Apple Thoughts: A Call to Action For Mac Developers

This is a call to action for Mac developers, particularly open source Mac developers. There are plenty of Applications for the Mac that could and should be written. Since these are large projects, the open source Bazaar model of development seems appropriate.

Photo Management and Workflow

Figure 1: Adobe's Lightroom is a powerful Photo Management and Workflow tool

I love Adobe's Lightroom, but it carries a hefty price tag. Apple's Aperture serves a similar purpose for a little less money. But there's plenty of room for innovation in this department. As far as I know, there is no Open Source Photo Management and Workflow application for the Mac (and if I'm wrong, please point me in the right direction.)

What I really like to see here is a large scale open source project to create this application. Ideally, it would have an embedded python or ruby interpreter for plug-in creation. There are plenty of image processing libraries in existence that could be built on to create this application.

Video Processing

Figure 2: Jakhasha is a decent video editing tool, but lacks the polish and features of Final Cut.

Right now, there are plenty of commercial applications for video processing on the Mac. Chief among these is Apple's Final Cut. In the Open Source world, there's Jahshaka, but it lacks a lot of the power that Final Cut has. Jahshaka is currently in Alpha. I'd like to see Mac open source developers take a hold of this package and really bring it to it's potential. In particular, I'd like to see a version that leverages the power of Cocoa rather than using the OpenGL interface it currently ships with.