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There were hundreds of Download sites, and each of them was packed with apps that did roughly the same thing as my app. On Windows, however, there was no one place to advertise my app. Everyone with a Mac looks there when they are looking for an app. On the Mac, you only need to list your app in the Apple downloads area, and you reach almost all of your audience.

I was disappointed to find out that, although the Windows market is larger, it is also more fragmented and saturated. When I first released the Windows version of my utility, I expected sales to sky rocket, being that the Windows market was so much larger than Mac. The result on Windows wasn’t quite native, but Windows users are less picky than Mac users, so it was “good enough”. Since this “installer” was a Java app itself, I used Launch4J to create a launcher for this installer app. However, after frequent requests for a “proper” installer, I used Install4J to generate an installer. I distributed this as a zip archive, and left it up to the users to manually copy to a desired location on their computer. Initially I used Launch4J to generate a Windows. “Exit” instead of “Quit”, and some slight variations in how it handled file associations).īy far, the most difficult part of porting it to Windows was building an installer for it. I had been using a few Mac native libraries for image enhancement, which I would need to develop windows-friendly replacements for, and I needed to alter a few UI items (e.g. Since it was written in Java, the Windows port shouldn’t have been too difficult.

I had always planned to port the app to Windows, but, since I was a Mac user, it decided to put it on the back-burner while I flushed out all the kinks. It looked and felt just like a native app, and importantly, in a time where bandwidth was still limited, the app size was small. At this point, Macs still shipped with Java, so there was no “size” penalty for creating a Mac app in Java. (Side note: The Apple downloads area was a great source of traffic - much better than the Mac Appstore that would eventually replace it). Originally, I distributed it on Mac only, and promoted it in the Downloads area of Apple’s website. It wasn’t until Apple unveiled their plans for a Mac app-store, that “things got real”.Ĭirca 2006, I built a utility app in Java that performed converted PDFs into text using OCR.

The emergence of HTML5 may have disrupted the Java enterprise landscape, but Java developers who were building Mac desktop apps were largely immune.

I’m going to take a short excursus in this chapter to chronicle the often forgotten golden age of Mac Java development that occurred in the first decade of the millennium, from the initial release of OS X, in 2001, to the launch of the Mac app-store, in 2011.