Years ago, Salon Transcripts created the precursor to STX, their industry-leading salon management software, for both the Macintosh and Windows platforms, but now the company is a Mac-only vendor. This naturally leads to the question: What is it about the Macintosh platform that Salon Transcripts finds so compelling? Here, Salon Transcripts Chief Technology Officer Aaron Conti provides some answers; you may find some of them surprising, and they may lead you to think in new ways about how you develop for the Macintosh platform.

In late 1999, Apple shipped the first developer preview of Mac OS X. As CTO of Salon Transcripts, Conti recognized that this quantum leap in operating-system technology provided the company with a unique opportunity to leverage its existing Mac platform while raising the bar in the salon and spa automation industry.

Aaron says, “We decided that the best thing to do was to bite the bullet once and bite it early—in other words, to rebuild our product from the ground up.”

This led to the development of STX, a completely rewritten version of the company’s existing salon and spa management software built specifically for the Mac OS X operating system and currently in use by thousands of high profile salons, spas, and stylists.

The result is an elegant and powerful application that can quickly add new features based on unique Mac technologies like Dashboard, Automator, Fast User Switching, as well as developer advantages such as Xcode and the Cocoa framework. STX is an example of how excellence of the platform allows for excellence in the applications built on top of it.

But let's start with some things that are unusual as benefits of a computer platform, but that everyone identifies with the Macintosh: extraordinary design, and a great buying experience.

Aesthetics as a Competitive Advantage

You may not consider the aesthetic appeal of Apple’s product design to be a competitive advantage, but Salon Transcripts certainly does. “The salon industry is beauty-conscious. Apple provides beautiful hardware for elegant software, and that makes all the difference in the world,” Aaron says. Salon customers want more than just a set of services; they want a pleasurable experience, which the salon supplies largely through the aesthetics of the salon studio. A Macintosh at the salon’s front desk adds to the salon’s ambience, as does the Apple award-winning STX software running on it.

Another unexpected competitive advantage comes from the way Apple interacts with its customers. Aaron says that this advantage starts when the customer is contemplating whether to purchase Apple or Windows hardware.

Conti explains, “We have a huge advantage, not only because of the aesthetics of the Mac platform, but also because of the aesthetics of the purchasing environment. The Apple Store makes purchasing hardware an entirely different experience—especially compared to going to some big computer store, where they don’t know which Windows computer to buy and they don’t have anyone who can give them answers.”

Aaron continued, “Contrast that to an Apple Store, where they can get their questions answered, where they’re confident that whatever choice they make is a good one because they can make educated buying decisions, where they can also get Genius Bar support for their purchase. At each phase of the purchasing decision, the fact that our product runs on the Macintosh gives us a competitive advantage.”

The Bottom Line of Ease-of-Use

This competitive advantage that the platform provides extends to the ease with which a customer can set up a small network of computers (which a salon environment requires).

According to Aaron, “The ease with which the customer can set up a Macintosh network, the ease with which a Macintosh computer can find and connect to hardware on the network—those aspects are critical to customers in the beauty industry. Most salon owners don't have an IT staff, and with the Mac and STX, they don't need one.”

On the software side, Aaron notes that the Macintosh platform enabled him to build into STX the same consistency and ease-of-use that Mac OS X and its built-in applications have.

The benefits of this, he says, are more tangible than most people believe: “All of our clients say that even though our software is packed with powerful business features, it is far easier to use than that of our competitors. Easier equates to more efficient, which equates to reduced training costs, which ultimately means a better bottom line for the salon. So a good user experience really means more money in the pocket to our customers.”

Taking Advantage of Macintosh Platform Features

It’s tempting to think of the solution you provide to your customers as residing in the code you write to create your application. However, thinking this way may cause you to overlook ways to make your application more powerful by exploiting the richness of the Macintosh platform. Here are some ways that Salon Transcripts uses the Macintosh platform to deliver more to its clients:

Leveraging Built-in Applications. Conti explains, “Mac OS X has a lot of hooks that allow us to take advantage of the power of other applications that are already installed on the platform.”

He continues, “With STX, we are taking advantage of Dashboard widgets, we are using Automator, and we tie into Mail—we take advantage of these applications whenever possible.” This is something his company couldn’t do on other platforms. “On Windows, even when we could reach out to other applications, each application has its own unique interface, each with a completely different regard for design guidelines,” Aaron explains. “We want to keep our users from having to learn ten different pieces of software.”

STX’s use of widgets is a good example of how a developer can leverage technologies only found on the Mac platform to add lightweight applications that extend the core functionality without core changes and yet act like seamless extensions of the software.

The latest version of STX includes custom widgets that—literally, in an instant—give a salon manager an “executive dashboard” view of how well her salon is doing (in terms of both money and customer satisfaction) and how she can improve both her short-term and long-term profitability. By looking at the salon’s booking efficiency, for example, she can see the next day’s “open” slots and direct employees to encourage repeat customers to fill those slots. (STX helps employees do this by giving them information on customers’ preferences and visit histories and by providing a waiting list that shows which waiting clients can fill any open slots.)

Networking and intercomputer communication. STX is a comprehensive salon and spa management system that manages appointment books, client information, payroll, schedules, inventory, cash drawer, credit-card processing, gift cards, analytical reports and more. It is implemented using a client-server architecture. In the public and business areas of a salon, Macintosh computers run the STX client Cocoa application, which employees and managers use for all interactions with STX. A back-office Macintosh server runs several server components of STX: a SQL database server that stores all of the salon’s data, the licensing server that implements the terms of the salon’s STX configuration, and a network notification server that increases STX’s performance by conveying database changes to the client application and, in doing so, minimizing accesses to the database.

