Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Indie Fever available for download

My thesis on Mac Indie developers –Indie Fever– is now available for download. You can get it at: http://www.madebysofa.com/indiefever/

One of the reasons I started this blog is to have a public channel to communicate about the contents of the thesis. So if you have any remarks/comments/additions feel welcome to leave a message. There is a lot of history in the thesis and the developers perspective has not always been written down by someone yet. So if you have another angle on something in the thesis, I'd be glad to hear about it.

Sunday, July 20, 2008

1.0 Out the door (at university)














When I went out to the US to research the Independent Mac community I was full of high hopes to write about all the experiences that come with the research on this blog. It did not take long to find out that writing blog posts is a form of writing and therefore is subject to all the musing and creative blockages that come with writing. As a result this is the third post on this blog, and it is for announcing the initial results of the research and not about all the questions that occurred while doing the research.

Despite that I am proud to announce that analyzing the interviews, wandering around the Indies' their blog history and working through ‘the shelf’ (all the books that were neccesary to frame the Indie world scientifically, each little sticky is a potential reference) did generate results: it is out the door. The thesis is called: “Indie Fever, The genesis, culture and economy of independent software developers on the Macintosh platform”. The title was inspired by a blogpost from Daniel Jalkut and captures the spirit of the thesis so well that I was unable to come up with a different better title. (I just hope Daniel does not mind).

At this moment a hardcover copy is being reviewed at the university. Tomorrow I will hear whether it is officially accepted and if that is the case (as I suspect), it will be available for download at the beginning of next week.

It was a challenge to give all the perspectives that were revealed in the interviews an appropriate place and I hope the result is something that Indie developers will recognize. But if people disagree on certain aspects I would really appreciate feedback. Tracing back the social non-technical origins of Cocoa and its developer community relies on a lot of (often not written down) stories as do the remarks on Indie culture and there might be angles on those stories out there that I was unable to grasp yet. I think it would be really nice if there are any missing puzzle pieces that a collective feedback effort is able to fill those gaps. Of course it is difficult to give feedback when the actual writing is not yet there, so I will return here to discuss all issues that people can come up with once others get the chance to read the actual thesis. And since I don't have to write a big book anymore (it is 105 pages) I will probably have enough writing energy left to get to them really soon.