What inspired you to get into building tools that targeted mobile
device developers?

It was many years ago, back in the Newton days. I had just won the
programming contest at the first Newton Developer’s conference. My prize
was a T shirt with an icon of a C:\ prompt on it. It inspired me and the
Vollum brothers to write a working DOS shell for the Newton OS. It was
working by dawn: it even made the proper drive reset sounds as it
started up. We kept its origins secret for quite a while.

I was joking with a magazine editor about it. We were having a good
laugh over how some of the commands which were too much work to
implement, responded simply “Abort, Retry, Fail”, including “Basic”. But
then it hit me: Basic, on mobile devices, was not a joke. The tools that
were available for the Newton were great for the pros that had a year to
master them: not so useful for the guy working in the IT department that
needed to get a business app working or for someone working on his own.
I got to work.

Basic for the Newton was a big success, as was NS Basic/Palm and NS Basic/CE.

Can you describe some of the challenges that you have experienced over
the years building development tools for Apple’s Mobile products (NSBasic
Newton to iPhone/iPad)?

Memory and CPU speed are far more constrained than on the desktop. We
have a saying here, “Plunder the ROM!”. We find out what’s built into
the OS and make as much use of that as possible. It makes up for a lot.

For the iPhone and iPad, we got really excited when we realized the full
implications of JavaScript + HTML5 + WebKit. There is an incredible
amount of functionality tied up in those.

When we looked closely at JavaScript, we were most surprised at its
speed: NS Basic/App Studio is the fastest Basic we have ever produced by
a long shot.

Can you tell us some of the features that you are most excited about
for iPhone/iPad developers? What do you think will really compel people
to use NSBasic for iPhone/iPad development?

It’s back to our roots: coming up with something that has a short,
gentle learning curve. We have implemented virtually all of VBScript,
which is a large subset of Visual Basic. VB programmers can start
programming right away, and can even copy and paste chunks of code. The
screen controls, like commandbuttons and checkboxes, are drawn using
HTML and CSS, so they have a very modern look and feel.

We also made it easy to deploy and test: within 3 days of the product’s
release, people reported that they had working applications.

Do you think Apple should be more open to other development tools (mono
and other environments)? Do you think that the Android is benefiting from
Apple’s policies at all?

It’s easy to slam them for their policies, but it’s not always right.
Apple has created a software marketplace with high standards: much
better than a lot of the dreck you see elsewhere. Apple’s reputation is
built on the quality of its products: I can understand their desire to
see software applications built to the same standards.

Do you personally use an iPhone or iPad? If not, what mobile hardware
do you use?

I’ve owned every model of iPhone and iPad as my personal go to device.
Right now, I have an iPhone 4 and an iPad.

What mobile applications do you use or find most interesting (personal
productivity, games)? What are 2 or 3 of your favorite mobile
applications?

Nothing interesting, I’m afraid. Being able to check email anytime makes
it easier to keep playing with the kids instead running up to the office.

What do you think the future holds for iPhone/iPad users? Do you think
the platform will continue to expand? Do you foresee any challenges?

I think iOS will continue to be a moving target. I think Android are the
only ones who have a chance of keeping up. Apple has a huge built in
advantage with the iTunes store: it will be tough for anyone to
duplicate that.

If you were granted 30 minutes with Steve Jobs to chat about mobile
development tools, what would you most want to talk with him about?

I’ve been friends with Steve Wozniak for 15 years, I’ve chatted with
Bill Gates, but I have never met Steve Jobs in person. I think I’d
evangelize him on how NS Basic/App Studio could bring the wonder of
programming mobile devices to literally millions of developers. I’d talk
about teaching programming. I’d show him places where a few changes in
Safari could add lots of possibilities. I would make him go through the
process of submitting an app. And I’d tell him about the grandmother who
took up programming on iOS [with NS Basic] because it’s more fun than crochet.

Can you tell us if you have tested your latest development IDE with
CrossOver or Parallels so that Mac users can also develop apps using your
tools? If not, do you need any volunteers to help you test?

We’re all big Mac fans here. Running on Parallels was an essential
feature from day 1, just so we could use it ourselves.

Have you ever considered developing a compiler or programming
environment for Macs (where the IDE would run natively)? If not, why not
are there additional challenges?

A Mac native version is not out of the question, but there are other
things we need to add to the product first.

We reached out to Sprikit Software’s Scott Fitzhugh, developer of the iPhone app Shovel, for comment.

As a developer you’ve been fairly vocal about wanting Digg to open up to third-party applications such as yours.  Will the introduction of this new API mean that users will be able to login, vote, and comment from Shovel?

YES!  As a programer, one of the most difficult things to accept is that something simply “can’t be done.”  We’ve been hard at work on the newest version of the Shovel and the foundation is there.  I can say without hesitation that as soon as Digg makes these features available, they will be featured front and center in Shovel.

Has Digg directly reached out to your or other notable developers in the Digg marketplace to encourage adoption of this API?

Digg has been very responsive to thoughts and suggestions about the new API.  There’s no release date yet so they haven’t quite moved on to that phase of things, but it’s nice to know that someone is listening.

Do you have any concern that this may somehow lead to Digg developing their own iPhone app?  Does the release of this API make that possibility more or less likely in your eyes?

Yes and no.  We’ve definitely had this discussion.  But I get the feeling that Digg, in general, prefers web-apps over native apps.   With or without their public API, I suspect if they wanted to be in the iPhone app business they would have done so already.

Digg has clearly lagged behind other social networks in terms of third-party involvement.  Why is this?

One word.  Spam.  The Digg community hates it with a fiery passion that could consume a thousand suns, and the developers there have gone to great lengths to eradicate it.  Creating an API that allows for programatic submission of comments, stories, and Diggs is likely to result in bots that automatically submit mass amounts of advertising.   I’m sure they resisted the move as long as possible for this reason.

With no anticipated release date available for Digg’s new API, what can we expect to see from Shovel in the near future?

Shovel 3.0 is due out sometime in the next month (assuming the app review process goes smoothly) and will come in both free and pro flavors.  It’s been recoded from the ground up, includes a story search, Instapaper integration, Facebook integration, has built-in email, a much more full-featured built-in browser, and is far and away a MUCH more rich experience than the current version of Shovel.  We’re really excited about it.  The free version will of course be a free (seamless) update for our existing users.

Interested in checking out what Shovel has to offer?  Click here to download ver 2.0.1 absolutely free of charge.

Today, Eric Thomas, CEO of Freedom Voice, confided that the company is pulling back support from the App Store after months of no response from Apple.  The company will no longer seek iPhone App Store acceptance for now.  “I am disappointed,” says Thomas.  The company plans to integrate the Newber concept into their new FreedomVOICE IQ product, a hosted PBX phone system that is gaining traction for the company.

Just last week, Market Strategist for FreedomVOICE Systems, Nick Gowdy, told me the Newber team stands ready to respond to Apples comments, but none of come.  In fact, Apple hasn’t even registered the dummy account to test the application.  150+ days of silence from Apple for an application that, according to the company, does not break any of the rules set up by Apple.  “We are frustrated,” says Gowdy.  One might ask, “what gives Apple?”

What is Newber?
Newber, a brand of FreedomVOICE Systems, a virtual office phone system provider, accomplishes 3 things for the iPhone user: the ability to make and receive calls where AT&T has spotty or no reception; the ability to offload a call when your phone’s battery is nearly drained; the ability to take calls without burning your AT&T minutes.

Newber will create a second phone number for your iPhone that routes through their network.  This second line is customizable in a manner similar to Google’s Grand Central.  Users can control when they wish the calls to ring or go straight to voice mail.  For users who seek both a work phone and a personal phone, this solution could be attractive.  The original iPhone number would, of course, still work just as it did before this application installation.

Calls to a users Newber line could have been routed to other numbers, such as a land line.  Users simply enter the number they wish the calls transferred to, it is that simple.  Additionally, Newber made use of the iPhone 3G’s GPS and automatically switch calls to the predefined number when you enter that lines proximity.  For example, users can choose to have their Newber calls forwarded to their work phone when at the office.  Arriving at work would trigger the line forward just as leaving the office would transfer calls back to your iPhone.

Another feature of the application is one touch tree dialing system.  This feature allows users to select a contact to reach and the phone begins dialing the first number listed for the contact.  Should the call roll to voice mail, the second number listed is automatically dialed.  An example of this would be phoning your contact office line, then upon getting voice mail, trying the contact’s mobile number next; all without any added input from you.

Newber was priced at $5 per month plus 2 cents per minute.  International calls varied by country in price from $1.68 per minute to the Falkland Islands to $.0266 to China.  Calls placed on your Newber line from your iPhone burned both Newber minutes and iPhone AT&T minutes.

150 days of frustration
The team at Newber was super excited to gain admission to the iPhone developer program and were even more so when they submitted the application to Apple.  In the days and weeks that followed that excitement as numbed a bit.  According to Gowdy, the application, “shouldn’t be a concern” to Apple.  Another application that deals with VOIP is in the same approval limbo for their application: iCall.

The team tried changing names of the application and resubmitting.  They’ve changed the description and resubmitted.  They’ve changed anything that could perceived as a “bad” and resubmitted.  The team even tried a petition at CES and MacWorld to get Apple’s attention.  All to the same end: no response from Apple.

Previously, the company had stated a jailbroken app for the iPhone might be a possibility.  Thomas confirmed they’ve not made a decision on that, but went into the business case and stated it didn’t make too much sense.

Have you no decency Apple?

A point Thomas wanted to emphasize is social consciousness.  How can Apple in good faith, provide no response to a developer wanting to make their device more appealing to the business crowd?  Thomas said he could respect a, “no” but to offer no response, which led to a significant outlay in marketing and perhaps more importantly in time.  Instead of accolades, a request from Apple to help, rewards and awards for a signigicant contribution to the iPhone’s business side, they recieved nothing.

Thomas concludes it must be a marketing move for Apple’s lack of response, “I can only think Apple wants to avoid the negative press from denying acceptance of applications like Newber.”

Thomas plans to integrate the Newber concept into their FreedomVOICE IQ, a hosted PBX solution that allows company to move away from the expensive outlay for PBX phone hardware and move to a scalable system based on VOIP.  Thomas considers pulling Newber support is the right move for FreedomVOICE customers and for the company.  Work on a BlackBerry version has also been halted.

The Newber app is one that leverages the iPhones assets: a phone you cannot be without for personal or business use and smart call routing fused with GPS.  Here’s to hoping Apple sees it fit for approval the next time it gets the chance, as there are many of us excited to add this app to our phones.  You can learn more about Newber at mynewber.com

How did you get started programming for Macs and how did Potion Factory come about?

After working as a programmer for a long time, I started Potion Factory almost 4 years ago with a friend because we were feeling adventurous with our lives and because we liked the Mac platform so much. We have since gone our separate ways, but I still enjoy this work very much as I get to be both programmer and graphic designer.

What made you develop The Hit List in light of Omni Group’s OmniFocus and Cultured Code’s Things, other GTD apps?

I made The Hit List because I didn’t find any applications that I wanted to use to keep track of my long list of things to do.

The work on The Hit List began before any of those apps you mention became publicly available. It’s funny how people now think that The Hit List is an amalgamation of all the good ideas in those apps, but from my point of view, they feel like my application split into separate pieces.

I didn’t pay too much attention to those apps anyway because I thought that what I was working on was pretty unique.

How does The Hit List differ from OmniFocus and Things and what makes it special?

The Hit List is for you if you don’t like being forced into a specific workflow. I made it fairly generic but it does support many of the GTD concepts. It’s an application that can be as simple or complex as you want it to be, but at the same time, I have tried to make the user interface simple to the point where it’s almost invisible. It’s also opinionated in some areas. One example would be the single key shortcuts and the helpful hint buttons that encourage their use.

When you learn Kendo, they teach you that you must use your sword as an extension of your arm, meaning, that you must be comfortable enough with your tool to the point where it feels like just another part of your body. Similarly, I wanted the user interface in The Hit list to be seamless and efficient enough so that it feels like an extension of your mind. An example of software that has this amazingly invisible UI are video games. With video games, you don’t think about pressing buttons to get something done, most of the times, you just do it. I wanted more of that kind of interaction in my application.