Aaron says that the quality of network support on the Macintosh platform made it easier for his company to implement STX’s client-server architecture. He explains, “Distributed objects, intercomputer messaging, and synchronization are all easier to do in the Macintosh environment, especially with the tools in Xcode that help us do this and the frameworks that do much of the work for us—unlike other platforms, where we would have to write more of that software ourselves.”

Intercomputer communication and Fast User Switching. Salons with multiple locations have always struggled with the problem of customers at location A wanting to book services at location B. How does the employee at A know which employees at B are available, and when they are available? And how does the employee at A schedule an appointment at B without the risk of the appointment being lost or the employee at B scheduling a second customer for the same time slot?

Normally, this process involves time-consuming telephone calls and the possibility of costly mistakes. However, with STX’s client-server architecture, its ability to log on to a server based on its IP address alone, and Mac OS X’s Fast User Switching feature, STX delivers a fast “remote booking” feature that minimizes the possibility of human error. This is accomplished by configuring each front-office Macintosh computer to have one user account for each salon location. Each account is configured to run the STX client application and is connected to the STX server for one of the salon locations. (The STX client application doesn’t know—or care—that a particular server is being accessed over the Internet.) The employee at location A can then use Fast User Switching to switch to the appropriate user account and interact with location B’s server, accomplishing the remote booking quickly and accurately. In this way, the designers of STX were able to deliver a major customer benefit simply by designing their program appropriately and exploiting technologies that come “for free” with the Macintosh platform.

Remote data backup. Salon Transcripts’ programmers have used their experience in intercomputer communication to create a data backup service for their customers.

“Salons can subscribe to our service,” Aaron explains, “where their data is replicated to our online booking center. All online appointments are booked to the replicated database and are synchronized with the core database located at the salon. They get the added benefit of online booking and the added security of off-site backup rolled into one.”

Aaron adds, “We can easily scale our ability to provide this service by using Apple Xserve G5 servers with RAID storage, and our clients get the security of offsite data backup without having to worry about the technical details or deal with an unfamiliar vendor.”

Using platform features to solve problems. Aaron points out that numerous features and aspects of the Macintosh platform provide opportunities for problem-solving, many of which are not available on other platforms. He points to Mac OS X’s underlying UNIX architecture and its UNIX toolset—you could, for example, use UNIX batch files and cron jobs to provide automated file backup. In another example, Aaron praised the I/O Kit, which enabled his team to develop a Macintosh driver for a receipt printer that, at the time, did not provide one.

The Best Development Environment

Because Aaron and his programmers use the Xcode IDE and the Cocoa framework to create their applications, he talks about them as one thing, his “development environment.”

And he sees it as a critical component to his company’ success: “I’ve developed on a range of platforms—Windows, UNIX, Sun, MacOS, NeXT—and probably the best development environment we ever used was the NeXT environment...until Apple came out with Mac OS X,” he says. “I can easily say that Project Builder/Xcode is the single best development environment that I’ve ever used, affording us a ten-times faster development cycle on Mac OS X than on Windows.”

In fact, Aaron says that Salon Transcripts has delayed a Windows .NET version until Windows “catches up” to what Mac OS X already provides.

He adds, “Xcode provides me with options to organize my data in a way that is most logical to me, where other development environments make it more difficult to do the same thing—for example, to create multiple targets per project, or to automatically know which form or window I’m working on. The other thing that’s really useful to me is Xcode’s tight integration with source-code management—and it works not just with CVS, but also Subversion as well.”

One development tool that Aaron values highly is a third-party open-source tool for unit testing, OCUnit (which is now included with Xcode). Aaron says that OCUnit is very easy to work with because it integrates tightly with Xcode. Using it, he says, increases the reliability of STX and decreases the amount of time needed to update the product.

Good Support: Getting What You Need

When Aaron needs a technical question answered or can’t get something to work, he finds that the “ecosystem” of support that Apple provides and facilitates—not just Apple products and services, but also the developer community—has provided what he needed to keep his efforts on track.

“With Apple, not only do I feel I have a corporate resource to go to, but I also have a number of local groups from which I can get assistance or ideas,” he says. “Most of the time, I’ve found the answer I needed in documentation, or on the Apple web site, or through a local developer group that’s been very helpful to me.” Aaron credits Apple with providing him with a robust, friendly developer community that, he says, “I have not experienced on any other platform.”

Aaron also cited the Worldwide Developer Conference as a key resource for making connections to both Apple engineers and other developers. In addition, he says that he benefited from the opportunity to learn about new Apple technologies at WWDC, and he credited the annual presentation on human-interface guidelines as being very important to creating software that has that “quality” feel that Macintosh users value.

Opportunities for Excellence

Much of the success of STX comes from the development team’s commitment to designing and implementing a quality product that meets their customers’ needs. In addition, Aaron’s comments tell an additional story: namely, that Apple has provided a computer platform that contains both built-in advantages and (sometimes unexpected) opportunities for you to create an excellent product by exploiting key Macintosh features.

The Macintosh platform is unique: It gives you the chance to make 1 plus 1 add up to 3 or 5 or even more. The first platform that delivered this kind of development synergy was UNIX. The Macintosh platform is built on top of UNIX, and the layer that Apple adds provides opportunities for a new generation of development synergies—and that’s something you won’t find elsewhere.

For more information about Salon Transcripts and their product, see the Salon Transcripts, Inc. webpage.