Apple Seeking to Stimulate Mac Development With $99 Mac Dev Program


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Apple Seeking to Stimulate Mac Development With $99 Mac Dev Program

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After a brief outage on Thursday, Apple's developer site returned with a dramatically restructured developer program for the Mac that is modeled after the $99/year iPhone developer program:

'Modeled after the highly successful iPhone Developer Program, we've relaunched the Mac Developer Program to offer members technical resources, support, access to pre-release software, developer forums and more, all for just $99 per year. As our developer base continues to grow in leaps and bounds, we're working hard to ensure we provide our developers with everything they need to create innovative applications for both the iPhone OS and Mac OS X.'

Previously, Apple offered multiple tiers (Select, Premier) at significantly higher prices ($499, $3499) but also included hardware discounts and other perks to membership. It appears Apple may be looking to tempt the large number of iPhone developers to easily jump to Mac development. Existing ADC members accounts will continue as is until they expire, at which time members can then join the new $99/year program. Prospective Mac developers can still download the Xcode tools for free, but without access to the pre-release software and technical support.

Source: Mac Rumors

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I might be interested just for the pre-release version of OSX :P I don't see myself creating OSX apps just yet (don't want to deal with the licensing, getting the payment etc etc). If Apple come out with an AppStore for OSX I would develop a few apps for sure though.

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Hmmm, not a bad subscription... I quite fancy moving toward OSX development, or maybe iPhone development...

The way things are it's easier to develop for the iphone because apple takes care of the distribution (and collecting the money if it's a paid app). But OSX is more fun/powerful....depends on what you want to do

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Very good for what you're paying there. Considering the previous price this is a big improvement and will easily get some iPhone devs to migrate over.

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The way things are it's easier to develop for the iphone because apple takes care of the distribution (and collecting the money if it's a paid app). But OSX is more fun/powerful....depends on what you want to do

Whoa whoa... They also take care of deciding whether your app is fit for their platform or not. You could invest months in development, only to have them deny your app, or pull it from the app store the way they did with all the sexy apps. There is no way I would develop for the iPhone as my main source of income.

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There is no way I would develop for the iPhone as my main source of income.

A million times this.

I do the occasional bit of contracting work for iPhone OS and actually have my own iPhone app out, but there's absolutely no way I'd switch over to iPhone as my bread-and-butter. The market is *far* too fickle for a small-time developer like me to trust. If you have millions of venture capital to play with then the risk may be worth it, but for small one-two man shops, no thanks.

Hell, even my own iPhone app is a free "companion" app to a paid Mac OS X app.

I'm still on the fence about a Mac OS X App Store. If it's not the only method of distribution, then sure - check out an app called Bodega for a third-party attempt at the same. It manages updates to your apps as well - it's pretty sweet. Add payment processing in there, or a way to hook in your existing processing, and you'd be set. Not sure desktop developers will like having to give 30% to Apple, though - we're too used to giving up only ~5% for payment processing.

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Does it get you even a half of what DreamSpark(/WebsiteSpark/BizSpark) MSDNAA provide for free?

Does DreamSpark provide you with pre released versions of Windows?

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Does it get you even a half of what DreamSpark(/WebsiteSpark/BizSpark) MSDNAA provide for free?

Well, the development tools for Mac OS X are free for anyone, so you don't need a special program to get them cheap/free with Apple. Plus, come on - MSDNAA is for academics, not your normal developers. You're not comparing the same thing. BizSpark isn't free, either - from the FAQ:

"Startups will be responsible for a USD$100 Program Offering Fee when they exit the program."

Also, BizSpark provides two tech support incidents, same as the new Apple Developer program.

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Well, the development tools for Mac OS X are free for anyone, so you don't need a special program to get them cheap/free with Apple.

Visual Studio Express Editions are free too. What about iPhone app development?

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Visual Studio Express Editions are free too. What about iPhone app development?

Yeah, you could install any of the Visual Studio Express Editions and make an app for no investment to Microsoft whatsoever... Now, from this thread I guess Apple's dev tools are free as well, but you need a Mac... One cay say that you need Windows as well, but buying a copy of Windows is a heck of a lot cheaper than having to buy a whole new machine... It would be different if you could install OSX in a Virtual Machine or your own hardware or something...