I really enjoy it when people tell me that The Hit List feels just right because of this.

Are there any special features coming in the iPhone app that are not already in the OmniFocus or Things iPhone apps?

I don’t check out competitors’ applications before my own is done so I can’t really answer this one. The reason for this is that I’m trying to make the best product in my own way and I don’t really care what the other companies are doing. Being in the same space, you still tend to end up with similar features, but at least I’ll know that I arrived at those answers on my own rather than being influenced.

When can we expect to see the iPhone app?

When it’s done.

How do you justify the price of The Hit List (or any app) and will there be a “switcher” discount?

If you’re serious about your productivity, I think you can justify it. This is the type of application that can get you promotions at work and better grades at school. It certainly has made me a more productive person. With that in mind, when you compare the price to that of a concert ticket or a video game, I don’t think that it’s too out there. Also, I’d like to think that the love I have poured into this application is worth something.

I don’t know about a switcher discount yet, but even if I did offer it, I can’t imagine it being anything more than the current $20 discount on the pre-order sales.

How do you combat software piracy?

I don’t really try too hard on that front. I think there are enough decent people in this world especially in the Mac community who will contribute to the development of a good product by paying for it. I’d rather spend my limited time helping those people rather than spend it on trying to keep out the people who won’t or can’t pay for it anyway.

How do you personally use The Hit List?

I have separate lists for my products into which I brainstorm ideas and file bugs. These tend to get quite large, so then I go through the long list and set priorities on each item. Then I decide on what to work on each day and file it into the Today list. Using the outline features, I always break things down to actionable items that take no more than 30 minutes to complete. This keeps me focused and productive throughout the day as completing each little task is quite satisfying. Putting things in contexts helps a lot as well. For example, the one I use often is @photoshop.

When it’s time to actually do the work, I’ll switch into card view and focus on just that task. I just charge through those cards without second guessing what I should be doing.

At the end of the day, I review what I did and archive the completed tasks.

How did you get started programming for Macs and how did Cultured Code come about?

I started programming in 1981 on a Sinclair ZX80, which was a pretty amazing computer. The ZX80 was much smaller than even the Mac mini. Of course, it was not only smaller in physical size, its operating system fit in 4K! The computer landscape at that time was very different from what we have today, but it was extremely exciting and it was also obvious that this was the start of something new and big. I even sold software while still at high school in the form of computer code that people actually had to type in to use!

To me, the introduction of the first Macintosh computer in 1984 marked both the culmination as well as the end of this wild and crazy period of computing. Of course then came the PC which I found dull and uninspiring. I moved on and pursued another interest of mine: Mathematics. I studied Mathematics and subsequently became involved in teaching and doing research. It was only until much later when I realized that Apple had actually survived and was still producing computers in a much different spirit than the rest of the industry. But it was actually the announcement of Mac OS X that made me want to once again start creating software. The Mac was a small niche, but Mac OS X was finally something one could again be passionate about.

While still teaching at University, I began to learn Cocoa and prepared myself for leaving and creating a small software company called Cultured Code. This was the time when creating web pages using CSS began to become a feasible alternative. Oliver Marquetant joined me and we created our CSS debugging tool Xyle scope.

What made you develop Things in light of Omni Group already having OmniFocus, another GTD app?

My desire to create software that helps to get organized is actually an old one and goes back to my days at University. When we founded Cultured Code, we actually wanted to create a personal information manager. We called this the “Sea of Information” project. The CSS tool was supposed to be a side project to test the waters. However, it took a life of its own. From a business perspective, it never worked very well, but I got a lot of insight into creating and marketing software.

It was clear that we had to do something different in order to save, and even better, to grow the company. It was an obvious step to revive the “Sea of Information” project. Luckily I discovered David Allen’s book, which was a revelation to me. He seemed to have answers to questions I couldn’t even clearly formulate .

At the time when Omni announced their product, we had already spent a lot of work on our own project including a series of prototypes. But after Omni’s announcement, it became clear that task management would become a respectable product category on the Mac. I got even more enthusiastic and was able to attract Werner and Christian to start working with me. Werner is an amazing programmer with a strong intuition for every aspect of a software company, while Christian was one of the most talented graphic designers I had seen. It is really the combination of our talents and our desire to create something worthy of the Mac platform that made Things possible.

How does Things differer from OmniFocus and what makes it special?

Right from the beginning we wanted to create a tool that was easy to pick up yet powerful. It is no exaggeration, with Things it is possible to manage thousands of to-dos, but Things is also the application with the most modest learning curve.

There are so many methods of becoming more organized, but most of them require quite an amount of mental energy. With Things we wanted to create a product where users only need to spend the least possible amount of energy to get organized. This way you become more productive with what you actually want to do. We were in fact so focused on this mission that we even deliberately dropped features we now learned we shouldn’t have .

But what is really very interesting is that users who were using other products before are now telling us that they are getting more stuff done using Things. This is a great testimonial to the fact that with task management it is vital to not just to provide features, but to work very carefully on how you implement them. Even little design decisions can go a long way in making users more productive.

How do you justify the price of Things (or any app)?

There are two sides to this question: the developer and the user point of view. Luckily both of them are rather compatible in our case .

From a developer point of view it is important to be able to have a strong development and support team. This means that selling a product at too low a price will eventually kill it. Some people who do not have experience with advanced task management, view task management apps as simple to-do lists. But there is much more involved in helping people to get more things done. In fact, the problem space of successful task management is quite involved. Very small software shops are simply not able to do this right. We have seen this a couple of times in the past, where products slowly died because the developer was no longer able to keep up with the various challenges involved. During the past six month we have spent a large amount of time and energy to make Cultured Code stronger as a company, for example by hiring some very talented and experienced programmers. Our users can look forward to us making a lot of improvements available in 2009.

Users on the other hand will ask themselves, whether a product is worth its price? Now imagine working with an application that really makes you more productive. If such an application saves you a few minutes each day, or helps you getting more things done, how much is that worth? I think the precise answer to this question really depends on your work. But with Things we are in the lucky position where its price is much lower than the value it represents to a user.

How do you combat software piracy?

Seriously fighting software piracy requires quite an amount of resources. We rather spend those resources at making Things better. But when they see a useful product at a fair price, the vast majority of users simply want to do the right thing and help continue an application’s development and support.

How do you personally use Things?

Things is always open on my Mac. I manage everything I need to do with it, no matter whether it is related to work or not.

What’s next from Cultured Code?

As I said, task management constitues a large problem space. Expect us to stay ambitious. But also expect the unexpected as we are going to do things differently .

MacApper: DrawIt is now one of the most popular vector apps for the Mac, so what drove you to create it?

Pieter: DrawIt started I think about four years ago, really as a project to get some basic experience with programming.

I had just switched from Windows to the Mac I noticed there was not a simple drawing application available for the Mac, and since I needed something like that, I decided to create it myself.

Looking back it wouldn’t have been the lack of drawing applications but rather my inability to use Google, but anyway, that’s what got me started with it.

MacApper: How long have you been programming and why did you start?

Pieter: Early in high school I had my first experience with programming and then a teacher gave a copy of Visual Basic for Windows, and I used that to learn the basic stuff. After that I forgot all about programming for the next few years until I bought my first Mac (one of the last iBook G3).

After that I met a friend (Jelle de Laender, now on CodingMammoth) and we both started to do some programming again, this time in RealBasic. We had a little “company” together and we released a number of very basic applications, one of which was DrawIt in fact.

A lot of those applications went away again, but DrawIt (together with an app called QuickScale) stayed and we would work on those. Almost two years ago we split up and divided our applications; I got DrawIt and he got QuickScale and a few other applications. Since then development of DrawIt went much faster. That’s where we are today.

MacApper: What drove you to start Fontcase?

Pieter: Quite soon after shipping DrawIt again under my own name, I got in contact with Laurent Baumann who initially just had a few feature requests but who ended up also doing an incredible amount of work on of graphics, UI design, and testing for the application.

He knew I was looking for ideas for other Mac apps, and he talked with me about an idea he had for a long time to create a better font manager. And since I liked the idea very much we decided to do this together.
Development started I think early in the summer and we’re finally approaching version 1.0 now.

MacApper: What hardware do you currently use?

Pieter: My main working machine is a 24″ iMac but I also have a Macbook Air which I use when I’m on the road, but it’s also essential for testing the Shared Library-feature of Fontcase, which was the primary reason for buying it.

MacApper: Can we expect any other apps (iPhone or Mac) from you soon?

Pieter: Apart from Fontcase, I have been working a bit on a spin-off project of DrawIt, which currently goes by the name of DrawIt Batch. It’s an app for applying filters like shadow, stroke, scaling, and several CoreImage-filters on multiple images at once.

The app is not yet in beta, mainly because I’m now focusing 100% on Fontcase, and because there’s not yet an icon nor a website.

From the start, I’ve been very interested in doing iPhone development, but it has been a problem of coming up with a really good idea, and besides that, my current desktop projects ask a lot of time.

MacApper: Is there anything else you would like to tell us about? Upcoming features in DrawIt that you are excited about?

Pieter: When Fontcase is out I plan to work again on DrawIt and the main focus there will be on vector export. I’ve received a lot of feedback from people asking for SVG or PDF export and that’s what I hope to provide in the future. I’m also thinking about multiple-page support, but the most important thing will be true vector export.

Of course this presents some problems because almost none of the CoreImage effects make sense in Vector export, so it’ll be quite a challenge.

Thank you very much for giving me an opportunity to talk about my projects. This actually is my first interview, so thanks for giving me some time to talk about this.

MacApper: No problem. Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions.

As mentioned above, Pieter has a new app coming out soon, called FontCase. If you join the mailing list at their Website, you can download the beta today. In case you don’t want to join the mailing list, here is an exclusive preview that Pieter has given us:

Pieter: With Fontcase, Laurent and I have really tried to come up with a user-interface that is perfectly logical for a first-time user, flexible enough for a power-user, and of course packs all the features one would expect from any decent font manager. The UI has changed a lot since we first started. This means that any screenshots I provide at this point might be outdated by the time the application ships.

The website still provides a fairly adequate preview of the application, with the main features highlighted. One I personally quite like is the Compare tool. As the name suggests, it’s designed to be of help when you want to compare a few fonts; you can compare individual glyphs, header text, or paragraph text.

The screenshot below shows the Header Text:

Fontcase tries to be strong on metadata and we made it very easy to edit this. For each variation you can apply Tags, Genres, Foundries, and Designers which will also show up in the sidebar as can be seen in the first screenshot.

The website already shows the icon view, but the third tab, the preview list, is also a very nice one:

We’re very close to finishing the application and we’re very excited about it. There are of course many other features we haven’t mentioned so we hope you’ll all try the application once it’s released. And thanks to MacApper for giving us the opportunity to talk about Fontcase.

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!

If you participated in MacHeist I and II you have seen these apps before, but they are now back, updated and ready to go. I had a chance to sit down with Phill (well, sit down over the internet) and ask him a few questions about this latest project.

MA: Hi Phill, glad you could join us.

PR: Yeah, my pleasure.

MA: So your mixing up the Mac Software scene once again with the MacHeist Retail Bundle. Tell us a little about that.

PR: Well, we always seem to get swamped with emails after each MacHeist bundle asking when it’ll return, and we felt having a nice bundle available throughout the year would be a good idea. It’s really a great introduction to Mac shareware, and we feel it’ll do great in stores, especially for switchers. Really, this is about reaching a wider audience, and I think this package of software will go a long way in helping us do that.

MA: What apps have you put together for inclusion in this bundle?

Update: App list updated.

PR:

• iClip (Inventive)
• CoverSutra (Sophiestication Software)
• Awaken 4.0 (Embraceware Software Inc.)
• Cha-Ching (Midnight Apps)
• Overflow (Stunt Software)
• Xslimmer (LateNiteSoft)
• DEVONthink Personal (DEVONtechnologies, LLC)
• Wallet (Waterfall Software)
• WriteRoom (Hog Bay Software)
• Enigmo, Bugdom 2, Nanosaur 2 (Pangea Software, Inc.)

MA: How long have you been planning this bundle?

PR: I think I started talking to developers about this nearly a year ago, but it was after MacHeist 2 that I really started working on getting everything together. All in all though, we put this together fairly quickly… It helped that much of the sale’s mechanics are already in place.

