Mac Developer Journal
I just subscribed to Mac Developer Journal. I didn’t do so because I thought the first issue was amazing — it’s good, but it doesn’t cover what I do every day (and won’t for the forseeable future). I certainly didn’t do so because I like the interface; rather, like Erik and Michael, I can’t stand the Zinio reader.
Instead, I subscribed because the Mac development community desperately needs a good developer magazine. I appreciate the effort that MacTech has made, but I canceled my subscription because I rarely found even one article that would be potentially useful to me in each issue. It’s difficult to do a programming magazine in print because you have to waste far too many pages on source code. That increases production costs and brings down the quality of the rest of the magazine.
I have high hopes for Mac Developer Journal. I’m sure it’ll have its growing pains, as all new magazines do, but if anyone understands tech publishing, O’Reilly does. If they get enough subscribers to warrant putting a lot of effort into MDJ, I’m sure it’ll be terrific. I’m certainly willing to pay $50 to help it flourish.
Anonymous & Coward Said,
December 9, 2003 @ 12:45 am
What we need more is the return of Develop.
MDJ suffers from the same problems MacTech has:
- It’s empty.
- The topics are either too specific or too centered on newbies.
- The article on XCode reminds me of the marketing bullshit I read on the ADC WebSite about XCode and Luxology (where there’s a huge lie on the time they put their hand on XCode (Cf WWDC keynote)). (Rant of the day)
IMHO, the Zinio reader is fine. It’s way easier to read than a PDF with vertical scrolling. And the 3D animation are not too boring (contrary to the optional vertical scroll mode in OS X) (Second rant of the day).
Andrew Said,
December 17, 2003 @ 10:57 pm
How odd. Hopefully no one will confuse it with the other MDJ Mac journal, http://www.macjournals.com/mdj/ . That MDJ is a very well written pay journal, but I haven’t read it in a couple years.