Personal computing requires choosing applications from an ever moving stampede of options. For applications to stay relevant they have to keep up with the pack. Running with the herd means being aware of your competition while keeping an observant eye on the ever changing terrain. From System Software running on 68k to Mac OS X running on Intel, Apple’s herd of developers have had to cover a considerable amount of ground since the Mac’s release in 1984. During that time weaker apps have fallen to the strong, misguided developers have lost their way, malnourished apps have failed to keep pace, and unlucky developers have been stranded by the flood of new technology. Lion is only the latest predator to thin out the herd while redefining the Mac’s direction. Its arrival will signal the end of PowerPC compatibility for Mac OS X. But the PowerPC apps Lion leaves behind will not be the first. Adopting an application is always a gamble, and the countless apps we have had to leave behind are each sacrifices for Apple’s grueling pace, and steady progress.

Overtaken

Larger development companies buying smaller development companies to acquire their portfolio of products is nothing new, but Adobe has made a business out of acquiring the design applications of its peers only to throw away the scraps.

FreeHand started life under Altsys Corporation in 1988 as a primary competitor for Adobe Illustrator. Aldus released versions 1 through 4 under license from Altsys until Aldus merged with Adobe Systems in 1994. As part of a Federal Trade Commission ruling FreeHand was returned to Altsys before the merger to retain competition in the vector drawing market. Altsys was then picked up by Macromedia who released versions 5 through 11. FreeHand MX was the last version to ship before Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. Since then FreeHand has been discontinued, and countless petitions have been signed demanding its revival. Freehand’s claim to fame was its alternative approach towards vector drawing. Fans of Freehand found illustrating with it much easier than Adobe Illustrator because it kept your free hand off the keyboard. FreeHand is a PowerPC application that will not run under Mac OS X Lion. Even the PC version has trouble running under Windows 7. Unless Adobe is looking for a comeback competitor in the vector illustration space FreeHand’s fate is sealed. Freehand documents can be converted to EPS or PDF or saved to an earlier FreeHand of Illustrator file format and opened in Adobe Illustrator.

PageMaker followed a similar path to FreeHand before it too was overtaken by a stronger competitor. PageMaker was one of the first desktop publishing programs, introduced in 1985 by Aldus Corporation. Although a Windows version was released later, Aldus PageMaker’s popularity and PostScript compatibility fortified the Mac’s postion as desktop publishing king. When Aldus merged with Adobe, PageMaker became Adobe’s flagship desktop publishing software until the advent of Mac OS X and the introduction of Adobe InDesign. PageMaker remained popular for its backwards compatibility and easy document creation, but lacked the advanced feature set and Mac OS X compatibility of InDesign. In 2004, Adobe announced that development for PageMaker had ceased and that InDesign 2.0 was the logical successor. PageMaker is a Classic application and cannot be run on the latest versions of Mac OS X. Adobe PageMaker documents can be opened in InDesign with some limitations.

GoLive originated as Golive CyberStudio, but in 1999 Adobe bought GoLive as a replacement for PageMill its primary HTML editor at the time. GoLive differentiated itself from the industry leading HTML editor Dreamweaver by relying heavily on a modeless workflow that catered to drag and drop page construction. During its time GoLive incorporated the latest web technologies and strengthened Adobe’s Creative Suite by including compatibility with native PhotoShop and Illustrator files. Dreamweaver eventually replaced Golive when Adobe purchased Macromedia in 2005, but a final universal version of GoLive was shipped as a standalone product in 2007. Golive continues to run in Mac OS X Lion, and because it generates standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript its files can be opened in any text editor.

Lost

Missed opportunities, misguided development, and a general misunderstanding of a products potential are all reasons why some applications become lost without a future release.