MA: This bundle is even complete with its own trailer?

PR: Yeah, I mean, the idea of doing a full blown trailer for a software bundle struck me as a little ridiculous too at first, but it was one of those things where we’re talking ideas, and we go through a stage where it’s a bad idea, then decide why the hell not. I think it turned out well.

MA: Where did the idea to do a boxed version of the bundle come from?

PR: We’re always trying to reach as many Mac users as we can, because we have the best software deal out there. Retail is an opportunity to break into the mainstream, the casual user who doesn’t read TUAW everyday, or maybe the new Windows switcher looking to fill their new Mac with some software. Plus, it’s just cool to have a physical box. Kind of makes it feel more real.

MA: Did you consider doing this bundle in partnership with another organization like the MacUpdate/Skunkworks bundle of last year?

PR: No. Our “skunk works” bundle with MacUpdate last summer was an interesting collaboration, but ultimately we felt constricted by the partnership, and decided to continue on our own. We’re always open to potentially working with others though. For example, I’m in talks right now with a guy who may be helping us unleash the Heist brand on Windows users, so we’ll see how that goes.

MA: Do you think that the upcoming MacUpdate bundle will hurt your sales at all?

PR: No, but I think we will probably end up affecting their sales pretty heavily. I imagine with our launch the week before MacUpdate’s, a lot of customers are going to be light in their pockets the following week, and in some sense, gorged on quality Mac software. We definitely have the advantage with the timing. It’s interesting, I was talking to John Gruber about that [MacHeist/MacUpdate competition] the other day and he compared us to Coke and Pepsi, and it really is getting kind of ugly. I’m just waiting for Joel to launch the MacUpdate Challenge, but you know, we’re quietly feeling out the bottled water industry. MacHeist bottled water, coming this fall.

MA: Going off topic a little bit, can we expect any more MacHeist related promotions before the debut of MH III? There have been a few rumors floating around of a Skunkworks 2.0.

PR: I can’t comment on our future events, beyond the fact that MacHeist 3 is happening later this year.

MA: Thanks for joining us Phill.

PR: Thanks for inviting me here, enjoyed answering these questions.

So there you have it. The bundle goes on sale soon, and can be purchased through MacHeist. It is not known yet where you can buy the Retail bundle in-store.

Today we have an interesting interview between our own Michael Hjorleifsson and Pat Lee from VMWare Fusion. Virtualization has become one of the most interesting and progressive areas for computer users of all platforms, and Pat answers some great questions concerning the future of running virtual machines on OS X. VMWare Fusion is arguably the leader in the virtualization space and Pat talks about some of the cool stuff the company has been working on, and what to expect down the road.

You might want to check out Marv’s excellent VMWare Fusion review while you listen.

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Steve: Josh, thank you so much for joining me. Can you tell me a little more about your company? You guys seem to do a lot of things.
Josh: Thanks Steve. You’re right, we do have a lot of different projects going on. Many of your readers may know us for our Insanely Great Tees and Monkey Business Labs brands, though we also develop a lot of other projects. We have a company called Magnetism Studios which focuses on developing these different products and putting them out there. Basically, we develop products that we would like to use ourselves, put them out there, and see what comes from it. It’s a lot of fun.

Steve: What is it like working for Monkey Business Labs/Insanely Great Tees?
Josh: There are three of us right now, Josh and Dave and Paul. We’ve designed our working environment to suit our personalities. We all work from home, which gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of hours. Sometimes we’ll have really busy weeks when we’re trying to get a project out the door, sometimes we’ll have more experimental weeks when we’re just tinkering with things that we think would be fun. Those experimental weeks oftentimes lead to some of our most interesting stuff. A perfect example is our Filemark Maker tool, that lets users save desktop files onto their iPhone or iPod touch so they can view them anytime, even when they don’t have network coverage. It was a problem that was frustrating us, we sat down, played with some different options, and came up with the tool in a few hours while working with a friend. It was easy, and now thousands of people have used the tool.

Steve: Right now the focus of Monkey Business Labs seems to be on Dashboard Widgets, which of your widgets is the most popular?
Josh: You’re right, and we’ll probably be reserving the Monkey Business brand specifically for just widgets and Mac software. Our widgets have been really suprisingly popular, I think they were the thing that really got us started doing product development on the web. We started out doing a lot of widgets that were more utilitarian, like TV Tracker, to tell you what’s on TV, and To Do Tracker, to keep track of lists. TV Tracker has been immensely popular, though Checkmarker, the new version of To Do Tracker, has plenty of loyalists. Checkmarker is great because it’s so simple, I use it every day.

Steve: Do you have plans to write stand alone native apps for OS X?
Josh: We have a number of ideas for native Mac apps, though right now it’s just a matter of finding the time for them. Lately we’ve been focusing more on entertainment properties, like our Idea Generator widget, rather than serious utilities (really, who could trust a spreadsheet from a company called Monkey Business?)

Steve: What made you make all your widgets donation-ware except for Picture Framer Deluxe?
Josh: We’ve encountered a lot of resistance from people paying for software. A lot of customers believe that because widgets are so tiny and cute that they should be free. It’s a nice idea, though to continue to develop software it’s really key to have a healthy income. We offer our widgets using the “freemium” model where there’s a free version and a deluxe version, you can choose which you pay for. That said, the t-shirt sales help subsidize our widget development time.

Steve: How did you come up with all the designs for your t-shirts on Insanely Great Tees?
Josh: We’ve done all the design for our projects in house. I’ve always loved designing shirts and I’m quite pleased with a lot of the shirts we have for sale. My usual point of reference is “would I wear it?” I love wearing the shirts with just icons on them, really simple ones, though some of the more fanatic shirts like “Steve Jobs for President” and “I’m a Mac” are quite popular as well. We like to carry both kinds, appeal to all sorts.

Steve: What's your current hardware setup?
Josh: We do all our development on MacBooks, which we plug into our nice big monitors when we’re working at our desks. I just picked up one of the wireless razor thin keyboards, which I adore.

Steve: What is in your dock?
Josh: All the Adobe apps, of course. Also, I have this little thing which I think would be quite handy for your readers  it’s an icon you can press which opens a new message in Mail.app. It’s really simple, I made it a million years ago, though it still runs perfectly and uses basically no resources (it’s not like an applescript or something, which would be slow). You can download it from here, stick it in your dock and when you click it, presto, a new mail message. I must use it 50x a day.

Steve: Nice thanks! Do you guys have anything new and exciting for widgets, applications, or t-shirts coming?
Josh: Let’s see  we just launched two new tees, one for the inventor (see above) and one for the Apple History nut. Aside from that, we’ve got a brand new brand coming from Magnetism which we’re calling Bureau of Communication. It’s a formalized way of communicating with your friends. Let’s say your friend is always late to your meetings  you could go to our site, fill out a very serious looking but pretty funny “Airing of Grievance” form, send it along via email. Then your friend gets that, decides to respond with a “Formal Apology” message. And then you can follow that up with a “Statement of Gratitude” form to thank them. We like to think of it as fill in the blanks + tax forms + email. It’s a lot of fun, and we’ll have it out in time for the holidays.

Steve: Thank you very much for your time! It was a pleasure interviewing you.
Josh: Thank you, Steve!

He talks about OS X development and how he started Hog Bay Software. Jesse also shares his thoughts on the iPhone SDK. Plus, if you stick around, you’ll also find out about the two copies of TaskPaper we have to give away.

Marvin: First of all, tell us a little more about Hog Bay Software.
Jesse: I work at this full time and live in Bangor, Maine. Hog Bay Software is just me, my computer, and an upstairs office / playroom. (we’ve got a 2 year old). I try to run my business out in the open and involve my users in many business decisions. I release very early public beta versions of my programs and then work with everyone in the Hog Bay Software user forums to turn it into a shipping application.

For example I started work on TaskPaper this spring. I think I made the first public development release after about a week of work. Here’s the earliest screen shot that I could find, I think this was about a month in:

After 6 months of refinement and tons of public feedback we’ve now reached version 1.0. Here’s the current screen:

Marvin: Wow, that’s a huge change. What got you started with developing Mac apps? Any advice to novice developers?
Jesse: I was a computer science major, studio art minor in college. I always like the Macs that was back in the OS 9 days and I just didn’t want to put myself through the pain of programming in that environment. Mac OS X changed all that. I bought the public beta and have been working with it ever since.

Marvin: Are there any features for TaskPaper that we can look forward to?
Jesse: A big part of what I try to do is make my applications extendable by others via AppleScript and plugins. TaskPaper has some minimal applescript support and no documented plugin support. So my first plan is to work on that for a version 1.0. Though for the next week or so, I’ll be working on making WriteRoom and TaskPaper Leopard compatible, once I get my final copy of Leopard that is.

Marvin: Yea, I’m looking forward to Leopard too. What kind of Mac hardware do you use?
Jesse: I have a MacBook Pro with a gig of ram and 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. And that’s hooked up to a (don’t hit me!) Dell 24 inch flat panel. It all still feels fast a year after buying so I’m happy!

Marvin: What are your thoughts on the (official and unofficial) iPhone SDK? Do you see yourself building iPhone apps in the near future?
Jesse: It’s certainly very interesting, but so far I’ve never owned a cellphone, pda, etc… in my life. I’ve done some cell phone programming work, but it wasn’t very fun and I didn’t see many possibilities for creating an app that I enjoyed on it. With all that said, something like the iPod Touch might be just enough to push me over the edge into gadget land. I’ll certainly be looking at the SDK closely when it goes public and then I’ll decide if I’ll be getting one or not.

Marvin: Jesse, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.

Thanks to Jesse, MacApper has two copies of TaskPaper, each valued at $18.95 to give away. All you have to do is name a feature that you think will fit nicely into an app like TaskPaper. Leave a comment below with your answer; competition closes 29th October 9PM EST. Jesse and a couple of the MacApper folks will be judging this, so be creative.

First off, thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to do this interview with us.

No problem, glad to be here!

Can you remember the first audio app that Ambrosia developed?

That depends on what you mean by audio app. I guess you could say Snapz Pro, because it could record system audio along with video as part of a recording. Very useful for doing video game trailers, and the like.

And from there you decided to have an app dedicated solely to sound with WireTap right?

Actually, the way it happened is we needed to work on the Mac OS X native version of Snapz Pro X. For that, we needed the ability to record system audio again, and because it was an entirely new operating system, we had to totally rewrite the way we captured system audio. So in order to test this audio capture engine properly, we wrote a little free application called WireTap which used our audio capture engine, and released it to the world.

We never intended it to be a product, but rather just as a cool free tool for people to record audio with, and a way for us to get our audio capture engine tested properly. It was only after the overwhelming response that we realized we might want to take this a bit more seriously, and make a product out of it! The original WireTap was pretty limited; we came out with the $19 WireTap Pro later on that offered more robust recording capabilities, file formats, etc.

And in less than a week you will be releasing you latest audio app WireTap Studio, can you tell us what kind of improvements you have made since WireTap Pro?

Here’s how we approached the product. I spent a month talking to people who record audio. What I found was that people fell into two categories:

1) They used ridiculously low end solutions like QuickTime Pro to record directly to mp3. If anything was wrong, too bad. They didn’t edit anything.

or
¨
2) They used ridiculously high end solutions, like Peak. But they only used a very small subset of the features the product offered, and in general, were frustrated by the difficulty of using the product.¨

So we went for the sweet spot in the middle. Every feature we have in there is a result of talking to people. LivePreview, for instance. We asked podcasters, people who ripped CDs, etc. what format/compression settings they recorded to. Most didn’t know, or if they did know, didn’t know why they chose that format. So we tried to figure out a way to let them intelligently decide what format and compression settings they might want to use, and how large it would be before they even recorded anything. That’s how LivePreview was born. We tried to work backwards in terms of the way the product works, not just make yet another sound recorder.

With LivePreview (which is patent pending technology), you can be listening to audio coming form any source, then you can change the compression settings on the fly, and instantly hear the difference in the compression level, and see the difference in terms of how large the audio will be. I think it’s a really groundbreaking feature, because when you can compare audio side by side, you can really tell the difference between different compression formats, and figure out what recording settings you want for your audio.

