It has taken me much longer to get my first Blog entry started than I had originally anticipated. This is because of a wide variety of things actually, but mostly because of an unusually high about of business travel. I’ve currently been in London for a little over a week and a half now. I’ll most likely come home this weekend.

That said: I now had 3 opportunities to visit the Apple Store located on Regent’s Street. For those that are unfamiliar with this location it is the same store that Steve Jobs shows off in nearly every keynote he gives. It’s a fantastic location in a building that is owned by the Royal Family. (See here for a pic of the front: http://images.apple.com/uk/retail/images/photo-regentstreet040705.jpg)

Anyway: In all cases I was in the store while it was a “slow time” and in all cases the store was packed. There were well over 200 shoppers in there at any given point in time. I saw people purchasing the usual iPods, as well as iMacs, G5s, Minis … there were people jamming the seats in the cinema for the GarageBand tutorial. The line at the Genius bar was pretty long and all appeared to be happy and were having a good time interacting with each other.

Shouldn’t Mac sales be down now that the Intel announcement has been posted? Wow … if this is down I can’t wait to see how these stores do once the Mactel boxes start selling!

I came away from these observations with a feeling that the future of the Mac is very strong. As a software developer you always have to judge your market opportunities. I can’t remember a better growth market in the past 5 or 6 years.

That brings me to the point of what I shall be writing about in this blog: Software Development on the Mac. I am a long time (12+ years) developer of Windows software. I’m very versed with the windows tools (C++, MFC, ATL, COM, C#, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, VB.NET, Java, etc…) all of which read like alphabet soup. Prior to that I programmed on OS/2 and variants Unix. However I am new to Mac programming. My desire is to write about what I learn; what I find interesting and what I find challenging. I’ve got a few app ideas and I’ll focus my discussion on one of them at some point.

I am very curious as to Microsoft’s reaction to the Intel announcement. I’m sure that they are not sitting idle. We’ll have no way of knowing until they launch something. I’m absolutely positive that they will continue development of most of the Mac BU products, such as office as they are profitable businesses to them. As for Virtual PC? We’ll see. This will be the third time that Apple has asked them to do a major re-engineering in just a few short years.

Until next time …… cheers!