Interview: John Casasanta of iClip, MyDreamApp, and MacHeist I/II

John Casasanta is a man of many projects. Many of you right now are/have probably been used or been involved in something he has worked on, like iClip, or MacHeist. This interview was originally going to be a joint interview with both John Casasanta and Scott Meinzer (MacHeist I/II Web Developer), but due to time constraints, only John was able to send back my questions.

This interview covers everything from getting involved in the Mac scene, to MacHeist to MDA. At the end of the interview, he also gives us a sneak peak at the interface for the iPhone app he is developing along with Sophia Teutschler of CoverSutra.

How did you get involved in the whole “Mac Scene?”

I got my first Mac back in 1990. I was a hardcore Amiga user before that and after the Amiga started to die out, I made a brief switch to the Dark Side by going with a PC for a bit. Needless to say, I totally hated it and it wasn’t long before I was able to save up for the first affordable Mac: a Macintosh Classic. It had almost no RAM, tiny hard drive, crappy monochrome screen, slow processor… but I was immediately hooked and never looked back.

Over time I got to know more and more people in the Mac community since I was developing apps and making media contacts, etc. It’s definitely an interesting scene… most Mac users are die-hards with little tolerance for mediocrity so to stand out above the crowd you really have to work hard at what you do and pay a lot of attention to aesthetics and usability.

Did you ever consider following any other avenues of work (or what else do you do besides what you do in the Mac Community)?

There’ve been times when I’ve just gotten sick of programming and I felt it was necessary to try some new things. I’ve been all over the place with things I’ve done… painting, guitar-making, and I even considered boat racing at one point. But it always comes back to programming for me, even after some long hiatuses.

Even recently, I thought I was finally done with programming but once the iPhone SDK came out, I got back into it. But I have to admit that after this last break, I was completely rusty and the learning curve was pretty steep for me this time around. I’m working on some iPhone apps with Sophia Teutschler of CoverSutra fame and she was going to be doing all the programming on them, while I did most everything else. But right before the Apple Design Awards deadline, she had a lot of CoverSutra work to do so I tried to take up the slack and did some programming for our first iPhone app. Well, to put it mildly, things didn’t go so smoothly for me with it. I’ve never been called “a shitty programmer” so many times in my life… she can be pretty harsh.

What was it like working on MacHeist? If you could go back in time, would you still accept the project?

Considering that MacHeist was my original concept to begin with, I’d have to say, yes, I definitely would “accept the project”.

MacHeist changed my life, to say the least. I’ve never been involved with a project that’s been so consuming, but I mean that in a good way. Once we get going for the season, it’s really nonstop but it gives me a rush unlike anything I’ve ever done before, work-wise. And this is for most aspects of MacHeist: mission planning, the countless all-nighters while implementing the missions, working out the bundle with devs, seeing people solve the missions (definitely the most exhilarating part of the whole thing for me), and the mad rush of the bundle sale.

What was the original inspiration for MacHeist? How did you become involved?

The original inspiration for MacHeist goes back to when I had iClip in a week-long bundle on MacZot in early 2007. Brian Ball at MacZot was trying various things during the sale to hype it up and they were mostly improvised. What he tried did increase exposure of the promotion but I had the thought that if things were planned out well ahead of time and some fun things like games and puzzles were added with free software as prizes, then things could really take of. In addition, I felt that if we could get even just a few killer apps for a bundle then it’d be a must-have.

Once I worked out some of the details in my head, I talked it over with Phill Ryu one night and I wanted to hire him to do some of the legwork for it. I got to know Phill by advertising iClip on his MacThemes site and we worked together on some past projects and promotions. And he seemed to be into this so we started to get the ball rolling. Now at this point, this was to be a MacZot event but I couldn’t come to an agreement with Brian about making this all work out between us, unfortunately.

So then Phill and I talked about doing this on our own and it just snowballed from there. I knew that I couldn’t handle all the development on my own (in the end very little actual programming on MacHeist) so he suggested bringing on Scott Meinzer to help with this. I knew Scott a bit from some of the things I worked on with Phill and I’ll just say that I wasn’t happy with this at all at the time.

But we didn’t have a lot of choice here as we didn’t know very many web programmers, especially one as good as Scott. So I reluctantly decided to give it a shot and hire him. To make a long story short, we went from me hiring Phill, then hiring Scott to having us all be approximately equal partners and it worked out for the best, I’m happy to say (although I do sleep with one eye open because I fear that Phill’s going to try to have me killed one day so he can get part of my share ).