This is just one example of many that I can give you. Everything was designed by looking at what people did with audio, and figuring out how we could best solve that problem. We wanted to do the hard work for the end user.

WireTap Studio’s editor is well designed and one of the easiest editors I’ve used next to the new iMovie editor, did you create this simplistic interface from feedback?

What we tried to do with the editor is make something that did 90% of what people do with recorded audio extremely well. We’re not competing with Peak or other high end audio products. Again through interviewing people, we determined what things people did with their audio. We then set out to make an audio editor that was really, really good at the things these people did most of the time. Here’s a really good example I think. Just about every audio recording product on the market makes you tell it what file format, compression level, etc. That you want before you record anything.

To me, this is backwards! It’d be like Photoshop making you choose the file format and compression level before you can draw a single brush stroke. So we thought about it from the average user’s point of view. If they choose a higher bitrate for their audio, they expect it to sound better. They don’t know anything about re-compression issues, etc. They just know they want it to sound better. So WireTap Studio records a losslessly compressed master recording that all of the edits you make work from. This allows you to choose a high quality recording even after you’ve recorded it. You can even take something you recorded as “mono” and get stereo out of it, just by clicking on a popup menu.

Let’s say someone recorded something in a format that sounds bad. They either throw out their hour-long recording/interview and redo it, or they ship it sounding bad. With WireTap Studio, they can just change the quality level, and boom! There it is, it sounds better. This is one of the many ways that we tried to re-think the concept of recording and editing audio. This all takes place transparently to the user.

Most audio apps let you record and edit, but WireTap Studio lets you store your audio in a library, just in case you decided to re-edit your recording. What made you decide to add a library to the program?

We approached the product from the point of view that we wanted to solve four problems for people who recorded audio. The bullet points we came up with were:

¢ Record.
¢ Organize.
¢ Edit.
¢ Export.¨

We wanted WireTap Studio to be really good at those 4 basic things. The reason we went with a recording library was to let people easily manage their recordings. No need to dig around on their computer to see where a particular recording is, it’s always there in a nice iTunes-like Library. This has the added convenience of being able to search/sort on whatever you like, file name, size, date, even mp3 tags. The Library also allows us to do some smart things behind the scenes. As I mentioned, we have a lossless original master recording, but we actually do a dual encode when we record. We record in the format people say they want, and then also record the lossless master recording. If you make changes to the recording, by say, cropping it a bit, or changing the format, we re-encode the file behind the scenes so it is always instantly available for exporting/uploading/whatever. The Library allows us to present a single file to the user, and do some fantastic magic “behind the curtain” to make their life easier.

Another new feature to WireTap Studio is recording sessions, which lets you time-shift the recording of your audio. Will you ever bring this feature in to Snapz Pro for time-shift recording of your video?

The Recording Sessions feature of WireTap Studio essentially lets you encapsulate everything about a recording into a neat little package. The file format, compression settings, audio source, etc. And have it start and stop on a schedule. This is fantastic for doing things like recording internet radio shows when you’re not around. You can launch any media player from WireTap Studio automatically, have it start the feed, and WireTap Studio will record it for you. It’ll even wake your computer up from sleep to do it!

As for bringing it into Snapz Pro X, I will say this. Many of the paradigms that we’ve incorporated into WireTap Studio are absolutely going to be rolled into a new version of Snapz Pro X (which we’re working on already). Hopefully I can touch on some of those features of the editor in WireTap Studio a bit to explain what I mean.

Speaking of the WireTap Studio editor, I played with it for a few hours and it is very easy on the eyes. How did you manage to create great features in the editor that look so good?

We can’t compete with high end editors, nor did we want to, so we wanted to be really, really good at what people do most often when editing audio. So the number one thing was picking the audio format. We have that nailed with LivePreview and being able to change the format/compression even after the fact. The number two thing people do is they crop audio. In a traditional editor, what this involves is you select the audio, you listen to it, you hit delete, then you add a fade in so the audio doesn’t “pop”, and if anything is wrong, you hit “Undo, Undo, Undo and you do it all over again.

With WireTap Studio’s editor, all you do is drag the left or right crop marker. Audio that you’re cropping out is still visible, it just appears grayed out, and an automatic fade follows the crop marker. It’s that easy! If you’ve cropped too much to too little, you just drag it again, no need to undo anything. You can also change the duration of the fade just by dragging, and even change the type of fade. It all works in such an easy, natural manner that it makes it fun to edit audio.

We also do everything “live” in the editor, so you can see the waveform distort as you drag the fade, and if you delete audio, you actually see that audio gradually shrink from the recording. It’s not like other editors where you hit delete, and things just disappear, and you have no idea what happened. The animation isn’t just gratuitous. Sure, it makes it look cool, but it serves the purpose of visually showing people what happened to their audio when they made a change.

Another very cool aspect of the editor is that you can see every edit you’ve made to the audio. You don’t just see one big blob of a waveform, and have no idea what you changed or where, you can see every edit. And not only that, you can change the edits at any time. Delete some audio, and we’ll automatically put a fade out/fade in there for you, but if you deleted too much or too little audio, just click on the disclosure triangle about the cut mark, and you’ll see the audio you deleted, grayed out, visible in the editor. Then just drag the crop markers to change how much or how little audio is deleted! We really tried to make audio editing so easy that it’s fun again. Because the editing is completely non-destructive, you can really edit without fear, and dive right in to playing around with the audio, tweaking Audio Unit effects, whatever, without ever worrying about destroying your recording.

After you release WireTap Studio, what are your plans for the future?

My plan after releasing WireTap Studio is to issue a huge sigh of relief, and have a beer. Any recommendations? Victoria Bitter?

Haha, being an Australian I would have to go with a cold VB. How about future software updates? Any plans there?

Oh absolutely. We’re working on major updates to Snapz Pro X, using many of the lossless/non-destructive paradigms that you’ve seen in WireTap Studio. We also full expect to work on updates to WireTap Studio based on feedback from users. It’s great to ship a 1.0 product, but that’s always a starting point in some sense.

And of course, we also are working on updates to iToner to make sure that it works properly with Apple’s new iPhone 1.1.1 OS. We are also working on other secret projects that I’m not allowed to share. Suffice it to say that we are EXTREMELY busy with some software that I hope is really fantastic. We’re working hard on engineering tools that work naturally, and do the hard work for the user.

Sounds great and I hope the release of WireTap Studio goes well!

Thank you, and if you’d humor me, let me ask you a question now. You’ve used a pre-release version of WireTap Studio for a bit. What do you think?

I think it does what other audio apps can do but does it better, and with a whole lot of style. It also does a few things other audio tools can’t do. All the features are easy to use from capturing to editing and then exporting. One feature I had lots of fun playing with was LivePreview. Being able to hear what the final result will be and change the compression settings to improve your final result is really exciting. WireTap Studio won’t be easily outdone, and I personally can’t wait to buy it!

Thanks, I very much appreciate the feedback. We really did try to make the whole process fun and easy, rather than frustrating and tiresome. I appreciate your time, and thanks for giving me a chance to ramble on about our new baby!

Thanks to Andrew for sharing Ambrosia's new app with us! You can learn more about WireTap Studio by checking out these videos Ambrosia has posted.

And now for the free schwag I mentioned above. If you'd like to win a copy of WireTap Studio (and who wouldn’t?), leave a comment below telling us, “features you'd like to see in WireTap Studio. Winners will be announced in a week.

Now some of you may remember TheMacPak – it was a website that sold a nice bundle of Mac apps at a reduced rate. Well it seems it has, or rather will be, reinventing itself as a piece of software much like iTunes, but exclusively tailored for distributing Mac software.

According to Mark this app will be available sometime around Q1 2008. Aww that’s no fun right? We don’t want to wait! Well I have good news. Today around 9AM PST a web based version of TheMacPak’s one-stop application shop will be revealed, and at the end of this article I will dish you a coupon code to save you some skrill.

Now back to the application pictured above. Looks to me like a fairly neat solution, and I think this could be a fantastic addition to the platform and could even help a lot of developers. Curious, I headed over to the website which was empty except for a chat link. I was lucky enough to speak to Mark with TheMacPak and I hurled a couple of questions his way and here is what he had to say:

Me: Ok I’m confused. Am I right that you will have a new Mac pak released today?

Mark: Not a pack, a whole new retail venture. The image I gave you actually gives people a first look at something we’re doing in the near future, which will be the OS X native program for distributing software applications.

Me: Yeah this program sounds really ambitious. Can you give me any numbers on how many titles we can expect?

Mark: We hope to have over 1000 Mac software products on sale by years end 2008.

Me: Jeez that’s a lot. getting back to the web based app released today. How many apps can we expect to see there?

Mark: Hopefully there should be around 250 apps within the next 2 weeks.

Me: Any word on savings for the community?

Mark: Well that is tough to say because of different deals with developers but it should fall between 5-50%.

Me: So will there be bundles or will people just be able to buy whatever apps they like individually?

Mark: Eventually we will have bundles but with TheMacPak people have always complained they wanted to just buy certain software individually that was not part of any bundle. The new project will resolve this by allowing purchases of your favorite applications individually.

Me: Sounds good. Can you give me any of the developer’s who’s products we can expect to see up for sale?

Mark: Pangea, BeLight Software, and Koingo Software are some of our biggest launch partners. We have all their apps, not some of them

Me: Okay so this is 100% digital distribution. That’s great but what about those folks who insist on a physical CD?

Mark: All orders will be available as custom shipped CDs for people who like backups, or who have bad internet connections. We’ll ship those CDs anywhere in the world for $10. For the first time, you’ll be able to get all your favorite Mac software on CD.

Me: Sounds good. Anything else you feel like adding?

Mark: Uhh well we’re giving away an iPod Touch. You will see that soon on our website.

me: Nice! So how about that coupon code?

Mark: Your readers can use the coupon MACAPPER at checkout for 3% off. Oh, and coupon code’s are stackable, so you can use more than one. The code will only work until October 21st.

Thanks Mark! You can bet the entire Mac community will be interested in the web based shop appearing today. Mark told me his companies vision it to have every Mac application available on one website (and eventually via an OS X based front end). Very ambitious. Will be interesting to see how this project develops and I will keep you all updated with news and developments when I hear more. In the mean time keep your eyes peeled over at TheMacPak for the release of something exciting around 9AM PST today!

Steve: Paul, thank you so much for joining me. First of all, I'd like to know how you got into software development?

Paul: Glad to do it.

I actually started out on the press side years back. I was doing software reviews when I came upon a great tool that was being given away. I wrote to the author and suggested that he sell the software. He indicated that this wasn’t possible for him, as he was in Russia. Casting journalistic ethics aside, I offered to set up a small business with him. I handled the customer support and purchasing side, while he did the coding. That coder was Alex Lagutin, one of Rogue Amoeba’s three co-founders. Alex and I worked together at two additional software companies before he, Quentin Carnicelli, and I eventually founded Rogue Amoeba, almost five years ago.

As far as what got me interested, I find it fascinating to be part of the process of creating something from nothing. As developers, we have incredible power in terms of design and functionality, but we have to wield it wisely because it affects so many people.

Steve: What is your background with audio?

Paul: At Rogue Amoeba, only Alex came in with real audio knowledge, from doing work in the audio industry. Quentin and I have no background with it, and we’ve never hired based on audio experience. A wise friend has said that a good engineer can learn just about anything and it’s true. We’ve picked up the audio concepts we’ve needed, and five years in, we’re pretty knowledgeable about it all.

Steve: All of Rogue Amoeba's software programs are very innovative and highly regarded in the audio community. Where do you get your ideas?

Paul: Well, thank you for the praise! If I may, I’d like to say that I hope our software is well-regarded in the Mac community in general, not just audio circles. People often have the misconception that we’re an “audio company”, but we see ourselves as a consumer software company that makes audio products. The difference may seem minor, but our software is built with the average user in mind, not just audio professionals.

Alright, I said my piece. So, where do we get our ideas? By and large, the problems are identified by our users, then we work out the solutions. Users tell us what they’re trying to do, then we work to determine the best way to accomplish that desired goal.

