Apparently I wasn’t the only person to purchase Delicious Library in the first week of release. They’ve had $250,000 in sales so far. For an app that no one really needs, this is pretty incredible.
And no office space overhead. At O’Reilly’s Mac conference Wil Shipley emphasized a similar point, to cut costs down by selling directly to the customer instead of a boxed product in stores. See Niall Kennedy’s blog post for a link to the MP3.
Wil also likes Cocoa Bindings. From an Apple interview about Cocoa Bindings, he said:
“It makes it really easy for programmers to present data in a way that’s very clear and intuitive to the user. It makes every app look and feel like an iApp.”
I haven’t bought into Bindings yet. I commented on Michael Tsai’s blog about it last month. The funny thing is, the little details in Delicious Library that are so impressive required some significant programming, and shaving a few dozen lines of code that handles sorting in a table view seems to pale in comparison. For example, look at the gradient in this screenshot, and how it works correctly for contiguous or non-contiguous rows. You don’t get that kind of stuff for free.
