macelleria

Milen Dzhumerov [Cosmic Machine] Interview

2008-11-13T15:57:00.000-08:00

Milen & Chris are The Cosmic Machine, the developers behind the brand new app (and still in Beta), EventBox. EventBox attempts to unite all your favorite social sites (like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Pownce and RSS feeds) into a single awesome-looking app for the mac.

Who are "The Cosmic Machine"?

The Cosmic Machine is a limited liability partnership between me (Milen) and my friend Chris.

Is this your first attempt at writing software for the Mac?

We've written other small applications but nothing has been publicly released before, so in a sense, it is our first serious project.

How did you get the idea of EventBox?

It is a kind of strange story. Chris' brother (http://de-online.co.uk/2008/11/08/eventbox) asked him to create an application to view recent Flickr and Facebook photos. In the time, I was more into Digg / Reddit and Twitter. So Chris said that he will be working on this during the summer and I thought a little about unifying both applications - that's where the idea of EventBox was born.

I've read on your site that you are planning on expanding the number of social sites supported. Sites like delicious, lastfm and orkut are indeed needed. How about other popular sites like MySpace, FriendFeed etc?

Currently, we receive a lot of requests from users about more social services. The truth is, we will eventually support most of them, it is just a matter of time. If more people request service X, we will do service X. We've got del.icio.us, last.fm and Orkut on the list. I guess many more services will follow as time passes.

How about the UI? When will we peek at the HUD interface that will make EventBox more compact and streamlined?

When we started designing the UI, we basically had two choices - whether to use CoreAnimation (Leopard's new advanced graphics technology) or just plain Cocoa. It was a bet which we didn't know whether it would pay off - and we think it did. Everything in the main events view is custom and we have full control over it, we can do nice animations, dynamic content sizing, etc. The HUD interface was in the works and partly working - we've just disabled it for the meantime until it is finished. I cannot give any estimates for the HUD but it is one of the main visible features being worked on as we speak.

Tell us more about Newsgator syncing. I'm an avid user of NetNewsWire and I consider it the best RSS client out there. Is EventBox ready for a huge number of feeds, because NNW is doing a fine job speed-wise maintaining large libraries of RSS feeds.

Our RSS reader is rather simplistic at the moment - but it does the job. NewsGator have an API which allows 3rd parties to sync with it, so you will be able to have NNW, NNW for the iPhone and EventBox all stay in sync. Chris is also looking into support Google Reader but since it does not have an official API, we cannot say with certainty whether it is going to make its way into EventBox or not.

Any plans for an iPhone EventBox companion app?

Internally, EventBox was designer to be portable across the Mac and iPhone. Our current plan is to firstly finish the Mac version, polish it, fix bugs and basically bring out a solid 1.0. Then we can focus on the iPhone companion app.

How hard is it to combine different set of web APIs to a single application?

Our architecture is plugin based - so the answer is, pretty easy as far integration between the services and the main app goes. The different APIs all have their own quirks but there is nothing that cannot be fixed. There is one very annoying move made by the web sites which provide these services (there are a few exceptions) - they restrict what you can do with the API in order have an advantage over a native application.

What apps occupy your dock?

Transmit, Skype, iCal, iTunes, CSSEdit, Xcode, TextMate, Activity Monitor, Terminal, EventBox.
Chris has a very busy dock but I don't remember exactly what apps he has.

That's about it. Feel free to supplement anything else you might want to communicate. Thanks for your time!

We've just slashed the price of EventBox to $15 during the beta period as a compensation to our early adopters. We're looking forward to adding more features to EventBox and pleasing all of our customers.

There is a 14-day trial period so I suggest you download EventBox and try the app for yourself!

Tom Cain Interview

2008-02-26T02:02:00.001-08:00

Tom Cain is the sole developer of Smallware, a software company focused on gaming. So far, Smallware has published two games for the mac platform: Solavant, a solitaire suite with over 200 solitaire games and Septavo Tangram that features 1000 Tangram puzzles. This is his interview:

What got you started on building software for the mac and creating Smallware Software (cool name btw)?

I've been a Mac user for a long time. My original profession is graphic design, which I have a BFA in, where Macs have a strong presence. The advertising industry that I worked in for many years uses Macs almost exclusively in the art departments.

Smallware itself started when I saw an opportunity to make software for the Palm handheld platform. I have a background in programming and studied it as a minor in college. The Apple Newton handheld was a device I really liked and I had played around with making software for it. When the Palm came out I was pretty sure it would take off, so I wanted to try making software for it. Two partners and I owned a small ad agency at the time and I convinced them that we should try branching into software. It was just a sideline idea. So "Smallware" originally applied to a company that made handheld software where the name was more clever. :)

Around 2004 it was clear that the once fast-moving Palm software market had slowed down. I wanted to branch onto another platform and I wanted it to be niche. Mac was an obvious choice for me - I'd been using them since the Mac IIsi.

