Digital Home Thoughts: MacHeist: I'm Officially Jealous

I'm a sucker for software. Sure, slick hardware is fun, but at the end of the day when you're looking at a netbook, laptop, desktop, or smartphone, so much of what you do with it is based on the software running on it. Software matters - that's why I spend a lot of time writing about software, criticizing software to make it better, and getting excited when new versions of software is released (Windows included). The above screenshot is of a special event called MacHeist - this is the third event of its type, and as you can tell from the screenshot, it's a software bundle. For the price of $39 USD, Mac users get a software bundle worth $981. The reality is that most people aren't going to use every application in that bundle, so the value is subjective at best, but if you're someone who was looking at BoinxTV or Kinemac and were put off by the price, this is a great deal. The fact that 25% of the proceeds go to charity is also impressive.

The reason I bring this up is not that I'm jealous of a cost-saving bundle; it's that as I looked through those applications, I was impressed over and over with the clever applications that the developers came up with. There are some really neat applications! The design - the visual flair - of many applications on the Mac are hard to miss. With a few rare exceptions, so many applications on Windows are just fugly. Looks alone do not make a useful application, but if two apps have the same basic functionality, and one has a great user-interface, I know which one I'm going to take. Why don't we see better-looking, easier-to-use applications for Windows? Why don't developers care about the user interface of their applications as much as they care about the back-end code?

I've seen this scenario play out on Windows Mobile and the iPhone as well - it seems like the iPhone has incredibly creative developers making apps for it, and on the Windows Mobile side...not so much. Sure there are some stand-out developers on the Windows Mobile side of things, but it's seems like the iPhone attracts creative developers that design great-looking applications.

So what's the deal here? Is it because Apple is a company focused on aesthetics and looks that they naturally attract developers who have the same priorities? Or is it that the Mac, and the iPhone, as development platforms have better templates/presets to guide developers in creating applications? I suspect it's the former, though the latter comes into play on the iPhone in a big way - I've had Windows Mobile developers tell me how easy it is to create certain UI elements on the iPhone and on Windows Mobile it takes 100x more effort.

Anyone have any insight to share with me?