I don't have full details about the developers of either of these sites. I need to do more background work like emailing some of them to find out more about the actual development and checking out the dev interviews some other participant bloggers did. I do know that MacHeist seemed to have a fairly broad age range and theAmazon seems to be a bit younger group of developers. There also don't seem to be that many of us "oldies" hanging out on the forums, at least not as vocal participants. I'm probably even more of an anomaly because, dare I say it, I'm 44 years old and *gasp*, female.

I'm constantly amazed by what the "younger" generations (all those talented people who are younger than me) are doing these days with technology. I'm thrilled that I still have the capacity to grasp a fair bit of it and make use of the fruits of their labors. There are some amazingly useful Macintosh applications being distributed by a wide array of developers. If I had a few less concerns about my household budget I'd plan to go to WWDC just to see the interaction there, meet that wide variety of devs and take a much needed and enjoyable vacation.

Macintosh application developers, be they young or old(er) are a boon to the platform. As an older user I'm probably less apt to jump on using untried and untested apps. I do my research. One delightful side effect aspect of MacHeist in particular is (was?) the lively banter and great software recommendations being made in the forums. I hope we can keep the forums active there. Overall it's been a great community. OTOH, theAmazon seems to be having some growing pains (hopefully not to it's total demise). And of course, there have been copycats of the MacHeist model. I'm kind of sorry that iheist abruptly disappeared. They actually looked like they had some apps I haven't already managed to get elsewhere. Se la vie.

My goal now is to stay involved and aware of what's going on in the Mac dev community specifically. As I mentioned in a previous post, I truly am a Mac app junkie. I'm finding things that I can afford, that allow me to be more productive or fill specific needs. I'm looking forward to getting far enough along with evaluations to write up comparison reviews, hopefully helpful to someone other than just to me.

Thanks to all the developers who are making the Mac platform such a rich computing environment!