You create games that "challenge your mind". Solavant is a great paradigm and the same thing goes for your newest game, Septavo Tangram. In the age of "instant gratification" and cheap thrills in gaming and elsewhere, do you find it hard to "sell" these kind of games that rely on your brain instead of fancy visuals? What's your target group?

It actually isn't as hard a sell as it first seems. There is likely an audience for just about anything and most of them aren't served very well because most software products target the largest common denominator. It's risky to develop for niches because the audiences are smaller. On the other hand, it's risky to develop for large audiences because of competition.

It became clear to me as I developed Smallware's original Palm solitaire product through 4 versions that there was an underserved audience of clearly intelligent people that enjoyed thinking games. The product evolved in that direction based on user feedback. As a graphic designer I tended to want to make the visuals fancier, but the audience actually preferred the cleaner, simpler look. I just carried this idea with me onto the Mac with Solavant Solitaire. The Mac itself and it's audience fit well with this idea. Smallware software isn't for everyone, but the people who do like it tend to *really* like it. That's the best kind of user a software company can have, in my opinion.

What kind of development tools do you use to create / enhance your apps?

I've been using REALbasic to create the Mac software. It was suited for the type of games I planned to make and it was going to be easier for me to get up to speed with. Also, I had never developed for desktop computers before and didn't know what to expect. I was planning to make a niche product on a niche platform - so, honestly, I felt better knowing that REALbasic would let me port the game easily to other desktop platforms.

But my hunch was right and the Mac is an even better commercial software environment than I thought. I do like the idea of Apple's native Cocoa environment and hope to use it someday for other games.

You had/have a very successful Solitaire suite for the Palm platform. Now that the iPhone/iPod Touch platform is making waves as the "next big thing" in mobile platforms and Apple will provide an SDK for it, do you plan on building the definite Solitaire Suite for the iPhone? The touchscreen interface seems like a perfect fit for these kind of games.

You're right about the touchscreen and the potential of the device. I have an iPhone now specifically to explore it's development possibilities. I'm planning to make software for the iPhone if Apple releases the SDK in a way that works for Smallware. Right now I don't know if the platform will be completely open like the Mac or closed off like you see with videogame consoles. If they close it, I'm not sure how Smallware could afford to work with it. Apple has expressed security concerns and closed development is a way to handle that. We'll have to see how they do it.

I actually don't plan to build *the* solitaire suite for the iPhone. I believe a definitive suite would require features that Smallware won't include because it doesn't best serve our thinking audience. I hope to build the definitive solitaire suite for our typical audience, though. :)

Also, I do have a working prototype of our software running on iPhone's Safari browser, which I let you try out last month. I think the browser works well for lots of different apps, but maybe not for games. Our games don't even have much animation in them, but the input feels very slow using the browser. I think our audience may be disappointed with a web solitaire game because of how it will behave, so I'm holding out for the native SDK.

Your Solitaire suite for the mac, Solavant (and it's stripped down version Sol Basics Solitaire), is in my opinion, the best looking Solitaire game for the mac platform. There are a lot of trashy looking Solitaires out there but yours stands out for it's classy visuals. Septavo Tangram also offers a great interface, that knows when to avoid excessive use of flashy animations. Did you design the UI and the elements of all your apps by yourself?

Thanks! Yes, I design everything myself including the software web sites. To me, there's a certain look that Mac applications should have and that's the direction I'm taking it in. I actually don't think Solavant is quite there yet. I've made some slight interface changes in version 2.5 that's being released this week, and there will be even bigger changes in version 3.0. I think I'll have it "right" in version 3.

One problem is the temptation to add more visual stuff. Some players ask for extra things that are good ideas, but they don't quite fit with the overall goal. I hate disappointing players, but Solavant probably isn't really what they're looking for. There are some other good solitaire games out there that they would like better. I'm afraid that if I adapt Solavant to please everyone then it will end up pleasing no one.

However, lots of people have requested alternate deck choices and that's something I hope to get in by version 3. The best thing may be allow players to design their own decks and share them since the Mac has lots of very artistic users.

Solavant 2.0 introduced a community aspect to the game. You can sync your wins with Smallware's servers and get other people's wins as well. You can then chose to play games that are "winnable". There are more than 77.000 winnable deals on your server right now, so I guess that the new feature was a success. What got you to introduce this feature? What's in store for Solavant 3.0?