The genesis of Airfoil is a good example of this process. Airfoil allows users to send any audio to the AirPort Express, which is otherwise limited to receiving audio only from iTunes. When the AirPort Express came out, users came to us to let us know that they wanted this functionality. However, no one said “Make an application that takes any audio and sends it to the AirPort Express”. They wanted a plugin in Audio Hijack Pro to talk to the AirPort Express, or to turn the AirPort Express into a standard system audio device for output. Ultimately we decided to make this a distinct application, and created out a design that has worked out well. This never would have happened without hearing from existing and perspective users.

We’ve got countless examples like that. Our audio editor Fission came about because we heard from users who wanted to do some very simple editing and didn’t need or want to use the higher level editors that are out there. Audio Hijack 1.0 didn’t have Timers, because we didn’t know people would want to do timed recording. Once we added that, it became the single biggest use case for the app.

I could go on and on, but I think the point is clear – our ideas start with talking to and listening to our users. We’re not necessarily very smart, and we’re certainly not omniscient, but we do listen well to what our users tell us. We build off that input, and hopefully, it results in some great apps.

Steve: What is it like being the CEO of a company like Rogue Amoeba?

Paul: Picture your dream job in software development. You get to work with great people, designing and managing great projects. There’s little if any bureaucracy, useless or dull work is rare. You work from home, setting your own hours, and you get to do all sorts of fun things like panels with other developers, meetings with other software companies, and presentations for users. Doing all this, you earn a pretty great living. Best of all, every Thursday, a company-funded clown troupe comes to entertain you.

Now, toss in a lot of paperwork, dealing with the government for taxes and more, and throw in some support work, particularly the escalated tickets. Also, subtract the clown troupe. Now you’ve got my job. Even with the distinct lack of circus performers, it’s the best job I can imagine. Except maybe being a photographer for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue.

Steve: What's your current hardware setup?

Paul: My main work machine is a Dual G5 2 GHz. That still sounds fast to me, but it’s over three years old now and it’s starting to show its age. I’ve got a 1.83 GHz Core Duo MacBook that I use for travel and Leopard testing, and a Dell Dimension something-or-other for running Airfoil for Windows. You can see how much I care about that PC, since I know almost nothing about its specs. It’s running XP, I know that much. It’s also off about 99% of the time.

Steve: Other than software from Rogue Amoeba, what is in your dock?

Paul: You know, I don’t actually keep much of our own software in the Dock. I usually have multiple versions loaded on my machine at a time (Audio Hijack Pro 2.7.3 for support and testing and Audio Hijack Pro 3 for development, for instance). They change a lot, so I have to pick them more precisely than the Dock allows, using LaunchBar. I do have Nicecast in there, which I run 24/7.

Other items in my Dock of interest: Adium (AIM/GChat) and Snak (IRC client) for various work communications. I use both Mail and PowerMail for email, because PowerMail’s search functionality is vastly superior to Mail. To go with the mail clients, I have the indispensable SpamSieve. I’ve got iTunes playing music and Nicecast broadcasting it, 24/7. I’ve got NetNewsWire for necessary news and distractions, and I’ve got Coda and BBEdit for working on the website as well as documentation. I find I flip between BBEdit and Coda for text editing. I use a few other applications, but I launch those via LaunchBar, they’re not always in the Dock.

Steve: Can you tell us anything about the mysterious AHT?

Paul: I can and will. AHT was never meant to be so mysterious – we simply posted on our own site to get testers, and suddenly, it was all over the Mac web. Whoops!

AHT stood for Audio Hijack Timeshifter. The app’s real name is Radioshift, and it’s our next big application. Radioshift is designed to put radio on your schedule, acting as a TiVo for radio. The core of Radioshift is its guide, which lists tens of thousands of local and internet radio streams. With this guide, users can subscribe to stations and programs in a single click. We’ve got plenty of users using Audio Hijack Pro to do timed recording, but the process isn’t nearly as smooth as it could be. Radioshift aims to bring this ability to many, many more people, by making it easy.

Radioshift is also a great tool for simply listening to internet radio. Instead of using your browser and two or even three different media players, you can do it all in Radioshift. Find live content in the guide, click Listen Now, and you’re all set – no need to launch the horrible Windows Media Player, or use QuickTime Player or RealPlayer.

Radioshift has been in development for about a year now, and we’re almost ready to ship. We think it’ll really change the way people listen to and record radio, and we’re very excited about it.

Steve: After reading your blog post about creating iPhone ringtones with Fission, I am curious about plans you may have for iPhone audio apps.

Paul: Right now, we’re not planning anything on the iPhone itself. That may change in the future, we’ll have to see. I’ve toyed with lots of third party software for the iPhone, and it’s great to see the iPhone extended. However, the closest thing to a real product I’ve seen is master iPhone hacker Craig Hockenberry’s Mobile Twitteriffic, which is free. There’s no market for paid software on the iPhone, not yet anyway.

Steve: Are there any other new apps or major updates to current apps you can tell us about?

Paul: I’d love to, because we have some major updates coming. We’re working on Airfoil 3, a major update to our software to send any audio to the AirPort Express. We’ve talked about Airfoil 3 on our site, but one of the major announced features is Airfoil Speakers, a complementary application. With Airfoil Speakers, you can turn any computer into a virtual AirPort Express for use with Airfoil, enabling you to send audio around your house to more than just physical AirPort Express units. In addition, we’re improving syncing with multiple units, and with the local machine, so audio plays at the same time on all outputs. We’ve also got a hidden feature that’s going to wow some people, or should at least prove more impressive than Leopard’s “secret features”.

Going back to your previous question, the one idea I’ve had for an iPhone app is a copy of Airfoil Speakers. This is one application that might make some small amount of sense to have on your iPhone – it’d be flashy, if nothing else, turning your iPhone into a mobile AirPort Express, at least on local WiFi. We’ll see what happens in the coming months though, with both the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

We’re also working on an update to Audio Hijack Pro, that’ll be version 3 as well. That’s got a much improved interface, ID3 tag editing, and of course, Leopard compatibility.

Farther ahead, we’ll likely begin work on Fission 2 towards the end of the year. We’ve got plenty of ideas for improvements there. But in the next couple months, we should be shipping Radioshift, Airfoil 3, and Audio Hijack Pro 3.

Steve: What books or resources could you recommend to someone looking to start building apps for OS X?

Paul: I won’t really speak from a coding perspective, as I don’t do any application programming here at Rogue Amoeba – we’ve got far, far better programmers than I’ve ever been. But from a design and development perspective in general, not necessarily related to OS X specifically, I’ve got a few ideas. Tog’s books (Tog on Interface and Tog on Software) are old, but still great, that’s Bruce Tognazzini. Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things is an essential. You wouldn’t think the designer of Visual Basic would have anything useful to say about design, but Alan Cooper’s The Inmates Are Running The Asylum is a great read.

I’ve also drawn wisdom from books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink, Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner, and more. Perhaps my favorite book to recommend though is Randy Komisar’s The Monk And The Riddle, a book about starting businesses and living life.

Steve: Thank you very much for your time! It was a pleasure interviewing you. Good luck on whatever is coming next from Rogue Amoeba!

Paul: Thank you, it’s my pleasure. As far as what’s coming next, just keep an eye on rogueamoeba.com.

–

By the way, check out our review of the latest software from Rogue Amoeba: Radioshift!

Steve: Ken, thank you so much for joining me. First of all, I’d like to know how you got into software development?

Ken: I’ve been fascinated by computers for as long as I can remember, but I finally got a chance to use one briefly in the late ’70s when my mother took a class that used the University’s Cyber mainframe (I helped her prepare her decks of punch cards). My first long-term access to a computer was in 1980 when my school bought an Apple II; I read through all the manuals over the summer, and have been writing code ever since.

Steve: How did you decide you wanted to develop solely for the Macintosh platform?

Ken: Through the mid-’80s, I programmed as many different types of computers as I could get my hands on. I was intrigued by the Macintosh when it was introduced (and read through the photocopied prerelease volumes of Inside Macintosh at the computer center’s library), but didn’t spend much time with it because while it had some great user features, it seemed very limited from a developer’s perspective compared to the UNIX systems that were my preferred platform at the time.

Then NeXT appeared on the scene, giving us a computer with a Mac-like interface built on top of a powerful UNIX-based operating system. At first I was hesitant to do much work on it, because I didn’t want my programs to get stuck on a single platform. But as I learned Objective C and the NeXT frameworks (which later evolved into Cocoa) I realized that I was facing a crossroads: I could keep developing for the least common UNIX denominator, or I could start really taking advantage of the NeXT platform and become a much more productive developer.

I chose to focus on the environment that made me the most productive. And 18 years later, here I am! (For those who don’t know the intervening history, Apple bought NeXT a little over ten years ago and turned it into the foundation of Mac OS X.)

Steve: I see from your website that you have a relatively small group of employees all local to Seattle. Do you find this results in a more productive team and better products?

Ken: Yes. I did a lot of remote collaboration on open source projects in the ’80s and enjoyed it, but there’s nothing like being able to just sit down with somebody in person to hammer out ideas.

Steve: All of The Omni Group’s software programs are very innovative and very well regarded in the Mac community. Where do you get your ideas?

Ken: I think there are several essential components to the way we build our software: we have a very talented and creative team, we listen to our customers, and we keep iterating. We wouldn’t get far without a great teamand that’s where our ideas start. But we might go a long ways in the wrong direction if we didn’t make a point of listening to what our customers are telling us, so we build customer feedback into our development process. And when we don’t get something right on the first try, we try something else!

Steve: What is it like being the CEO of a company like The Omni Group?

Ken: I can’t imagine a better job: I’m surrounded by a lot of great people working on a lot of great projects. One of the hardest challenges is deciding where to put our energy next: there are lots of great apps out there that nobody has written yet that we’d love to write, but at the same time there are lots of great features that we’d like to add to the apps we’ve already written!

One of the hardest decisions we made this decade was to stop taking consulting contracts so we could focus all our energy on developing our own products. (It was also a bit of an act of faith, since those consulting contracts were paying a lot of the bills!) Fortunately, that paid off in spades.

Coming from a programming background, I have my own peculiar challenges. For example, I have to remind myself to think not only about the great new features we could add to our software, but also about the non-programming things we could be doing which might help our customers even more: things like publishing screencasts (which make it easier to learn the products), or making it easier to find stencils for OmniGraffle, or hiring more people to help with our email load so we can respond to our customers more quickly.

Steve: You must have a long to do list as CEO of such a great company. Do you use GTD/OmniFocus to manage it?

Ken: Yes, I certainly do! I switched over to OmniFocus a few months before we started releasing “sneaky peek” builds to private beta testers, and at this point I can’t imagine tracking my projects without it. (Before switching to OmniFocus, I was using the Kinkless scripts in OmniOutliner.)

Steve: What’s your current hardware setup?

Ken: My primary computers at work and home are both Mac Pros with Apple cinema displays. My laptop is a first-generation MacBook Pro, but I haven’t been using it nearly as much since getting my iPhone. (I tend to program at my desks, and use my iPhone to check my email when I’m not at them.)

Steve: Other than software from The Omni Group, what else is in your dock?

Ken: The other permanent residents are Quicksilver, Terminal, Xcode, Mail, and Activity Monitor (set to display the CPU history).

Steve: Are you planning on developing any applications for the iPhone?

Ken: We’ve written a web interface for OmniFocus, but would love to replace it with something more powerful if Apple ever opens up a native SDK.

Steve: I am a huge fan of your software and I have been running OmniFocus beta for a while. Is there anything new you can tell me about OmniFocus?

Ken: I’m not sure there’s much new stuff to share, given that we publish several new builds each day to all our (13,000+) private beta testers. But what we’re currently working on is finishing three major features (Perspectives, Printing, and email capture), and then we’ll be looking to see what rough spots remain that we need to polish up before shipping a 1.0 release.

Steve: Do you have any other killer apps in the works?

Ken: Did I mention it’s difficult to decide whether to put energy into writing new apps or into adding major new features to our existing apps? With OmniFocus we’ll have written three new apps in a row, so I think it’s time to add some major new features to our existing apps.

Steve: Thank you very much for your time! It was a pleasure interviewing you. Good luck on whatever is coming next from The Omni Group!

Ken: It was my pleasure. Thank you!

* Editor: photo courtesy of Arstechnica

We’ve covered applications that fetch cover art for you on MacApper, but this solution is unique. It’s free, it requires no application download or registration, and it’s drop-dead simple to use.