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Yeah, you could install any of the Visual Studio Express Editions and make an app for no investment to Microsoft whatsoever... Now, from this thread I guess Apple's dev tools are free as well, but you need a Mac... One cay say that you need Windows as well, but buying a copy of Windows is a heck of a lot cheaper than having to buy a whole new machine... It would be different if you could install OSX in a Virtual Machine or your own hardware or something...

You could bang out iPhone or Mac OS X code using vim, gcc, and gnu-make if you wanted to.

The SDK and documentation is freely available and Apple's default compiler is open source.

Xcode and interface builder are just front ends for editing text files: there's no magic going on.

Just because the most popular way (Xcode, MS Word) to edit files (.m/.docx) is not free doesn't mean that you have to

pay to do it (Vim+GCC, Open Office).

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Does DreamSpark provide you with pre released versions of Windows?

Microsoft releases many of those to the public for free. (Vista Beta, Windows 7 Beta, Windows 7 RC, etc.)

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Microsoft releases many of those to the public for free. (Vista Beta, Windows 7 Beta, Windows 7 RC, etc.)

Only milestones though, the dev programs give you access to a LOT of OSX seeds.... (from updates like 10.6.3 right now to bigger releases)

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Only milestones though, the dev programs give you access to a LOT of OSX seeds.... (from updates like 10.6.3 right now to bigger releases)

Dreamspark and the dev program are different though.

The Microsoft equivalent of the apple dev program is Technet. And they both used to be similarly priced until Apple just cut it down to $99. Though I suppose you can argue that a technet subscription gives you a lot more.

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Dreamspark and the dev program are different though.

The Microsoft equivalent of the apple dev program is Technet. And they both used to be similarly priced until Apple just cut it down to $99. Though I suppose you can argue that a technet subscription gives you a lot more.

I'm not the one who brought up Dreamspark, I'm proving that they're nothing alike

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You could bang out iPhone or Mac OS X code using vim, gcc, and gnu-make if you wanted to.

The SDK and documentation is freely available and Apple's default compiler is open source.

Xcode and interface builder are just front ends for editing text files: there's no magic going on.

Just because the most popular way (Xcode, MS Word) to edit files (.m/.docx) is not free doesn't mean that you have to

pay to do it (Vim+GCC, Open Office).

I thought Xcode and interface builder were free. At least I seemed to have downloaded them off Apple's website for free. Did I miss a licensing restriction?

Is the iPhone development program $99/year or $99 1 time fee? I thought it was a 1 time fee but since this was modeled after that, then perhaps I was mistaken.

$99 a year isn't much for someone making a living developing. Technet is equally a steal of a deal when you really look at it. Support and access to early "frills" and regular updates for some engineering software packages can cost ~$1000 per user per year.

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I thought Xcode and interface builder were free. At least I seemed to have downloaded them off Apple's website for free. Did I miss a licensing restriction?

Is the iPhone development program $99/year or $99 1 time fee? I thought it was a 1 time fee but since this was modeled after that, then perhaps I was mistaken.

$99 a year isn't much for someone making a living developing. Technet is equally a steal of a deal when you really look at it. Support and access to early "frills" and regular updates for some engineering software packages can cost ~$1000 per user per year.

Xcode is free, it's not what this programs offer.

The iPhone program is $99 / year and you're right it's not that much (I've made a lot more than that :P)

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I thought Xcode and interface builder were free.

Free as in beer, not as in speech. If you buy his argument that "the cost of a mac to run mac os-only development environments counts" then the truly free approach is using GPL software on Linux.

Is the iPhone development program $99/year or $99 1 time fee?

It's a yearly fee - not so much an "iPhone developer fee" as an "appstore distribution fee": the documentation and SDK are all readily available. You don't have to pay anything to write iPhone software, you do need to pay if you want to put your code on a physical phone or distribute it through the appstore - that's what the fee covers.

The iphone dev program is separate from ADC - you had to pay both membership fees every year if you wanted to maintain ADC and write iphone applications.

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You could bang out iPhone or Mac OS X code using vim, gcc, and gnu-make if you wanted to.

The SDK and documentation is freely available and Apple's default compiler is open source.

Xcode and interface builder are just front ends for editing text files: there's no magic going on.

Just because the most popular way (Xcode, MS Word) to edit files (.m/.docx) is not free doesn't mean that you have to

pay to do it (Vim+GCC, Open Office).

Oh, I didn't know that there were tools that ran on Windows for OSX / iPhone development. I'll have to check those out... Thanks. :)

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