Applications – Page 2

Cheetah3D

Cheetah3D recently released version 6 of it’s impressive 3D app. First off, to those who are not aware of Cheetah3D, let me give a little synopsis of the app. It’s a lightweight 3D modelling and animation tool, built for Mac OS X, with a Javascript scripting API to create tools and workflows. You can purchase it either through the Mac App store:http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cheetah3d/id402708753?mt=12 or by purchasing it through Cheetah3D’s online store here:http://www.cheetah3d.com/order.php

I ran into Cheetah3D soon after the Mac App store was released – it was one of the first apps I bought. I was fascinated by the $99.00 price for a 3D application that, based on some cursory research, provided the perfect toolset for someone wanting to dabble in 3D – i.e. a perfect app for a prosumer not wanting to break the bank on Maya and other high-end 3D apps. So I bought it. And it was awesome! It’s the right balance of easy to use baked in with good professional features. The Cheetah3D forums are also a great resource.

Anyway Cheetah3D 6 is an awesome upgrade – bullet physics being a big new feature. If you’re on a Mac, looking to dabble in 3D and don’t need the “complexity” of a high-end 3D app – I highly recommend Cheetah3D.

Thoughts on the Mac App store…

So I recently made some purchases through Apple’s Mac App store. Overall I think it’s a good system, particularly for those developers without strong marketing and distribution channels. The net benefit for the world is positive, although I wouldn’t want app stores like this to be the only way of buying and distributing software.

Here’s a quick list of pros and cons, followed up with my “huh…this could change everything” realization.

Pros:
– Purchases are amazingly easy and generally painless.
– instant gratification (click, purchase, download, and go)
– easy to keep apps up to date
– curated experience means good exposure to new/useful apps while (so far) keeping malware out
– App Stores – not just the Mac App store – provide economic impetus to develop for the Apple ecosystem, meaning more cool apps for Mac OS/iOS

Mixed:
– walled garden – it’s nice and pretty, but sometimes you want to break out…

Cons:
– the store is difficult to search
– for a “curated” experience, the store still has a lot of “this passed review?” kind of apps
– broadband is a necessity, particularly for larger apps

And now for the “this can change everything” realization. So most software licenses basically tie the software to a machine, device, and sometimes even by CPU. Under the App Store, once you purchase software, it is licensed to your App store user account. This means you buy software once and can use it anywhere (after logging into the App store and installing the app under your App store user account). It’s basically a floating license (I’m looking at you, Luxology Modo). This makes perfect sense to me – the machine doesn’t matter – it’s not licensing the software. The user though…they matter a lot, they’re the ones licensing the software. I eagerly await for this licensing model to become the norm because it has the potential to change everything.

Room for improvement

As any commercial software developer will tell you, releases revolve around features, bug fixes, and need for income. The company needs to balance new features (which will make the product sell better to a larger audience), fixing bugs (which helps keep the existing user base happy) and the need for income (the company/developers need to make a living). This balance gets even more precarious when the company in question produces many software products, some which are bundled together in suites. And if we want to add more headache into the mix, let’s say this software company supports two major computer operating systems, and at least the last 2 releases of these differing operating systems. Then to make this whole scenario positively nightmarish, these operating systems run on fairly diverse hardware setups and may be run simultaneously with other software.

Where am I going with this? Let’s talk about Adobe.

Adobe makes some pretty powerful and complex applications that help users communicate. At the end of the day, Photoshop helps people communicate their message to someone else. Same thing with InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and even Acrobat (which has more to do with creating a wrapper to maintain the fidelity of the message when rendered). Adobe has a great history of making applications that help people create and communicate.

But somehow, Adobe is starting to move away from this history. They seem to have a disturbing (at least to me) fascination with “Enterprise” and “Development Platforms” (Live Cycle, Acrobat, and Flash). And then there’s the additional “services” they are trying to sell on top of these “platforms”. This isn’t the Adobe I’m used to and I’m sensing that a lot of creatives are like me, wondering where the old Adobe went. With all these different business focuses and the tight 18 month release schedule, the software is becoming, unfortunately, less stable, more buggy, and filled with tie-ins to services I see little value in. I think the biggest issue that Adobe faces is that it’s failing to connect to the creative individual like me. I’m sure they connect with the giant ad agencies though – I mean just look at the interactivity that InDesign CS5 can do!*

I just want an Adobe which is more focused on making my creative apps run better, faster, more efficiently, and that gets out of my way and let’s me communicate. There’s room for improvement.

*Have you ever seen the work done by somebody trying to translate their print design to web? That’s the same vibe I get from this CS5 feature.