The process is simple:

• Use an Applescript to magically create a playlist containing all of your coverless music.
• Export a list of the coverless must.
• Use a free online tool to locate art for all of those tracks.
• Drag the art from Safari into iTunes. You’re done!

The first step is to download the Tracks without Artwork to Playlist script from Doug’s Applescripts. If you don’t already have Doug’s site bookmarked, you should. The script is not guaranteed to be perfect, but it will do a great job of locating the tracks in your library without cover art and placing them into a new playlist called “No Art.” It took about five minutes to run on my MacBook and found that 959 tracks in my library out of 1,962 tracks had no art. Of those tracks, 30 already had artwork, which I had already manually entered by poking around on the web a while back. It was a piece of cake to simply run through the Cover Flow view, find those tracks and delete them from the list.

The second step is to create a text file listing all of the tracks in your No Art playlist. You do that via the Export command in iTunes’s File Menu.

Third, head over to Art4iTunes, the site that is going to do the heavy lifting. It is a totally free service that, in my experience, does exactly what it says it will. You use the simple form there to upload the text file you created in the previous step and – presto! – you get cover art for each album. I would not suggest uploading all 900 of your tracks at once, since the results will span several pages and the process of moving the art into iTunes is the most tedious step. Still, for those tracks too stubborn to get art automatically from iTunes, this is a great alternative, and it’s totally free!

Watch for the video after the jump and be sure to subscribe to our feed so you don’t miss any of our premium Macalicious content.

…And in case you missed the first 2 segments:

Delicious Generation Party Video I

Delicious Generation Party Video II

Enjoy this second video installment after the jump and be sure to subscribe to our feed so you don’t miss the third and final video coming soon.

Here’s what he had to say.

Marvin: Hi Sippan, tell us more about yourself and the team behind Keynote Bingo.

Sippan: I’m a crazy Swede with a passion for languages. And for some reason I tend to attract Followers. When I grow up I’m going to be a cult leader. The rest of the team are crazy Swedes with a passion for other important Bingo related things, like Apple and programming. They do all the work, and then I do the interviews and steal their glory.

Marvin: What inspired you to create Keynote Bingo?

Sippan: Henrik and I are writers for a Swedish Mac news site/community called MacNytt. When John Siracusa blogged Ars Technica’s Keynote Bingo in 2006, Henrik wanted to bring the fun to our Swedish readers, so he made a similar Bingo in Swedish. Then one of our readers, HannesP, decided it would be more interesting if it was interactive and randomised, so he sat down and programmed it.

Some people have been complaining about how our Keynote Bingo is just a ripoff of Siracusa, but we think they’re so different in nature (static PDF vs randomised and fun) that it doesn’t matter if he did it before us. It’s not like he was the first person to make a Bingo out of something other than a bingo hall, either. Haha.

Marvin: Did you play along? I chose #8, but didn’t hit Bingo.

Sippan: Yeah, I had #64123, but I didn’t get anything either… It was close on a few rows though. But I think more people won this year than any of the previous keynotes, it felt like for the first five minutes of the keynote, they were just ticking off things straight out of our events list.

I suspect Steve may have planned the keynote around his own Bingo template so he would win.

Sippan: At the time, I loved it like everyone else, but now that the RDF effect is wearing off, I have to admit there weren’t a lot of dramatic news announced or dramatic new features demonstrated. Also I was really hoping I’d get to click the “Steve mentions Keynote Bingo” square. Maybe next year.

Marvin: Will you be creating any future apps that we can look forward to?

Sippan: Yeah, the Bingo team is hoping to put some more work into the next version of Keynote Bingo and put in some new cool features and things. And the members are doing stuff individually; I think Tomasf is rising to fame with his SiteCrawler application, and I’m always making little games.

Marvin: Sippan, thank you so much for joining me. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.

Sippan: Hooray! And it was fun to rant. Now I’m going to have breakfast. HejdÃ¥! (it means ‘bye’ in Swedish)

Well that’s it, look forward to Keynote Bingo at MacWorld 2008! Oh and are there any other Mac developers that we should interview? Let us know.

Conner: Hey, thanks for taking the time to talk with me.

Steve: Hey Conner. Thanks for having me.

Conner: For the readers who may not know much about you, what projects and other applications have you done?

Steve: I’m currently working on Tubular, which is a Mac app that is a front-end to YouTube. That’s been my labor of love for almost 10 months. Before that, my main application was SnapShooter, a tool to put borders around screenshots. I began working on that in January 2005 for the brand new (back then) forums for MacThemes.net, and pretty much stopped working on it in April 2006. I also wrote two little mini-apps that were well received. One was called DeskTunes, which displays the album art and information about the currently playing iTunes song. I wrote and released that in 6 hours on an all-nighter in October 2006. The other was called Nine Figures. That was more of a fun toy app, as all it did was display the number of songs sold on iTunes in your menu bar. I released three versions of that, when Apple had their contests for the 100 million, 500 million, and 1 billion song milestones.

Conner: What was the inspiration for Tubular, and why did you choose to make it?

Steve: Tubular was born in July 2006. I had decided a few months earlier to stop working on SnapShooter, as I was growing bored with it, and I wanted a new project. At the same time, I was on summer break from college, and became addicted to YouTube. There were some shortcomings with the site that I didn’t much like; for instance, I really wanted to put a lot of these videos on my iPod, but I couldn’t with just YouTube. So, I started thinking about how to turn YouTube into a Mac application. Eventually I had a working prototype, and I started crafting it into what it is now.

Conner: How is Tubular going so far?

Steve: Tubular is coming together a lot nicer than it was a couple months ago. We hit some pretty rocky bumps when we were changing our playback system. Tubular was originally just embedding the YouTube flash player into the application window. It worked, but it was hardly optimal. On top of that, our system to get the video URL was breaking, and needed to be replaced with a more robust system. So we started integrating Tubular with Perian, a set of open source QuickTime components (including one for decoding Flash video), and rewriting our video download system. The private beta release we put out worked pretty well, but was crashy. After a couple more beta releases, we’ve improved the stability and performance quite a bit.

From here on out, we’re going to try and work with the Perian developers to get streaming playback. We’re also going to be cleaning up a lot of the little bugs that are here and there. Furthermore, we’re going to be working to make Tubular run faster.

After the 1.0, we’ve got a ton of ideas for things to do. One previously unannounced feature that we’ll be putting into Tubular 1.1 is a tool to manage YouTube feed subscriptions. You’ll be able to subscribe to any YouTube RSS feed, which will update itself with the new videos in the feed. We’re also thinking about making it possible to automatically have those videos downloaded and converted to your iPod, if you want. That’s one thing we’ll be working on. We’ve got a lot of features in our sights, though.

Conner: What made you decide to make SnapShooter, the handy screenshot application?

Steve: Long winded story ahead. I was working for MacThemes.net as a writer in 2004. In January 2005, they launched a new web forum for people into GUI customization. There was a thread in there for posting screenshots of your desktop. People posted whenever they got new wallpapers, new icons, new ShapeShifter themes, etc. However, everybody’s monitor is really big, compared to the size of a web forum. So if you put a full screenshot inline in a thread, it would usually break the forum design. To solve this problem, some of the artists on the site started creating some beautiful borders to put your screenshots. The premise was that after you downloaded these borders, which were usually Photoshop files, you would take a screenshot, open it in Photoshop, resize it, position it, mask it out, then save it out to a PNG and upload it to your web server.

But the list of problems coming from this solution is huge. First, the entire idea is based upon the fact that everyone who wants to use this border has to own a copy of Photoshop, which costs $650. Second, it takes some skill in using Photoshop to figure out how to properly set everything up the way you need to – random people couldn’t just open their screenshot and do the resizing, positioning, and masking needed without learning the tool. Third, the time it takes to do this is immense. Photoshop is an insanely complicated app, which is great for a versatile image editing tool. But it made for a terrible experience for this common (relatively speaking) task. I wanted to do it right.

The application does exactly what it’s supposed to do – help you frame screenshots. It manages all of your borders for you, and you just select the one you want. You could drag in or paste a screenshot, or you could even let the app take it for you (after hiding itself). Drag it around and resize it all you want. It then gets masked, and you can save it wherever you want. The app had some support for automatically uploading to FTP, SFTP, and .Mac, which I was hoping to extend even further to include support for uploading to Flickr and other photo services.

Conner: What is your current hardware setup?

Steve: Currently I’m running off of a 15″ MacBook Pro with a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo and 2 GB of RAM. I also have my two external hard drives, lovingly named Sephiroth and Kefka. Kefka is a fun drive. It’s a 250 GB drive with 8 partitions on it. On it, I have separate installations of Tiger, Leopard, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, and Fedora Core 6, as well as a blank partition used for installing new versions of those operating systems. I also have my server, which is a PowerMac G4 Dual 1.25 GHz with 1 GB of RAM. That hosts my source code backup, and is used for general file sharing with my roommates. It’s also responsible for running the YouTube test cases. There are several dozen tests that check YouTube every couple of hours to alert me if YouTube breaks Tubular in some way.

Conner: Do you currently have any plans for the future?

Steve: A ton. My next confirmed and public project will be one of the top 24 from My Dream App, called Ground Control. In a nutshell, Ground Control will be a tool aimed at people who really like making their computers work for them. Specifically, it’s a utility bar that passively displays information about other apps, so the number of new emails you have, any items you’ve got coming up today in your calendar, etc. It will be very customizable to fit your workflow, because we will be including the option to create custom skins and plugins. It’s a bit of a complicated idea, and requires more words than a paragraph could elucidate, so take a look at our new just-launched home at GroundControlApp.com.

I’m also looking into numerous possibilities involved with web development. I won’t say anything specifically, but there are some very interesting ideas that I want to see explored on the web.

Conner: What’s in your dock?

Steve: My Dock got replaced long ago by Quicksilver for most of my application launching. But there are a few things I keep in there as reminders. Adium, Camino, Mail, and iTunes are pretty much always open if my computer is on, so they’re on there. I keep Xcode and Interface Builder there too. Aside from those standard ones, I also have Cha-Ching, TextMate, Xtorrent, Coda, CSSEdit, and Parallels.

Conner: What Mac related website(s) do you read?

Steve: A good portion of my major news comes from Digg, which I enjoy reading if only for the people who are as adamant about Linux as we are about Mac. I also read MacRumors quite a bit. Aside from that, most of my Mac news comes from forums and blogs. I’ve read blogs from a number of people, including John Gruber, Wil Shipley, Daniel Jalkut, Cabel Sasser, Jonathan Rentzsch, and Dustin MacDonald. I don’t really read a whole lot of news websites like MacNN because most of the stuff on those kind of sites reads like a press release – if the site doesn’t read well, I probably won’t stick around long. I also participate in the forums at My Dream App, where I am a moderator, and MacThemes.net, where I was a writer. But my list of links is not static at all; my RSS feeds change around a lot.

Conner: Thank you for this interview, it was nice to talk to you.

Steve: Thanks again for having me on. For your readers, we’ve got a special coupon code that’ll let you get Tubular for $3 off. Go to the Tubular site at TubularApp.com, click on “Coupon”, and enter “MACAPPER” without the quotation marks, or follow this link. Thanks for checking it out!

I encourage you to check out Tubular, as it seems really cool, and the coupon code should make you want to buy it even more. Check out Steve’s site, and be sure to order your copy of Tubular today.

After publishing the review, I managed to sit down with the developers from BinaryNights (Attila, Bela, Gabor and Mudi), to chat about ForkLift, Macs and their future plans. They even made a significant announcement, but I won’t spoil the surprise. Read on to find out.

Marvin: First of all, tell me more about BinaryNights. How did you guys come about, and what do you do?

BinaryNights: There are four of us at BinaryNights; all of us come from different IT backgrounds. We were originally involved with developing J2EE enterprise applications for telecommunication enterprises, like T-mobile.

We bought our first Mac in early 2006 and immediately fell in love with the concept. It was obvious that this is a much more progressive market to develop applications for. Desktop application development was an exciting opportunity to shift to from the repetitive enterprise tasks.

Marvin: Cool. What was the motivation to start ForkLift? Was it to build a better file manager?

BinaryNights: Although the Mac way is superior in almost every aspect, we had to realise that file management was pretty complicated for advanced users. Our goal was to create an application that integrates every aspect of file management into a single platform, be it on your home computer, remote server or even on your mobile phone.

