Who’s pushing the boundaries?
Lately I’ve been bouncing around various Mac apps for Twitter, since I don’t like using the website. My latest is Lounge.app. It’s by far the most promising of late, but is in early beta. Using these beta apps got me thinking about the state of Mac software in comparison to iPhone software.
Clearly the iPhone is a huge deal for Apple and developers. The apps that are coming out for it now are amazing (not all, mind you), and I fully expect that amazingness to continue when iPhone 3.0 becomes available.
And yet I can’t help but wonder why we aren’t seeing this amazingness on the Mac? I realize that the hardware differences between the two make for some pretty significant software gaps, GPS being a prime example. But even without these hardware differences, I just don’t see the same level of software coming out for the Mac that I do with the iPhone.
Twitter provides a good example. As I mentioned, I’m trying out Lounge.app (which began as an iPhone app first), having switched from Twitterific. Twitterific is a great app, it really is. It was so well done that it became synonymous for me with Twitter. In my mind the two were the same. But then I bought Tweetie on my iPhone, and that all changed.
Tweetie came out and really raised the bar for Twitter clients, on both the iPhone and the desktop. Aside from it’s great interface, it offers up a way to follow conversations, which is by far the biggest issue with almost every single other interface, including the website. Lounge.app begins to fix that with its ability to follow conversations, but still lacks in polish yet.
Why does it take so long for really great software to trickle down to the Mac desktop?
/end rant
