Thursday, November 18, 2004
Audion is an mp3 player created by Panic. They just stopped development on it since iTunes is dominating the market.
Audion is a great product and a great story about third party software development. Here is the story told by the creator
My favorite parts:
Audion had custom skins that had alpha channels (transparency). This was in OS 9 before it was natively supported in the operating system (I think Windows will have this in a few years). They had to hack around this by actually looking at what was under their window, compositing their window over an image of the background, and then putting that on screen as an opaque image. Very very cool.
And a quote about Steve Jobs
The guy who we basically owe our entire professional existence to, who basically created the very platform we want to hug, the computers we want to crush into little pure plump pieces of joy?
And a quote about iTunes, which describes the Apple software philosophy and what makes the software so great.
iTunes was, of course, and I'll say this now, brilliant. It single-handedly taught us an entirely new philosophy on software design. Do you really need that Preference that 1% of your users will use? Can you find a better way to design that interface than having each function in a separate window? Can you clean this up, even if it means it's a little less flexible? iTunes blazed the trail for clean, efficient software design for a broad audience, a design philosophy we practice actively today. It was a way to take a complicated digital music collection, and make it easy. Sure, it was limited, but man was it easy.
I HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend Panic's other great product, Transmit. I've been using it for years. If Apple didn't have a site license, I'd pay for it in a second.
Audion is a great product and a great story about third party software development. Here is the story told by the creator
My favorite parts:
Audion had custom skins that had alpha channels (transparency). This was in OS 9 before it was natively supported in the operating system (I think Windows will have this in a few years). They had to hack around this by actually looking at what was under their window, compositing their window over an image of the background, and then putting that on screen as an opaque image. Very very cool.
And a quote about Steve Jobs
The guy who we basically owe our entire professional existence to, who basically created the very platform we want to hug, the computers we want to crush into little pure plump pieces of joy?
And a quote about iTunes, which describes the Apple software philosophy and what makes the software so great.
iTunes was, of course, and I'll say this now, brilliant. It single-handedly taught us an entirely new philosophy on software design. Do you really need that Preference that 1% of your users will use? Can you find a better way to design that interface than having each function in a separate window? Can you clean this up, even if it means it's a little less flexible? iTunes blazed the trail for clean, efficient software design for a broad audience, a design philosophy we practice actively today. It was a way to take a complicated digital music collection, and make it easy. Sure, it was limited, but man was it easy.
I HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend Panic's other great product, Transmit. I've been using it for years. If Apple didn't have a site license, I'd pay for it in a second.