We also wanted to know, if we could make a living from developing shareware software

Marvin: What sort of Macs do you use for your day-to-day tasks?

BinaryNights: We currently have three MacBook Pros, two 20” and a 24″ iMacs, two PowerMacs, a Mac Pro and 23-30″ Cinema Displays.

Marvin: Quick! Name 5 apps currently sitting in your dock.

BinaryNights: XCode (of course), IShowu, Adium, VLC, LightRoom.

Marvin: Any word on ForkLift’s pricing? I’m sure a lot of readers are anxious to know.

BinaryNights: The final price should be $29.95. This is the first public announcement of the final price, you might want to emphasize that.

Marvin: Really! Wow, I thought it would be around $70 because it has roughly the same functionality as Pathfinder + Transmit + AppZapper, but that’s awesome. So what are your plans for ForkLift and beyond?

BinaryNights: We’ve spent a lot of time developing ForkLift, but we have merely scratched the surface. There are a lot of improvements and new features to come, that will further streamline people’s file management workflow.

We have high hopes for our upcoming plug-in infrastructure, which will hopefully encourage other developers to extend our app even further. In the long run, we want to reposition ourselves as full time shareware developers for this great platform.

Marvin: Looking forward to some great features. Guys, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you all.

So there you have it. An advanced file manager with built-in FTP, an application deleter, live remote editing, plus an upcoming plugin infrastructure. Definitely worth checking out. Download your beta copy from BinaryNights and be sure to send the team some feedback.

But best of all, the price. $29.95. You heard it here first.

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Speaking of the contest, time is running out to get your entries in so I will give you a little update. As of tonight we have just a few videos, but a couple really stick out. We also have a few audio clips, and some unique imagery. I will say that right now anyone with a good idea and a few hours to kill on their Mac, could easily run away with this huge giveaway. I’m not sure why more people aren’t submitting funny or satirical type of entries as a switcher’s story contest pretty much begs for it.

Only 72 hours left for submissions! If you have a good idea for a quick 3 minute video or audio clip, better get on it now. Remember any reasonable entry will be added to the draw for a random winner. Thanks again to those competing and submitting entries, its been tons of fun wading through these all week.

Joseph: What gave you the idea for Growl?

Chris: It’s really 2 things that gave me the idea for Growl. Within the Adium project there were 2 developers. One, Jorge, wanted notifications that looked like the system bezel. The other, Adam Iser, wanted notifications that looked like Colloquy’s notifications. The problem we had with Jorge’s setup was that the system bezel is very hard to make everyone like.
For those who remember Adium from 3 years ago, there were a ton of options for just the bezel we had in Adium. There were so many that they were all in Advanced. Something had to give!

The other bit is that I was tired of being able to have more information in the system via one system; unified; standard. I needed more metadata about what was going on, and I needed it in a single way.

I got the idea when I had an IM from a coworker for a high priority customer when I was mailing my boss about something with a lower, but serious priority. That was it

Joseph: Beside the apps you work with, what’s your favorite app?

Chris: There’s so many to choose from! I like this one app called MineSwept, which is a pretty good Minesweeper clone. SubEthaEdit is also pretty great, along with Swear and Jisho.

Joseph: How did you get to work with Adium?

Chris: I started off helping on the forums. Before there was Trac (ticket system/wiki), I maintained a rather massive forum post. Basically it contained all the requests on the forums. When people would post to it, I’d have to update the first post so bugs wouldn’t be flooded too the depths of the black hole which is page 2 of the forum. That lasted only 3 months.

Joseph: Other than Adium, what other apps do/did you work on?

Chris: Before Adium I worked on an IRC bot called iTonamaton. It’s the only Cocoa IRC bot that I know of. Though iTonamaton is now defunct.
Besides Adium, I currently work on Growl, Perian, and Family.

Joseph: Can you tell me a little bit about those last two apps?

Chris: Sure, I’ll go with Perian first. Perian is a QuickTime component, basically the rebirth of the FFusion component. It allows you to play things in QuickTime enabled applications which you couldn’t play in them otherwise. For instance, I can play FLV (Flash videos, such as videos from YouTube) in NicePlayer. Full screen and the works! We have a whole slew of codecs that it plays, adding more with each release. Right now we’re at .5, with 1.0 we’ll add Matroska (mkv) and subtitle support in some codecs.

Family is a genealogy (family tree) application. The difference between Family and other genealogy applications is that Family is easier to just get started with. We don’t base Family on the prevalent format for genealogy (GEDCOM), so we can do things that aren’t forced by the format.

Joseph: When did you first start programming?

Chris: I started trying to learn to program in 2000 at a intro to C++ class at the local college. Ever since then I’ve been working on little applications here and there that help me get some stuff done. For the most part on the projects I work on I take more of a support and administrative role, along with input on the direction of each of the projects. The exception of that is with Family.

Joseph: I’m currently hoping to learn to program, starting off with Ruby. Are there any tips you can give to our readers (including me) that want to program?

Chris: Two tips:
When you start learning with whatever study material you have, start working on small mini projects. It doesn’t matter what they do, so long as you actually learn the concepts you are reading. The second is, just stick with it!

Joseph: Finishing up this interview, what do you like to do in your spare time?

Chris: Hrmm… spare time? Well, I have a Wii, Xbox 360, and a DS lite. I play those a lot. I also go to the gym, work a full time job, and spend time with my wife. I’m on the lookout for a decent rock gym in the Houston area, too.

Joseph: Well that wraps things up, thanks for your time Chris!

Chris: Thank you very much as well!

Feel free to check out Chris’ Blog.

William: Why did you first decide to create VirtueDesktops? What were some challenges you had to get past to get it working?

Tony: First up – I didn’t create VirtueDesktops. Thomas Staller started the original Virtue project in about August 2004 (at least that’s when the project first appeared on Sourceforge). I picked up the project in late 2005 after tinkering with the source to get it working under Tiger. It had been abandoned for a while. I didn’t originally intend to do any more than get the application working, but I guess I figured that the experience of resurrecting an open source project could be quite a lot of fun (and I felt I needed the experience).

Second question: obviously Thomas faced the harder challenges of getting Virtue off the ground – he based his original work off the work that Rich Wareham (http://filecoreinuse.livejournal.com/) did with DesktopManager. I guess this is a good time to clear that up too – when I say “based off”: Rich did a lot of work reverse engineering the private CoreGraphics calls into a useable header file (CGSPrivate.h), and decoding how the calls actually worked. Virtue uses that header file, and Apple’s private APIs to create and manage virtually created desktops, but Virtue’s actual data model, application flow and features are all it’s own and not based on DesktopManager’s source.

Rich also got involved again when Tiger was released and updated the CGSPrivate header to work properly, as some of the APIs had been changed and removed. There’s a great article on OSNews that outlines how he did this (I don’t have the URL handy).

My work just involved dealing with some issues around mach_inject under 10.4 (which the inimitable Jon Rentzsch helped me understand, and ended up fixing), and then the whole change in security model on Intel-based macs that required mach_inject applications to do extra footwork. The challenges I’ve faced have been more around my own understanding of the tools, APIs and code than actual interesting reverse engineering work!

Interesting fact of the day: Apple has always referred to virtual desktops as “Workspaces” – all of the calls use this terminology, and their preliminary terminology for Spaces does as well. The CoreGraphics calls have been there for at least 2 major revisions, and I had heard unsubstantiated rumours from a very credible source that Apple has had virtual desktops working internally for longer again.

William: You’ve said that you’re “just starting out with mac programming”, yet you’ve created an application that many people swear by. What does that feel like? Did you have any idea that your app would be so well received?

Tony: Well, I guess I addressed that in my answer to the first question: it’s not really my concept or my (original) code, so I don’t feel that I deserve the kudos here – that belongs to Thomas and the original project contributors. It’s great that people find it so useful – that was one of the reasons I wanted to resurrect the project: I personally loved Virtue back under Panther.

Many people count on VirtueDesktops as an integral part of their system, alongside apps like Quicksilver and Growl. Why do you think this is? What apps could you not live without?

I think Mac users are inherently task focused – we put a lot of emphasis on how we do things, and the amount of effort that each task requires. Tools like VirtueDesktops, QuickSilver and Growl all simplify the user’s workflow in some manner, and therefore save us time. While I’m not sure that VirtueDesktops is deserving of the following comment, QuickSilver and Growl both have a certain elegance to them as well – they both address problems in an incredibly intuitive manner. Users like to feel like they’re solving problems intelligently.

What could I not live without? By day, I’m a glasses-wearing programmer for a University – it’s only by night that I put on the CodeCape – so my must have apps are a little webby:

* QuickSilver
* Growl
* CSSEdit
* Mail.app (IMO the simplest, most efficient mail client out there)
* TextMate
* Parallels Desktop
* NetNewsWire

At the very least, those are bound to hotkeys on my keyboard (as well as Xcode, but don’t talk to me about Xcode until version 3 is out!).

William: What do you think of the other Mac virtual desktop apps? (besides Spaces). What makes VirtueDesktops different?

Tony: VirtueDesktops takes the kitchen sink approach to virtual desktops. That’s a bit of a double-edged sword, in so much as I think I may have got a little carried away there for a while with superfluous features. The other virtual desktop tools are in my opinion either too simple (DesktopManager), or unpolished. VirtueDesktops addressed this by trying to organise your workflow around the three major objects that you interact with when dealing with virtual desktops: Applications, Desktops and Windows (as opposed to just leaving users with tools that didn’t tie these object together). It also had a philosophy of staying out of your way until you needed it, so aside from the tiny menu icon, you could continue to work as you normally would. VirtueDesktops was also the first to integrate motion and light sensors as triggers. Superfluous features indeed!

I think any person/company that decides to develop a virtual desktop app on the Mac has to be a little bit less than sane, or make a lot of money. There are lots of foibles that you have to deal with in Apple’s implementation, so they all deserve kudos.

William: Did you expect Apple to pull spaces out of their MacWorld hat? What was your initial reaction?

Tony: To be honest, no. I was able to attend WWDC last year (it was a blast), so I was there for the announcement – people were asking me before the keynote whether I thought Apple might do virtual desktops, but it just seemed so contrary to their approach so far. In my opinion, exposé _was_ Apple’s response to virtual desktops.

When they brought the first screen of Leopard up on the stage, I remember noticing the Spaces icon in the dock and thinking to myself “Wow – if that’s what I think it is, I can trash my voodoopad document outlining the next version of Virtue”. I was sitting with Jan Van Boghout and Nick Peelman (hi guys!) and they both thought it was fairly hilarious. I was annoyed for about 30 seconds – at least until they demoed how well Spaces worked – then I was just impressed. It’s nothing new, but it’s got that typical Apple style to it that just works.

William: What had you been planning for VirtueDesktops before the announcement? How would it have progressed had Spaces not come along?

Tony: Well, I was going to rename/rewrite it. “Foci” was at the top of the list (I still like that name – I call dibs on it). I was also going to drop the GPL and replace it with a license that would have allowed the code to be re-used. Plenty of people would like to integrate virtual desktop compatibility into their apps, but unless they too are a GPL app, the license was preventing that. Nick Jitkoff showed me a QuickSilver plugin that interacted directly with the available desktops quite some time ago, but QuickSilver isn’t GPL so releasing it would have been a bad thing.

In terms of features, I had some sketches that looked remarkably like Spaces overview mode – a grid of desktops where you could just drag your stuff about. Also, Virtue was in need of a serious overhaul – the Xcode project was one of the most complicated I had ever worked with (I spent the entire night before the keynote @ WWDC re-arranging a bevy of sub-projects into a single project file), and the application design needed refreshing. I had lots of ideas, but they would have all take quite a while to program and design.

William: What features does it have now that Spaces won’t have? What ways can you just simply not compete?

Tony: Hmmm, I have to be careful how I answer this – Spaces’ feature-set is covered under my NDA with Apple. In terms of what is public – VirtueDesktops has quite a few options that Spaces doesn’t have, especially with regards to the concept of desktop decorations. VirtueDesktops allows you to place images, colours and customised text onto individual desktops to clearly, visually indicate where you are. In the previews that Apple has given publicly so far, Spaces does not allow this – then again, Spaces is not released (or finalised) yet. Apple might decide to take a little inspiration.

