C4[1] Day 0: the Power of the Indies
Last night, C4[1] began. Wolf Rentzsch and Wil Shipley were the speakers. Wil was, well, Wil. Wolf’s talk was interesting and I found myself still thinking about it this morning. Wolf talked about the sea-change that indie developers are experiencing. He believes that indies have much more influence and power since platforms, languages, and interfaces have shifted from the large companies (e.g., Microsoft and Apple) to the web, resulting in a democratization. The lower cost of entry for developers is certainly an example of this trend. However, while I think we’re heading in this direction, we’re not there yet.
Wolf actually reinforced my position in his talk. Using Twitter as an example, he illustrated how a public API is essential for success of a web application. Wolf remarked he doesn’t even bother to use a web application if it doesn’t have a public API. While APIs can be used for a variety of purposes, they are frequently leveraged to develop desktop applications that interface to these web applications. Twitter’s API supports applications such as Twitterific, which I expect is used more often on the Mac than Twitter’s web site. Similarly, it is important that blog software supports an API so bloggers can use desktop tools such as MarsEdit to write their posts rather than the web interface.
So, I’m not willing to go as far as Wolf in terms of the shift of power to indies due to a shift to web apps. That said, I agree that the trend is in that direction. For those of us who develop applications on the desktop, rather than web applications, this transition period provides a unique opportunity to develop desktop-based clients for web applications. I think we’ll still be doing this for a while.
