Cocoa Heads (Real Indy)

After the conference today I stopped by at a live "Cocoa Heads" meeting at the SF Apple store (Here is the link).  These guys are the real deal, all but one essentially work for themselves by writing Mac software.  The other guy is working on a real cool startup after escaping his other job working on the iPhone.  His company is basically creating a web application that looks like a desktop presentation tool.  And they created a web framework that behaves as desktop development environment to do it.

All of these guys are getting paid to do what they believe (and do rather well) directly by their customers.  It was great to see them in action after hearing them on a few odd podcasts here and there.

Was there a take away message?  Not sure, these are all guys who sort of fell into it or simply turned a hobby into a business because people took notice of what they were doing and pretty much demanded that the give their products to the public one way or another.  But, they were mostly normal guys who just decided to go for it.  So, I guess the take away message is to do what you need to do to bring your vision to the world.

Also, they all implied that you need to stay engaged with other people - customers and other people in the field.  They all worked with people who were friends...  Another interesting note is that many of them came from odd backgrounds - not all computer science, many had art and design backgrounds.

This makes me wonder if the Mac truly is the platform of the future.  The Mac platform has developers with a truly fresh perspective.  Programming frameworks are advancing to the point (at least on Mac) where talented people (who are not just engineers) can use these frameworks to create artful programs.  The things that these people are doing are state of the art in technology, but also lifestyle and vision.