And in the end, having Scott be a part of the team was a great thing. I got him all wrong based on my original dealings with him… I just wasn’t getting his sarcasm at the time so I was taking things too personally. Even though he can still be a bit stressy at times, I have to say that I really enjoy working with him, especially on creating the missions. When we get into the groove, it’s truly an amazing experience.

What would you say were the biggest obstacles to overcome when creating MacHeist and MacHeist II?

The biggest obstacle is definitely getting stuff done on time. I shouldn’t be “breaking down the wall” and saying this but pretty much when a mission goes live it does just as we finish implementing it (I’ve never experienced anything more chaotic than the few hours leading up to a mission going live). Sometimes we’ll even put a mission live then finish some of the final details as it’s in-progress. We have the benefit of there being a few hour delay before heisters get to the later parts of a mission so we feel like we can get away with stuff like this sometimes, but it’s pretty risky and I’m sure we’ll get bitten by it one day.

How long does it typically take to complete a mission, from planning to coding?

That’s hard to say exactly because we almost never put one together in a single stretch. The only one that I can remember that was done like that was Mission 6 to wrap-up MacHeist I because Scott and Phill seemed to go into the federal witness protection program or something and I had to get it all together mostly by myself (with design/implementation help from Ollie Wagner). That one took a few weeks to do, including a mini-heist, if I recall correctly.

Typically, we spend several months planning and implementing everything. Throughout the year, I’ll jot down puzzle ideas as I come up with them and before MacHeist II I went away on a week long “retreat” to plan out things. Then the three of us threw ideas back and forth and came up with an overall story-line for all the missions. Scott and I would then meet-up frequently (virtually) to develop more puzzles and integrate them into the story-line. Things would change very often but at some point, we’d have a (somewhat) coherent plot, broken-up unto several missions and puzzles to fit.

Then, for each mission, we’d plan them out in fine detail so that we could pass them off to our graphics designers, Wolfgang Bartelme and Ernest Liu (we’d sometimes hijack someone else for a rush job for something we’d forgotten or needed to change last minute) and our web coder, Karl Baron. Occasionally we’d need something specialized so we’d recruit someone with the necessary skills to do those things (for example, Sophia did the Safari plug-in that let you control the maze with the Apple Remote for Mission 4 of MacHeist II). Half way through MacHeist II, we recruited IRC-goer Noël Rosenthal, who had some nifty, puzzly ideas and she helped out with various parts of Missions 3 and 4.

Overall, I’m extremely satisfied with the team we’ve assembled. We have some of the hardest working and most creative individuals in the Mac industry helping to create something that so many people in the community enjoy. It’s an extremely rewarding experience to have it all come together and hear how much people love it all.

What was your favorite mission and why?

For MacHeist I, I loved Mission 3. It was one long puzzle sequence that communicated with the heister mostly via graphics rather than words. Moreover, it included the freaky red filter iSight thingy (some people were really weirded out and paranoid from having their live image appear in their web browser, especially all tinted red and upside down) which was actually the very first puzzle I came up with for MacHeist. That whole mission had a very tight feel to it and it showed that we were finally getting the hang of things after a somewhat lackluster start.

For MacHeist II, I thought Mission 4 rocked and the heisters seemed to agree. The maze controlled by the Apple Remote really made that mission. If I recall correctly, the maze was originally Scott’s idea.

Do you ever feel like Phill (considered the face of MacHeist) is getting all the credit for MacHeist?

Totally!

But that’s partly my fault as I intentionally wanted him to be the public face originally. I’m pretty much an introvert and he was much more well known than I was leading into MacHeist I so it made sense at the time.

For MacHeist II, I tended to be a lot more in the forefront as I spent a lot of time in the forums (post count at 577 now!) and in the MacHeist IRC (some of you may be more familiar with our custom IRC client, MacHeist Chat) so I boosted my visibility quite a bit. So even though Phill got most of the credit for MacHeist I, I don’t feel that’s the case for MacHeist II and I no longer feel the deep resentment I carried around for the previous year.

What is it like working with Phill Ryu and Scott Meinzer? Any experiences you would like to share?

