Finally, the day has come.
It has been just about a year since i started working on RemObjects SDK for OS X, and today, we’ve declared it “gold” and shipped our first “release” level version to customers, so for everyone who has been patiently waiting for this, the release is now up on our licensed user’s download page!
What’s taken us so long? Good question. Many factors come into play. For one thing, when i first started dabbling with RO/OSX, it was really just an attempt to get my feet wet in Objective-C, Xcode and Foundation.framework, so much of the work on it was done on the back-burner, in stolen hours in the evenings or on weekends. Even once we decided to go production, sometime late summer last year iirc, i was till the only guy working on it, with lots and lots of “more important” tasks competing for my attention. So work progressed slowly but steadily, and RO/OSX was pretty much production stable last fall, but as you all know, the 80/20 rule applies, and it takes a lot of time to dot those remaining “T”s and cross those remaining “I”s.
Also, over the past half year or so, a lot of my work on the OS X side of things as been going into the Data Abstract side of the library (which builds on top of RemObjects SDK), as i was building a couple real life applications for Mac and iPhone with Data Abstract, for internal use. This was a great opportunity to dog-food the library, and out RO thru its paces – without really driving RO closer to release, in terms of all the outstanding non-code work (samples, documentation, whatnot). And while DA is not shipping just yet, that work spent will bear fruits soon, once it does.
About a month ago now, we finally expanded our Mac development team, with my colleague Sergey switching to Mac development full time. This as helped tremendously getting the product finished, and will speed up future iterations considerably. In general, once the initial inertia of “1.0” is past, it always becomes a lot easier to push out new stuff of course; so with RO/OSX now in full motion, it will see the same quarterly update cycle as the other products.
Another of our guys, Alex, is also picking up Mac development (albeit not full time, as he is invaluable to our .NET development, as well). Alex is pretty much the driving force behind DA/.NET these days, and his contribution and expertise will greatly help move Data Abstract for OS X towards release later this year (we hope to have a production stable beta by WWDC – which should be very doable, given i’ve already been using the current internal Alpha for quite a while now).
Oh, and also: if you could not care less about the low-level remoting framework but are really looking forward to Data Abstract, we have pre-order options for that as well. Pre-ordering Data Abstract for OS X (or any combination that includes it) will give you the shipping RemObjects SDK right away, and access to the Data Abstract beta program.
Side note: i’m still in the process of finishing off our completely reworked RemObjects SDK product website; this will go liveby the end of the week, along with the official announcement of RemObjects SDK’s availability. But as always, you heard about it here, first ;).