Audion, prior to 2001, was in a heated battle with SoundJam over the dominance of MP3 playback on the Mac. A customizable user interface with transparency, and perceived high-fidelity playback were Audion’s chief advantages over its rival. Then in 2000 while Audion’s developers were busy talking to AOL, Apple bought second choice SoundJam and re-engineered it as iTunes. With no way to compete with Apple’s free juggernaut of a music player Audion slipped into obscurity. Lost from the world due to bad timing, Audion’s story has a silver lining. Panic, Audion’s parent company, lives on to bring us great Mac software like Transmit, Coda, and Unison.

Eudora was a popular email client noteworthy for its extensive variety of settings and capabilities. Purchased by Qualcomm in 1991, Eudora was once available for the Mac, Windows, Palm, and Newton operating systems. Originally distributed for free, Eudora was quickly commercialized and offered in multiple versions, including a version supported by ads. With the internet coming of age and free email clients springing up everywhere Qualcomm tried one misguided attempt after another to monetize their investment. Qualcomm continued to add impressive features onto Eudora until 2006 when it threw in the towel and released Eudora as an open source project built upon Mozilla Thunderbird. Eudora was a capable feature-rich email client that lost its way in a modern world where many of the most capable email clients are free. Eudora’s mbox email archives can be opened by most modern email applications.

HyperCard might be the most misunderstood application ever created. One of the first successful hypermedia systems built before the World Wide Web, HyperCard combined database capabilities with a flexible, graphical, user-modifiable interface that could be used for rapid application development. HyperCard was originally released in 1987 for $49.95, but by order of Bill Atkinson, HyperCard’s creator, HyperCard was included for free with all new Macs sold at the time. Apple never really understood HyperCard’s target audience, but felt threatened a free application that let anyone program would cut into the sales of traditional software. The HyperCard development team was split several times and both a free player, and a upgraded paid version were later released. In 2000 after multiple failed attempts to modernize the project it became clear the web was the future of hypermedia, and Steve Jobs pronounced HyperCard dead. In the years that followed, HyperCard saw no additional support from Apple which finally ceased selling the product in 2004. HyperCard’s free availability combined with the ease it allowed anyone to create competitive software doomed HyperCard to become lost within the flailing Apple of the mid 90s. A wiser later Apple might have harnessed HyperCard’s power to sell more Macs, but despite its death HyperCard’s legacy lives on in the interactive games it created, and the wikis, web, and Javascript programming language it inspired.

Malnourished

Some applications are left to wither on the vine while their parent companies concentrate on new initiatives.

AppleWorks was first published by Claris, an Apple owned subsidy, as ClarisWorks in 1991. Written by Bob Hearn and Scott Holdaway as an integrated application suite, ClarisWorks included several modules such as word processing, drawing, painting, spreadsheet, and database that could be incorporated into a single layout as frames. A common misconception is that ClarisWorks’ components were derived from the existing Claris programs MacWrite and MacDraw. In fact, ClarisWorks was written from scratch and then redesigned to match other Claris programs. After Claris was disbanded and absorbed back into Apple, the product was renamed AppleWorks and later ported to the Carbon API to work with Mac OS X. As Apple’s priorities shifted to modern software that took advantage of advanced Mac OS X features AppleWorks was left behind. In 2007 Apple completed Numbers the spreadsheet portion of their iWork suite of productivity applications and AppleWorks was quietly cancelled. AppleWorks word-processing documents and spreadsheets can be converted to popular formats, but its database module is proprietary and cannot be opened by modern software.

