unix development could benefit greatly from an Apple or Apple-related service for people who choose to develop their applications on the Apple platform. The documentation is great, but docs are not enough: What about some added-value?

For example, there are Grpahics, Video-Editing and Music "clubs" all over the world offering people first-hand experience with different software. Xcode has its quirks but it's a good product; WebObjects however, you couldn't find anyone to give you hosting for developmnent purposes only for less than 30$/month. For ASP.NET you would find for 2.5$/month, for J2EE you could find at around 4$/month.

And what about CVS hosting? And not only for OpenSource, where SoureForge are doing a great job keeping it alive. Even for closed service, low-budget, start-up ocmpanies/groups. These starting developers can't be expected to buy a full Mac OS X Server and a hardware to go along with it just because they wanted to stress test their application on WebObjects, to benchmark it against Hibername with Tapestry, for example. Neither can they be expected to pay 30$/month for it. Also, an opportunity for developers deploying their application to stress test it on a Mac to see how powerful it is might and should draw deployers to purchase Mac hardware for their deployment and hosting needs.

I will try to see how I can implement this type of "Digital Times" for developers. A set of services given for developers to try out, to use and to benchmark, all Mac-style.

Wish me luck!

tags:[ Development ] [ Apple ]