Troy: It is a little unfair. As has been pointed out, most of the
apps you mentioned were:
Nothing is "fair". It is a statistic. It is somewhat interesting as
a statistic. Xcode (in its current form) is MUCH younger than RB,
yet many killer apps have already been made with it.
Actually, Xcode, and its direct predecessor Project Builder, and the
language upon which OS X (Objective-C) is based on comes from the
early 90's with NeXT. Objective C is also a subset of the C
programming language (C with Objects... get it?), which everyone and
their mother learns in comp-sci. None of this is what I would call
"new kids on the block"
RB has none to its credit. People will read into that whatever they
will. I read it (combined with other statistics and data) that RB
is suitable for vertical market apps, and shareware/utility level
apps, for many of the reasons that have already been stated. Others
will absolutely read it differently (or not at all). But so far, my
read has not been proven wrong. Once someone makes a powerful,
elegant, name recognition app with RB, my view will likely change.
Until then, I guess things are just unfair.
Frankly, I'm still waiting for the next "killer" app to be developed,
period. I don't put Delicious Library into that category. At the
end of the day, it is just a book / media cataloging application, one
with relatively little usage for the vast majority of people, unlike
a Photoshop or Word. Perhaps the last one I can think of was iTunes
and iPhoto. Both made by Apple with their own development tools.
I think you are missing the point that very, very few "killer" apps
actually get made, and those that do are generally "killer" because
of either their long-term existence and their wide-scale usage. When
looking at what the main apps that most people have on their toolkit,
i would find, with the exception of the Apple i- and pro- apps, most
every single one I can think of was developed sometime in the 80's or
early nineties. BBedit, Word, Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, name
the mass-market tool. Nowadays I think you'll find that, due to
increased competition, there are very few applications you can look
at and say, "this is a killer app, developed recently, and has taken
the world by storm so that everyone is using it." There are,
however, many, many well designed applications that exist -in the
vertical marketplace- so to speak that are developed using everything
from RB to XCode to Java. It just depends on your target audience.
Let's face it. Everyone has very different needs when they sit down
to work on their computer. Common ones, like writing letters,
creating spreadsheets and organizing pictures have already been very
well served by existing applications for, in some cases, the last 2
decades or so. It's for the salespeople who have different needs
(that would use my app), or the videographer that would use a video
pre-processing tool, or the shopkeeper that uses a POS app and the
other "vertical" markets that make up the vast reality and market of
the computer industry. It's these applications, these vertical
applications that, combined, make up a much, much larger percentage
of usage then any Microsoft Word or Photoshop.
If you're really looking for much-hyped killer app types of things,
look to Flickr or some other online flavor of the month.
And again, RB suits many needs almost perfectly. The real point
here is that it is no position to displace the other tools
mentioned, because it can't do their job.
You're right. I can take 1 hour to whip up a nice little utility app
in RB, or I can take 8 hours to do it in Xcode. Again, it will
always depend on your needs. RB is not the solution for everything,
but neither is Codewarrior, XCode or any other programming language
or IDE.
The killer app statistic is only part of the evidence, and whether
people like it or not, some developers will take it into
consideration when choosing the tools to put in their toolboxes. Of
course, like me, that doesn't prevent some from using RB anyway.
When it's right, it's right.
I think someone else pointed out that the very name, REALbasic seems
to have some negative connotations to it (thanks to that word,
Basic). Perhaps renaming it to something weird like "Delphi" or
"Ruby" would make it look less silly for those elitist C++ folks.
Either way, I think most programmers are pretty pragmatic about their
tools of choice, and choosing based on community "appeal" will only
be a part of a decision, along with code maintenance, ease of
development, cross platform capabilities or other hot buttons for
them, and their target audience and needs.
- Corey
--
Troy
RPSystems, Ltd.
http://www.rpsystems.net
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