Claris Cad was developed in 1988 by Claris Corporation in a joint effort with Craig S. Young of Computer Aided Systems for Engineering (CASE). It was based on MacDraw II and Young’s earlier CAD application, EZ-Draft. Version 1 was released in 1989 for Macintosh computers running System Software 6 or later. The initial releases were plagued with bugs, especially with the bundled plotter driver. Development halted in June 1991 with the release of version 2.0.3. Currently, Claris CAD can run on any Macintosh using the classic Macintosh operating system, but has trouble running in Mac OS X’s Classic environment. Limited to creating floor plans and manual orthographic projections Clairs Cad is not suitable for three dimensional drawing. Many users continued to rely on Claris Cad up until the advent of Mac OS X when it could not longer run natively on modern machines. Claris Cad’s documents can be exported as postscript and inferred by more modern drawing programs.

iWeb is a template-based WYSIWYG website creation tool developed by Apple in 2006. Sold as part of the iLife ’06 suite of digital lifestyle applications iWeb was designed to work closely with Apple’s MobileMe web hosting platform. iWeb allows users to create and design websites and blogs without coding, and includes a number of Apple-designed themes, each of which has several page templates with coordinated fonts and colors. Users can customize these pages by replacing placeholder text and by dragging and dropping their own photos and movies into the document. iWeb is not a HTML editor, and there is no option to directly edit the HTML code of templates. HTML support is limited to small snippets that can be included within the page. iWeb was popular with first time web publishers who saw iWeb’s page layout approach to web design appealing. When iLife moved to the Mac App Store for distribution in 2010 iWeb was notably absent. With the discontinuation of MobileMe web hosting iWeb is not expected to see a future release.

Stranded

The constant flow of new technology is a difficult river to navigate. Sometimes it empowers applications with new features. Other times it strands applications that were too slow to move or unable to see an upcoming bend in the river.

CodeWarrior was the most famous application to have its foundation washed out from underneath it during the transition to Mac OS X. Developed by Andreas Hommel and licensed to Metrowerks, CodeWarrior was an IDE based on a C compiler for 68k. The first versions of CodeWarrior targeted the PowerPC Macintosh, and had faster compile times than the Macintosh Programmer’s Workshop development tools written by Apple. CodeWarrior was a key factor in the success of Apple’s transition of its machine architecture from Motorola 68K processors to PowerPC because it provided a complete, solid PowerPC compiler when the competition was mostly incomplete. Metrowerks also made it easy to generate fat binaries which included both 68K and PowerPC code. However, after Metrowerks was acquired by Motorola in 1999, the company switched directions and concentrated on embedded applications, devoting a smaller fraction of their efforts to compilers for desktop computers. This change in direction combined with Apple’s free Xcode IDE saw the end of CodeWarrior for the Mac in 2005 with the release of CodeWarrior Pro 10. Older versions of CodeWarrior are still in use by retro-computing enthusiasts on the classic Mac OS, but CodeWarrior’s lack of an Intel compiler makes it incompatible with the future of Mac OS X starting with Lion.

MacHTTP was a shareware web server designed to run on Mac OS 7.x through 9.x. Written by software developer Chuck Shotton MacHTTP was once commercialized as WebSTAR but is now open source. Apple began shipping the industry leading Apache web server as part of Mac OS X in 2001. Apache’s existence on the Mac combined with MacHTTP’s inability to run under Mac OS X left MacHTTP stranded. Still used by Mac enthusiasts today, MacHTTP lives on by serving nostalgic websites detailing Apple’s past.

DiskDoubler was a data compression utility created by Terry Morse and Lloyd Chambers for compressing files on the classic Apple Macintosh. Unlike most compression programs, which compress numerous files into a single archive for transmission, DiskDoubler was intended to compress single files in place to save space on early hard drives. DiskDoubler’s greatest feature was its ability to hand off files to the appropriate application after decompression. Combined with a decompression algorithm at least 50% faster than the competition DiskDoubler was a huge success during the early days of System 7 when hard drive space was at a premium. Passed around through various companies DiskDoubler continued to improve gaining automatic compression, and support for third-party algorithms. Despite all of its success DiskDoubler’s life was short. Shrinking Mac market share combined with underlying filesystem and ever-increasing drive space killed off the file compression product niche stranding DiskDoubler.

These are just a handful of the applications left behind by the constant stampede of progress. Let me know if I missed any of your favorites by messaging me on Twitter.