As for working with Phill, I once summed it up in a MacHeist forum post:

It’s no secret that Phill and I are often at odds with each other but I feel that overall, we work really well together. We’ve known each other for years and have been involved in various projects together, so even though we’re occasionally at each other’s throats (we can both be complete asses toward each other), we obviously know how to make it all work when we need to. When things aren’t clicking it can totally suck, but when it comes together and we get in the zone, it’s fantastic. And the same goes for Scott, although he and I tend to be more often on the same page with things compared with Phill. The bottom line is that we all want to do the best job we possibly can and we all have a tendency to be stubborn, so the occasional flare-up is inevitable, but we always make it work when we really need to.

Working with Scott’s usually a lot of fun. We often compliment each other creatively and he has a tendency to come up with some great puzzle concepts and story ideas for the missions. When we flesh things out it doesn’t feel like “work” at all because we’ll do a lot of brainstorming and there are always little diversions which keep things interesting. Because of working with Scotti, I now far know more than I’ve ever wanted to know about deep fryers, burn barrels, and the crown jewel of Minnesota (AKA ’sota): the walleye.

Any projects you are working on that you care to share the details of?

Yeah, but I’ll save my answer for when you ask the inevitable iPhone question… (Ok, ok, this is an email interview so I know the question’s coming since I have them all ahead of time.)

How were you involved in the conception/execution of MDA?

When Phill came up with the concept of My Dream App, he pitched it to me and I have to say that I originally wasn’t into it. I don’t watch any TV (DVDs only) and the “American Idol for Mac software” idea didn’t do much for me. But it quickly grew on me for some reason. I agreed to be a part of it so long as I didn’t have to do any programming so I took on the role of “Development Manager”.

I was involved with helping pull everything together both for the competition and for developing the apps. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out so well in the long run and I quit My Dream App around September of last year (even though I’m still listed on the site) because of some personal differences Phill and I were having. I’m still really hoping that the apps get finished but I’m not sure what state things are currently in.

A little known fact is that Phill came up with the My Dream App concept after we started talking about MacHeist, not before. We felt it would’ve worked out best if we put out My Dream App first, then followed it with MacHeist. In retrospect, I’d say that it definitely was most effective doing things in this order even though I had a lot of reluctance to the ideas.

Do you have any advice for people who are just beginning to get involved in your areas of interest? i.e. Mac Developing/Web Design?

Collaborate!

I started doing Mac development on my own and while I was able to build a pretty successful business that way, it wasn’t until I started working closely with others that things really started to take off. And the overall experience got sooo much better by collaborating with other talented, motivated people.

I’m actually very surprised that so many indies in the community are pretty much solo. The saying “the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts” couldn’t be truer here and I think that if more people started working together we’d see some really great things come out of the Mac dev community. I hate to sound negative here but the scene has been pretty stagnant for too long of a time and I look forward to seeing some talented, original people get together to “rock the boat” with something really fresh and innovative.

The other advice I have is to not be afraid of doing things beyond your level of comfortability. I originally hated marketing but if I just stuck with what I was familiar with and only what I enjoyed, MacHeist simply would never have happened. Starting up an indie dev company takes countless skills and you often have to be willing to do tasks you’re just not familiar with or even have a distaste for. But when you give those things a fair chance you can gain an appreciation and sometimes even a liking for them.

With the recent announcement of the iPhone SDK, do you see yourself getting involved in developing applications for the iPhone?

When the SDK came out, I thought, “sure, why the hell not”. I toyed with the SDK a bit but was kind of empty for ideas so I felt that I was going to watch things from the sidelines this time around.

But then I came up with an idea that I felt could be done in a few days and would be pretty cool to have. I told it to Sophia and she immediately wanted to do it, so she and I partnered up for it. Well, a few days turned into several weeks as it evolved significantly and we wanted to have a killer design in it, so we hired Wolfgang to perform his pixel magic. We went through a zillion iterations for it but we’re totally happy with the end result. We can’t show the whole app because of NDA reasons with Apple but we can show a snippet of the design:

Wolfgang did such an incredible job turning our concept into reality. Doesn’t that look sweet?

And now, after my initial idea drought, Sophia and I have been coming up with cool, new things almost daily.To put it simply, I LOVE iPhone development and I’ve been very absorbed with all the apps we’re working on.

We came up with the perfect name for our iPhone app company. I wish I could tell you the URL right now but we’re in the process of buying the domain from one of those evil squatters and we’re still waiting for the transfer to finish. But keep an eye on the MacHeist forums and Sophia’s site because we’ll have info there as soon as we can make it public.

Thank you very much for joining us, John.

Thanks a bunch for having me on and for MacApper’s continued support of the things I and the people that I work with create!

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