Welcome to Spin Studio LLC

First and foremost, with very, very rare exception, don’t create products that compete with Apple products or upset Apple’s product strategy. More times than I can seem to remember, I've seen developers create products intended to circumvent Apple's product strategy, and then fail to understand why Apple doesn't want to build a strategic relationship with them. If you want to successfully work with Apple, you cannot create products that work against its strategies. Oh, we won't get into the very, very rare exceptions I mentioned above, because they don’t apply to 99.9% of Mac developers.

On the other side of that same coin, third-party products should complement Apple products, even bringing out the strengths of those products. Doing so creates a strong “solution” story for customers, and for Apple as well. It also creates a strong solution story for your product. Apple will be far more willing to pay attention to, and promote, products that make already great Apple products even better. For example, great earphones for iPod, professional themes especially for Keynote, etc.

Pay close attention to Apple’s market segment movements and strategies, and then create innovative, well-designed products that fill consumer needs in those market segments. As it currently stands, Apple's strategic markets include design, film & video, photography, music & audio, education, small business, IT pro, science, iPod, and iPhone.

Products should always employ an interface that’s in line with Apple’s user interface best practices guidelines. Apple has taken considerable measures to ensure a clean, elegant, uniform interface experience for Mac users. Nothing upsets the applecart—no pun intended—more than requiring users to learn a whole new interface layout.

Products should be as simple and intuitive to use as possible. To a large degree, there’s a very good reason why Apple products either don’t come with manuals, or boast only very small manuals: they don’t need them. If consumers have to rely—and that’s the keyword here: rely—on a manual to find their way around your application, or figure out how to use it, you’ve lost them.

Products should target the proper customer audience. More often than you might think, developers create and distribute products they intend for one particular market segment, but which serve the needs of a different market segment altogether. Over the years I've had countless meetings with developers where they would enthusiastically demonstrate their latest wares, and tell me how much their target market segment was going to benefit from it. The problem was that somewhere along the way, their development process veered off from creating a product for the market segment they intended, and instead resulted in one that served a completely different segment. And since the developer was so close to the product, they couldn't by themselves see what had happened until it was very clearly pointed out to them. Such products are nearly guaranteed to result in marketplace failure.

Always, always, always—and I can’t emphasize that enough—make use of the Mac logo and Mac OS X Universal badge on your product packaging and collaterals (as permitted by Apple’s licensing agreement, of course). No other visual validators are as important when it comes to letting potential customers quickly know your product will run on their Mac systems.

Make sure your applications employ the latest Apple technologies. For example, every Mac application you develop and release should be built with Xcode and be Mac OS X Universal-compatible. Always make sure the technologies used in your applications are in line with Apple’s technology strategy.