In terms of competing, the big issue is likely to be the APIs – there’s every chance that I could make VirtueDesktops run under Leopard (although my NDA prevents me from divulging specifics of whether or not this is actually possible), but the fact is that VirtueDesktops uses private APIs to provide it’s core functionality – Apple can move the goal posts any time they like. Chris Forsythe, also known to the community as The_Tick (and a good friend of mine) said to me after WWDC that he considers Apple bundling any of his programs into the operating system as the entire point of starting projects like Growl, Adium or Virtue. Seriously, if iChat had all of the features that Adium has, I don’t think there be a need for Adium (although it would no longer have the simplicity that iChat is famous for) – same with Growl – I’d love to see an integrated user notification system built into the operating system. So in that light, I feel like I’ve succeeded.

I think there will still be a market for third-party virtual desktop apps under Leopard – iChat vs Adium is the example I’d use. There’s always going to be a market for enhanced versions of Apple’s applications.

Virtue’s code base is also very large, and the design of the application design is somewhat dated in terms of the technology Apple has made available to us in Tiger. It needed a rethink and a rewrite (and I had started one over the last couple of months, but never completed the work).

William: VirtueDesktops was freeware, and now it will be open source. Have you ever thought of making it shareware?

Tony: I’m not quite sure how the idea that VirtueDesktops was anything but open source got started! VirtueDesktops has always been open source – the source was available back when Thomas worked on it, and there may have been a brief period when I was taking over that it wasn’t, but even now you can go check the latest code out of subversion.

In answer to the question, no, I never considered making VirtueDesktops shareware – it simply wasn’t my call – the license was already in place, and I promised Thomas when I took over that it would remain open for as long as I was running the project. I toyed with the idea of a pay-for version of Foci – given the effort it would have required, I think that would have been fair.

William: What’s next for you? What’s your next app that will embed itself into our Macs?

Tony: Oooh. Well, I’m currently working on two projects – one of them is still under discussion, and hopefully I’ll be talking about that on my blog in the coming month (it’s going to be another “must-have” application if all goes according to plan though). The other is a commercial/shareware app I’m currently designing to help with my day job (and this is the first time I’ve spoken about it publicly). We’re currently going through a major web-site rebuild at the University where I work, and one of the really big time-sucking tasks that you have to do is an audit of what you’ve currently got up there on your site. My app aims to automate this process, report on the outcomes and look all sorts of validity issues. There is simply nothing good and reasonably priced in the application market to do this work. It will all be wrapped up in a hot mac UI, obviously. I’m aiming for a Leopard release with that app.

Other than that, just taking some downtime – running an open source project is a huge undertaking for a single person, and it takes a lot out of you. It’s hard to keep a constant level of enthusiasm for a product going forever, and I’m going to be glad not to see another private CoreGraphics call for a while.

William: Good luck with your future endeavors, and thank you so much for answering my questions!

Tony: You’re very welcome. Thanks for the interest!

When did you first start developing? How long have you used a Mac, and why did you decide to develop for the platform over Windows?

I guess my first development was on a Ti-83 calculator. I played around with it during math class because I was bored. Clearly nothing all that interesting came out of that.

I’ve used a Mac since I can remember. I used old Apple-IIe’s in school at some point. At home we had an IBM with DOS on it for a little while, but after that it was pretty much always a Mac. I convinced my parents to get an iMac (strawberry) when we needed a computer for our family. The reason I thought it would be better then a Windows machine was that I’d always tinkered around with our Macs in the past, so I knew what was going on and would know how to fix any issues with it.

My initial reason for developing for a Mac over Windows was because I didn’t have a Windows machine. My reason developing for a Mac now is because I still don’t have a Windows machine. If I did have a machine that could run Windows, I’d wipe it clean and install Linux, so I probably won’t be developing for Windows any time soon (unless it’s for work).

How did you first learn to code? What apps do you use to develop?

I first started learning how to program with higher level languages after my Junior year of high school. I always wanted to learn how to make applications for my computer, so I borrowed a C++ book from a friend and taught myself C++ over the summer. I learned Objective-C and Cocoa at the same time because I wanted to make applications that could run on my computer.

I use XCode for Cocoa applications. I don’t really like it that much, though. It leads to a cluttered work place.

I use TextMate (http://www.macromates.com/) for any other development. I love TextMate. It’s the best software purchase I’ve made to date.

How do you decide which apps to create?

I create applications that I will use. If I wouldn’t use it, why would anyone else?

If I think of a good idea, I first think about how often I would use it. If it’s not something that I would use a lot I don’t even bother to write the idea down.

What is your development process? Do you work on an app one at a time? How often and for how long do you work?

I try to work on my projects as much as possible. Being a student, though, it’s hard to find time sometimes. Generally I try to work on one thing at a time, but recently I’ve found myself jumping around a bit.

What do you think of promotions like MacAppADay and MacHeist? Are they effective? Are they a good thing?

To be honest, I haven’t heard of them. After looking them up, I realize why I haven’t heard of them. I don’t charge for my software. These sites are about giving away software at a lesser price or free. I give away free software every day.

Do I think they’re effective? Most likely. I know the reason that my applications have become popular is simply because they are free, so these sites probably help promote the applications a lot by basically giving away the software.

Do I think they’re a good thing? I think there is good and bad in them. MacAppADay’s website is ‘under new management,’ so I’ll comment on what I read from MacHeist. I use one of the applications from the last MacHeist bundle, TextMate. It’s a great application. I’m glad that I paid for it in full. I think the author deserves every cent I paid him because it’s an amazing application that has significantly increased my productivity. Of the other applications, there’s not one that I would use, so it wouldn’t have saved me any money. It’s such a random assortment of applications, that I think few people would use more than 2 of them. Another good thing is that 25% of your purchase is given to charity, which is great. I give a percentage of money generated by Fadingred.org donations to charity, too. This leads me to the bad, though. $200,000 was raised for charity, which means that $800,000 was raised. If each author agreed to give away unlimited licenses for a day (or whatever period the heist is run for) in order to make a quick $20,000, that’s still only $200,000 that MacHeist has to give back to the authors leaving them with a profit of nearly $400,000. I guess that’s not really a bad thing. It’s just not something that I support.

What do you think of Cha-Ching in regards to competition to your app Cashbox? Will you continue to upgrade it?

Cha-Ching looks like an interesting alternative to Cashbox. At this point, it looks better than Cashbox, but I have an extreme update to Cashbox in progress. Whether or not it’s better makes little difference. Choice is great for users. Users having more alternatives to Quicken and Excel is a very good thing.

Which was your favorite app to develop? Which was the easiest?

My favorite to develop is Senuti. There are a lot of challenges with Senuti. I like a good challenge. The easiest to develop is hard to say. iColors is the simplest, but it was one of the first applications that I wrote, so it was hard to me then. I’m in the process of rewriting both Cashbox and Senuti. I’m changing a lot of the code behind the applications. I’ve learned a lot since I started the applications and realize that I made a lot of poor design decisions in the past. They work just fine, but to me there is a lot of room for improvement. There’s always room for improvement which is what makes it fun!

What are your favorite apps to use?

My favorite to use is Cashbox. I use it daily. I’m really looking forward to finishing the next version and using that.

What do you think of Leopard? Will you take advantage of any of the new features for you apps?

Leopard looks neat. I’ll reserve judgement until using it. Apple likes to make a huge deal about new things. It’s hard to say anything until getting your hands dirty.

What are your favorite hobbies? You say on your website you like photography. Tell us a little about that. What do you like to shoot and what sort of camera do you have? Do you have a Flickr page?

I have a D70s which I haven’t gotten as much of an opportunity to use as I would like. It’s a little too cold out these days to go spend a lot of time outside. No Flickr page, sorry. I also like playing guitar and cooking. They’re all just hobbies, though. I’m not really all that good at any of them.

Do you have any plans for upcoming apps? Any chance you’ll give us a sneak peek?

I have plans, yes. I hope you’ll get to see some of them. Can’t give away all of my creative ideas, though.

One plan that I do have is to write a book about how to program. I don’t know when I’ll find the time to write it, but I think that there should be a free resource out there for people to learn how to program. A lot of books do a very poor job explaining the basics of programming. I also think it would be a good experience trying to put into clear, concise words everything that I’ve learned through the years.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. For anyone interested in Whitney’s apps, you can see what he’s created here.

MacApper: Thanks for joining us Austin!

Austin: No problem

MacApper: There was some controversy over the so-called “lack of features” in Disco, do you think that affected it’s sales or boosted them?

Austin: I think for the most part the controversy surrounding Disco has been regarding the supposed “style over substance” ideology that people think we relied on entirely. Things like spandex, discography, as well as the ease of use of the app itself are (we feel) innovations in an otherwise repetitive market. We absolutely value style, probably more than most… and as soon as our use of style stops exponentially increasing both our exposure and sales, we’ll be the first to tone down.

MacApper: What Mac(s) do you currently use in your office to develop your apps?

Austin: I’m running a first generation (i.e. buggy as all hell) MacBook Pro, and I’ve got a 23 inch Cinema that I dock with.

MacApper: Nice, At the Macworld Expo this year you had a small stand displaying Disco and AppZapper, any plans for next year?

Austin: We’ve already reserved a gigantic and well placed 10×20 booth for Macworld 2008, and you can expect a stylish booth design as well as more than just AppZapper and Disco on display.

MacApper: Does this mean your hinting towards a new application?

Austin: Hahaha… certainly not. Most likely MacZOT and some other friends of ours will be showing their products at the booth. After Disco and the upcoming Cookbook, I have no plans to develop another app for awhile.

MacApper: Speaking of Macworld, The iPhone was a big part of this years Macworld, If you could develop an app (existing or new) for the iPhone, which would that be?

Austin: Disco for the iPhone, of course. We’d also market a hardware CD drive add on.

MacApper: One more thing (Steve Jobs moment), any chance we could get a few Zap’d t-shirts from you?

Austin: Haha… well we’ll be giving out a bunch of free ones at WWDC so you can stop by there. We’re planning to allow people to buy t-shirts from our sites, eventually.

MacApper: Well, its been great talking to you Austin, good luck with Cookbook and next year Macworld!

Austin: Thanks again.

Contest: We have three (3) copies of Disco to giveaway thanks to Austin and the Disco crew. To enter the draw, simple leave a comment on this post.

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We had time to sit down with Dustin MacDonald and ask him a few questions about application development, and how he codes. Keep reading for your chance to win a copy of Wallet.

MacApper: Thanks for joining us Dustin!

Dustin: Thanks for having me.

MacApper: Your most popular application to date has been Wallet, are you planning any major updates to it in the near future?

Dustin: At the moment there are no major updates in the works, mostly because I am working on another new project.

MacApper: Care to elaborate or are you keeping it top secret?

Dustin: Well, right now it’s top secret, but it’s definitely the coolest project I’ve been apart of. Should be released this year.

MacApper: Can’t Wait, You haven’t been coding too long, what has been the highlight of your developing career so far?

Dustin: I’ve been keeping Waterfall Software as a hobby for a while now, but the success of Wallet has definitely been the highlight for me so far.

MacApper: What Mac(s) do you currently use in your office to develop your apps?

Dustin: I have a Core Duo Mac mini that I used to test Universal apps on, but now I also have a MacBook Pro 15″, which has become my main development machine.

MacApper: Speaking of Apple hardware, the iPhone was a big part of this years Macworld, if you could develop an app (existing or new) for the iPhone, which would that be?

Dustin: I’d love to see a trimmed-down version of Wallet on the iPhone obviously, but I think there is lots of room for innovative apps on a phone so I’d have to give it some thought.

MacApper: What can we expect from you in the future?

Dustin: As I mentioned earlier, I’m working on a top secret new project. Those are my only plans as of now.

MacApper: Ok, thanks Dustin for spending the time to answer these questions, and good luck with your new top secret project!

Dustin: No problem. Thanks Jack.

Contest

To celebrate the release of MacApper, we have copies of Dustin’s groundbreaking app Wallet to give away to three (3) lucky readers.

To enter the draw, simply post a comment on this article – we will announce three winners on February the 9th at 12PM EST.

Update: If you like this post, you canDigg it.