The Sincerest Form of Flattery
It's been almost a year since we sat down to prototype the product now known as LittleSnapper, creating over 40 pages of wireframes for the application and spending countless hours ensuring that it looks, works, and behaves as you'd expect. We built the application because, at the time, we saw no product that had the features we ourselves wanted (DOM snapping, webpage-orientated organisation and full webpage capture in one beautiful application). We built LittleSnapper because we saw an opportunity to innovate.
The Mac developer community is known for its mutual respect for others work. Applications compete on their own unique features, and developers create applications that, whilst similar, serve the needs of a different set of users: take Pixelmator and Acorn, for example. That is, most developers.
In amongst a quick check of Twitter mentions for LittleSnapper, we discovered an app (let's call it Product X) that had seen a fairly notable update this week mentioned alongside LittleSnapper. Ever curious, we decided to see what was new and innovative in the updated Product X. We all downloaded the application here at Realmac HQ, installed it and were all astounded at the striking similarities between ‘Ours’ and ‘Theirs’.
Sidebar Inspector
Source Lists
Built-in Browsers and Element Snapping
Product Page Layout & Icons
A Little Perspective
We love competition - we thrive on it. The prospect of developers coming up with applications that are uniquely better than our own is something we're always wary of, and this possibility encourages us to make sure that our own releases are the best they humanly can be. But far-from-creative imitation, even as a sign of flattery, is not part of the community in which we're fortunate enough to be a member.
All of us at Realmac have been saddened by this episode. After many months of prototyping, designing, and refining the look and feel of LittleSnapper it's pained us to see such a liberal borrowing of our hard work. That said, we've got plenty of exciting tricks up our sleeves - and can't wait to see how others respond to our forthcoming updates!