This is a nice read. I think that the enormous foundation of frameworks, toolkits, and open source libraries that exist today provide a huge lever for the talented individual - Acorn is an incredibly accomplished app and I had no idea a single person wrote it.
Equally, they provide a great crutch for the much greater number of not-very-talented people like me to cobble our ideas together into something approaching a polished product. That's new: I certainly couldn't have hoped to get much done writing 6502 assembler, but with a Cocoa book and a few late nights I'm earning actual money from code I wrote.
I wonder if Core Image is doing a lot of the work for Acorn, I'm not an Apple developer but I remember when it was announced thinking that it would make Photoshop type applications easier to develop.
Equally, they provide a great crutch for the much greater number of not-very-talented people like me to cobble our ideas together into something approaching a polished product. That's new: I certainly couldn't have hoped to get much done writing 6502 assembler, but with a Cocoa book and a few late nights I'm earning actual money from code I wrote.