Today marks the 10th anniversary of the founding of Edenwaith.com.
The Past...
Edenwaith started with two small products, a Javascript FTP site and the text-based RPG/Adventure game Psychomancer.
2002 saw the introduction of Edenwaith's first set of Cocoa-based Macintosh applications: EdenMath and Untar. The next several years saw a flourishing of additional Macintosh applications, ranging across utilities for file archiving, security, mathematics, entertainment, and audio.
While the first decade of the 21st century proved to be a revitalizing time for Apple Inc., its largest successes came not in the form of its core strengths of computers and operating systems, but from new lines of popular mobile devices. Whereas the Web and Internet created an explosion of new interest in the technical world, the same is now occuring with a new breed of mobile devices, namely cell/mobile phones and light-weight tablet computers. Even though Macintosh sales are better than they ever have been (more than 4 million Macs were sold in Q1 2011), these numbers pale in comparison to the number of iOS devices which are now in the market. Apple can claim an installed Mac OS X base in the tens of millions, whereas the iOS base (iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad) is well over 100 million and accelerating at a much higher rate than Macintosh sales. Since iOS is an extension from Mac OS X, it has been a natural progression for many Macintosh developers to transition to iOS. While Edenwaith has mainly focused on developing utilities for Mac OS X, our first foray into iOS development came to fruition last year — EdenList for iPhone. This is just the first step for Edenwaith into iOS development. EdenList will continue to evolve and new products will come to the iOS platform in the next several years.
Looking ahead...
Ten years ago at this time, Mac OS X was still in beta, the original iPod had not even been announced, and mobile phones were more a novelty than a commodity. It can be difficult to even see five minutes into the future, much less five or ten years down the line of a quicksilver industry. Who would have thought in 2001 that Apple would have surpassed Microsoft's market value in the coming decade?
If anything has been learned from the past ten years when trying to make predicitions is not to make predicitions. They are almost always wrong. Yet, for the sake of amusement, let's make some far reaching statements and guesses about Edenwaith's future.
For the foreseeable future, Edenwaith will continue to work on its active Mac OS X products for as long as they are useful and needed. Several of Edenwaith's earliest products (EdenMath, EdenGraph) were designed to fill in the gaps found in a young Mac OS X. However, as Mac OS X matured, some of the usefulness our products was lost as Apple improved upon their OS and associated utilities. The future is murky to determine, but if anything is certain, change is inevitable. Already the wind of change is blowing directly into developers' faces as mobile developers are in high demand, indicating where current trends are leading.
Edenwaith has made its first baby steps into the mobile arena, and we will further entrentch into this space in the coming years with several new products. Hopefully we will turn back in the direction which started Edenwaith: games. There are a number of other ideas brewing, so we'll need to evaluate how feasible these ideas might be before dedicating time and effort into new projects.
Just as the Web did not kill the Desktop, neither will mobile devices eliminate the need for personal computers and web pages. Edenwaith's Mac OS X products are not going away any time soon, but our direction will likely lead down many new paths in the coming decade. Just as Edenwaith has gone through numerous changes in the past ten years, we expect just as many changes in the next ten. It is not unfair to consider that Edenwaith might wear a completely different mask in 2021. Perhaps some of our current products will be still around. Perhaps there will be an entirely new set of products. Perhaps there will be no products at all. Time will tell...