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The Real Story of Audion
mijkal writes "Panic's Audion music software has been retired and made freely available. The developer has a nice write up on his experiences with Audion in relation to early-MP3 days, failed AOL deals, and the could-have-been iTunes app. It's an inspiring read on the history of a shareware developer and his adventures thus far."
Speaking of old MP3 stuff, there was once Sonique but it went by the wayside after it was bought by lycos and the original creative team was disbanded.
Sometimes it's better for everyone if some big corporation doesn't buy an application because then the developers and creative people stay together simply for the love of the project and breakthrus can be made rather than pandering to profit margins......
Cool! Amazing Toys.
So . . how do you differentiate between begware and shareware then?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Well,
he's managed to avoid working in a soul-sucking job for a large corporation, where his creativity would dry up and his voice go unheeeded. He's managed to keep his sense of humour through it all (those barbed comments from Steve have to hurt), and he is actually more aware than ever that he's better off going his own way and creating the stuff *he* wants to make. I'd say it was inspiring in that he's happy, doing what he wants to do, and can make money doing it. Software companies always copy each other, that's the way it works, and I'm glad they do or we'd be stuck with a choice between several apps with orthogonal features none of which did everything we want.
Actually the comment from Steve about iPhoto made me laugh as it's really one of Apple's worst products and could easily be bested, even after a couple of revisions. Someone could do worse than come up with a better alternative and sell it as shareware; I'm sure a lot of people who take photos as a hobby wouldn't mind a decent app to organise their images.
One where you could edit comments for more than one image at once for example, or add custom tags to images, or which has flexible HTML export. Perhaps one where the internal file system wasn't so byzantine that once the files are in there your best bet for getting them out is to drag and drop to the desktop. One which had a decent search facility. I could go on, I'm thinking of something like iView, but with basic functionality free (to compete with iphoto) and then a few extras for registering.
Freaking pathetic. These guys passed up an opportunity to become iTunes, and why?? Because they thought AOL was going to solve all of their problems, because they couldn't hold a frickin' meeting without them?!? I know it's easy to spot in retrospect, but that's so pathetic, it should have been easy to spot at the time... I mean, you're an Apple developer and Apple wants to meet with you, so you... don't??!? What would Apple have had to do to buy these guys big frickin' houses?!?
Tell you what - if you're a small software developer being contacted by Apple, hire me as your managerial consultant. I'll make sure you meet with them, at the very least!!
Okay, I'm not a huge MP3 hoarder, and never was, but I never really got into MP3s ever because all the audio programs seemed "too cool." It was cool to make an audio player that supported visual features? Why? Back in the days before napster:
Me: Hey, are there any programs that can play these MP3s?
MP3 guru: Are there? d00d! Look at these MP3 players!! This one has awesome support for skins and its skins are cross compatible! Look at all the choices you have to make your MP3 player look cool!
Me: ummmm yea but is it easy to use and will it play my Mp3s?
MP3 guru: and this one supports alpha channeling so it's like L337 n' stuff!
Me: Hello? How does making the player transparent make it work better. Does this audio program even have audio features? And what is L337? Some kind of code to unlock the program?
----
Basically I never got why back in the day so much time was spent on how the player looked vs. how the player worked. Even these days, there are visual features of iTunes (such as that weird psychedelic screensaver thingie that changes shapes while different music is playing) which I just don't get why anyone wants them. I just want to listen to music and I want my software to make sense!
It seemed like MP3 players were designed by the niche and for the niche, until MP3s were no longer a niche.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
One thing that is being overlooked here in the Windows vs. Mac shareware observation is that it's no longer possible to get a decent Windows development environment at a decent price. There are free or low-cost tools out there, but none have the bredth and depth to allow you to develop a decent app or game. It's not like 10 years ago when you could pick up a $99 copy of Turbo C++ and write a decent win31 program from it. So shareware is dead there because hobbiests can't justify the price tag for Visual Studio. Mac, on the other hand, has a decent environment with decent tools for doing Cocoa apps, and it's all free with the OS. Same goes for things like PalmOS. The tools are priced right to allow access to the hobbiest. That's what keeps shareware alive.
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
I'm writing this because I too am part of the small fraternity of Mac MP3 application developers. I was part of a three man team writing MusicMatch Jukebox for Mac OS when iTunes was released. And soon afterward I was out of a job.
I know that iTunes would have crushed all competition anway, but Steve Jobs is the guy who saw through the stupidity of skins. WinAmp had them, so every MP3 player has skins. You can read in the article about the incredible amount of wasted development effort spent on improving the skins-giving them transparent corners and whatnot.
At MusicMatch we spent a third of our time developing the skinning engine. And what did we end up with? A lot of ugly, non-intuitable windows designed by graphic artists with no concept of UI design, windows that docked in some skins but not others, and with list views that couldn't expand because of the surrounding bitmapped edges. If we'd have settled on a standard interface and just worked on getting the music database, radio streaming, and audio playback working we'd have finished much, much faster, and given the user a nicer experience to boot.
Steve saw what was valuable in a music player and told the SoundJam guys to junk everything else. Simplify. Simplify. And the result is the preeminent digital music player.
The Panic guy writing the linked article even now doesn't admit the wasted effort, and why he couldn't come up with a list of reasons why Panic 2 was better than iTunes 1.
In theory, it sounds all good to meet with Apple. I mean hey, they rock, don't they? They have a cool culture, cool products, etc. But c'mon...give these guys a break. First, they didn't know they were going to be asked to be iTunes. Hell, maybe in the back of their heads they were thinking Steve (Jobs) just wanted to shut them up. It's easy for you to say they were dumb now, but back then...they had no clue. And let's not forget...everyone laughed at the idea of mp3s being a viable money maker. It was just for college kids to steal music and play...
Let me ask you this. Do you run your own shop? I commend them for thinking about what they want in life. Like he said, they're young, not married, so why not go for it? Follow your dreams. And if the going gets tough, I'm sure Jobs would have no problem hiring them if they said "we need a job". I for one am impressed with their decision. It was tough, and they're following their dreams.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
i worked for scopus, bought by siebel. millions of lines of code, all trashed
i worked for centerrun, nee raplix, bought by Sun. 40 people worked really hard to make a great product. now you can find it on sun's site, if you look carefully. advertising budget/market awareness of solution? zero
if you sell your software company, you can be confident the software will cease to exist.