The creative part of the publishing industry is divided into two segments since Mac OS X “Tiger” was released. There is the creative business that employs multiple graphic designers and there is the individual designer. The first group needs software that has clear license and upgrade policies, and a company of which they can be sure it won’t go out of business any time soon. The second group is mainly interested in value for money. They want high-quality software which allows them to perform their task well, but they don’t want to spend a year’s salary for the honour of using it. 

When Tiger was released, Apple offered developers a chance of changing the market for creative software aimed at the second group (and perhaps also at the first, but it will take longer to see results there). Core Image, Core Audio, Core Everything Else meant a developer could write “some code” and plug that into one of these Core Technologies, and end up with a program that can easily compete with Adobe’s products’ corresponding feature set.

Needless to say Leopard expands further on these Core Technologies, offering more and more powerful below-the-waterline features for developers to translate in program functionality. The result of Apple’s move with Core Technologies has been that the number of small developers to release dedicated applications has never been more impressive than the last couple of years. These are smart people. They aren’t competing with the Adobes of this world heads-on and trying to create a new Illustrator, Lightroom, or InDesign. 

Creative Programs With An Attractive Price

They create programs with a small footprint, an attractive price, and functionality that makes their product suitable for a very limited number of purposes. By limiting themselves this way, they can improve on parts of the feature set offered by those all-round heavy-weights such as Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop. And that makes their products especially attractive, because you can buy just the functionality you need and be better off than with a heavy-weight --which usually comes with a lot of features you’ll rarely use.

Examples are Bee Docs’ Timeline, an application I’ve just reviewed, Panic’s Coda (although that one isn’t really “small"), MacRabbit’s CSSEdit, Chronos’ SOHO Labels, and Freeverse’s Sound Studio, to name only a few.

It’s an evolution I’ve only so far seen blossoming on the Mac platform, and it’s probably only possible because Apple offers a helping hand in the sense that the programming environment and the “Core modules” offered are all really useful for creative applications.

It also means Apple has succeeded in creating a sort of symbiotic relationship with a large number of people who know what creative users want and who can develop the programs to fulfil those (niche) needs. That in turn makes Mac users less dependent of large vendors like Adobe, although we will all agree that we can’t do without Adobe, Microsoft, or even Apple itself entirely.

Still, it does imply creative users who stick with the Mac platform today find themselves in an enviable position of being able to choose from a vast array of applications for little money. Who would have thought this ten years ago, when the future looked very pale for Apple.