The Seattle Sound

A number of Seattle-ites have apps listed in Apple’s best-of-2013. Gus with Acorn, Chris with Napkin, me with Vesper, Black Pixel with Kaleidoscope, and The Omni Group with OmniFocus and OmniPlan.

A few things are interesting (at least to me) about this list:

• Only OmniFocus and Vesper were recognized as iOS apps. The rest are on the Mac list. We love Mac software.

• Only The Omni Group and Gus are purely Washington state. My co-workers are in New York City and Philadelphia; Chris’s co-worker Guy is in Montreal; and Black Pixel, though Seattle-based, has remote workers everywhere. (Probably even in your town.)

• If you wanted to stretch definitions a bit, you might include Delicious Library, which originated in Seattle and thrived here till Wil ran away to San Francisco. Library, also a Mac app, would not look out-of-place in the list.

• These are all productivity apps.

It’s possible that there are other Seattle-made apps on the list, and it’s possible that some of those are games. But, if that’s true, then those game-makers aren’t joining the Cocoa community here.

We used to write games here. I’m sure we still do. But as a community we are, apparently, better at productivity apps. Mac apps especially.

(I offer no theories. Not even the easy one that blames it on the rain, because you’d think people make games indoors too.)