Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's nice that this program is being made available, rather than becoming a footnote, lost forever, in the software history books. Kudos to the programmer for being considerate of his users.
Your confusion is understandable; in the Windows/x86 world, shareware truly is dead. But the distribution format continues to exist (though barely) in the Mac market. Besides, Panic, there's Ambrosia Software, Freeverse, Littlewing, Spiderweb and others.
Mac users, partly due to reduced malware exposure and partly due to cultural conviction, tend to be more appreciative of shareware developers, and as such are more likely to download strange unknown software and pay their fees. I used to have a link to a developer's anecdote where he got about 3% or so pay-in from Mac downloads, but only got much less than 1% when he ported his product to Windows. The result is that Mac shareware tends to get more income than on Windows, despite (or because of?) the low market share of the platform.
That said, even the old shareware houses are starting to migrate to brick-and-mortar. Freeverse sells some of their games in Apple Stores, and even Ambrosia has made CD pressings of Escape Velocity: Nova (as well as a board game!). It's a shame, shareware was as close as the "little person" could get to a true free market of software sales, sacrificed during the current war between Corporate software and Open Source.
Those who complain about affect & effect on
A solid tale of adventure, including the Reality Distortion Field.
It's a tiny operation, comprising four people. They were extremely dedicated to doing one thing and doing it well, and to the Macintosh platform. It made me proud to be a Mac user, since I was in such good company.
Then I read slashdot.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
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.
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"