One of my favorite Mac apps in the whole wide world is Pandora, a Google Images scraper. Version 2.0 of the app came out fairly recently, and includes a ton of new functionality, including support for finding files of any type and an open plugin architecture, so that you can slap in support for any search engine or authentication scheme. I guess this totally blows my initial description out of the water. Oh well, c’est la vie, non?

John Pannell, the creator of Pandora, is also a fantastic guy who takes a huge amount of pride in his work. He’s one of those people who makes me proud to say that I’m a Mac developer, too. He is incredibly serious about his user interface design, and goes to great lengths to create software that really matches the Mac ethos. What’s amazing is that John goes to such lengths to create a fantastic piece of software that can only be sold to 5% of the computer market.

There are actually a ton of Mac developers who treat their software’s user interface as absolutely sacred. Fit-and-finish and polish are of paramount importance to Mac developers everywhere. We haven’t been able to match this on the Windows side, yet, but I’m hoping that an operating system as beautiful as Windows Vista will do something to narrow this gap.

I’m sure Aaron Ballman has some interesting thoughts on this topic, as he creates developer tools that have to work on both sides of the fence. I hope he’s willing to share.

by land, by sea, by dirigible, we’ll leave our tracks untraceable…