The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS

A year ago, I bought a Dell desktop running Windows Vista. Last week, I finally got it working…mostly.*

This week, we are releasing WaveMaker for the Mac (OS 10.5 Leopard to be specific) and Safari. Although the Mac is a visual platform, it has always been behind on WYSIWYG development tools. With Wavemaker, the Mac is leaping back in front.

The WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio download for the mac is at http://www.wavemaker.com/downloads or just click here.

After many years of languishing in the education and design ghettos, Mac has once again become the defacto standard of leading edge techies. I attended an open source CEO conference recently where I was the only PC user at a breakout session of 10 people.

Our press release included a spiffy quote from Jean-Louis Gassé, General Partner at Allegis Capital and ex-Apple executive: "WaveMaker's Visual Ajax Studio for Mac comes at a very opportune time. Apple is gaining momentum in the Enterprise and WaveMaker gives enterprise users an easy and visual way to build Web applications."

Mac developers had their moment, back there in the days of Hypercard and Filemaker pro. Now the Mac platform is becoming a defacto standard for developers once again.

Here are some of the key reasons the entire silicon valley seems to be moving to the Mac:

1. Ajax platform of choice: Safari is lightning fast and leads the pack in standards-compliance. I can't remember the last time I saw any web app demoed on Internet Explorer, and if Firebug* ever gets ported to Safari, Firefox will be in trouble.
2. Video platform of choice: we just went through a 3 week death-march to create a new screencast for WaveMaker. Of that time, about 8 hours was spent creating content - the rest of the time was spent wrestling with the brain-dead video software we were using on the PC (Camtasia). In contrast, my 12 year old niece just created a 30 minute class presentation using i-movie. Enough said.
3. The Incredible shrinking desktop: with more and more compelling web applications, I find myself spending less and less time working within my Windows desktop.
4. The disaster that is Vista: given that I have to relearn the whole user interface to move from XP to Vista, I might as well relearn an interface that actually makes sense.
5. That cool backlit logo on the Mac laptop: let's face it - the knowledge that you will look good in a coffee shop probably sells more laptops these days than Ghz or RAM stats.
   

When I was in college I saw Steve Jobs demo the Apple Lisa in front of about 30 of us Stanford Comp Sci nerds. It is still to this day the best demo I have ever seen, despite the fact that the Lisa flamed out famously. I know that Macs will never take over the world, but it's sure nice to see them back in the race.

Then there's also the part about it just plain works! Which brings us back full circle to my Dell/Vista saga: after spending dozens of hours, many hundreds of dollars on utilities that didn't work, and a spectacular lack of help from Dell (the answer ended up being on an Intel site, having to do with the Intel Matrix storage manager, not that you really wanted to know).

Interested readers may also want to check out another good blog post on why PC developers are moving to the Mac.

*corrected - original post confusingly said Firefox, causing a great deal of what passes for glee among the trolls ;-)

Labels: AJAX, development, Macintosh, RAD, WaveMaker