Scott Stevenson put together a special CocoaHeads (that’s when a group of developers get together to talk about programming a Mac) at the Apple Store Downtown San Francisco. That Apple store is conveniently located a block away from where WWDC is being held (The Moscone Center) and also happens to be the same block as the hotel I’m staying at.

This CocoaHeads was special because it was a meeting of some of the finest Indie Mac Developers – Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster who gave us a good lesson in Hype (aka how to do guerilla marketing), Gus Mueller of Flying Meat who told us about how to do the day-to-day of working for yourself (things like setting goals and getting out of the house regularly) and Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater about payment processing. (Note that Wil mentioned a project called Golden Braeburn which might help out with accepting payments in the future.) Brent, the Godfather of MacSB – the Mac Small Business group – and author of NetNewsWire was there as well at the panel discussion after the presentations.

It was standing room only and probably the most crowded I have ever seen any Apple store auditorium. People kept coming over wondering what all the commotion was about. I think it was great. Some of it was a validation of what I’ve been doing, some of it was an admonition of things I should be doing, and some of was “ah good idea – I’d never thought of that!”

BagelTurf recorded the audio and once I get back to DC, I’ll help the next generation of Indie Mac Developers by cleaning it up. I remember a few years back, Niall Kennedy recorded a similar discussion between Indie Mac Developers at O’Reilly’s Mac OS X conference back in 2004. That’s when I realized it was viable to become an Indie Mac Developer. Before that, I thought you had to have a big programming team to make a modern software product, but that turns out to be true mainly in the enterprise and gaming parts of the software industry.