An interesting puzzle for solitaire developers is the idea of offering deals that are known to be winnable. "Winnable" means the deck isn't completely stacked against you because of the random shuffle. Those kinds of games are the worst because you lose even though you didn't make any mistakes. So it's known that winnable deals may be preferable to some players.

The puzzle is how to make sure the deck is winnable. The discussions tend to drift toward complex algorithms or genetic things that go over my head where the software takes any given shuffle and plays it out in every possible way to determine if it is winnable. It just occured to me one day that the result of doing that would be trillions+ of known winnable deals. Who is going to play all of those? No one could possibly do it, so what good would having that many known winnable deals be? That's when I realized that the players themselves were solving this particular puzzle as they played - players were figuring out what deals were winnable by winning. After that realization I just fixed it so players could easily send those won deals to the server and others could download them.

Here's something that occured to me once I saw how many people were using the feature: do people enjoy playing winnable games, or do they actually enjoy winning the games and sending them to the server? I have no idea if anyone plays the winnable deals, I just know they are contributing them. So for version 3 I plan to build in optional player profiles so other players can see who is contributing what. This should be more fun for people who enjoy syncing a batch of wins to the server.

How do you choose what your next software/game is going to be? Do you evaluate the market first by doing research and trying to feel a "void" or do you simply choose to create a game that interests you no matter the number of contenders in the same space?

My problem here is my marketing training. I think I spend too much time analyzing the market and kill off some potentially good ideas because I don't think they are viable. It would be different if Smallware was hugely rich, but right now I can't afford for a game to do poorly. But I do over-analyze.

The good thing about making games is that they really don't compete like other software does. There are people who play multiple solitaire packages because of their differences. These kinds of people are in Smallware's audience because people who do this tend to be fanatical about their game choice, and I like fanatics. :)

However, I do think it's important to fill a void if your goal is to make a living. Burning Monkey Solitaire for Mac is a really good piece of software, especially if you like the humorous angle it has. It wouldn't make sense to try to make a "better" Burning Monkey Solitaire package, it's already great. It makes more sense to make a solitaire package that's nothing like Burning Monkey for people who prefer something other than the humorous angle. At least it does to me.

Septavo is a great way to waste some limited free time, between tasks etc. It's also the first game for Smallware, available for the Windows platform as well. This, seems to follow a trend of other previous mac-only software houses, like Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil and Plasq's Comic Life that now have Windows versions counterparts. What's the story behind this decision? What's the sales ratio between the mac and Windows versions of Septavo?

I saw this opportunity in the number of people searching Google and Yahoo for tangram software. I used to love playing tangrams as a kid and made my first tangram game for the Palm platform. There really aren't any big, modern tangram software packages for any desktop platform, so I thought I'd try to make something for those people searching for it. I figured a lot of those searches would be school-related and that lots of schools would be using Windows, so I decided to make it for both platforms to cast the widest net. Plus, the REALbasic software I was using made it trivial to make a Windows version as well.

Some of my assumptions proved to be wrong. The Mac version is outdoing the Windows version 5 to 1. I think it's because Smallware's typical audience gravitates toward the Mac. There are changes I could make to Septavo to appeal more to the Windows crowd and I've considered making them, but ultimately decided against it. Septavo is pretty much what I wanted to make, and it seems Mac users like what I make more than Windows users. So there will probably not be any more software released by Smallware that runs on Windows because I don't think it's worth the effort.

(That sounds weird to me, because in my experience the vast majority of developers look at it from the opposite direction: Is it worth the effort to develop for Mac.)

I noticed that you offer a lot of pricing flexibility for your Solitaire games. One can choose between the stripped down version, Sol Basics Solitaire, that offers 3 popular card games (Spider, Klondike & Free Cell) for 9.99$, the Solavant Spider that offers 12 Spider-like solitaires for 15$, the Solavant Core edition for 17$ that offers the 25 most popular Solitaire games and finally Solavant with all 223 solitaire games in 3 editions as well: Student licence for 17$, Single license for 27$ and Family license for 37$. How is that working for you? Don't your customers get confused? Do you offer post-upgrade options as well? Let's say I bought Sol Basics Solitaire and enjoyed it so much, I decide to buy a single license of Solavant. Do I get a discount?

I haven't had any players complain about being confused, but they could just not be telling me. :)

At first we only offered the full Solavant package with the three licensing options. The Solavant Core and Spider versions were added later because lots of players were asking for stripped-down versions. They liked the idea of hard solitaire, but they didn't care about a large number of games.

Later I discovered that I had this all wrong. It took some talking with players over time before I figured it out. Most of these people were switching to Mac from Windows and OS X does not include any solitaire games like Windows does. Like most of our users, these people are fanatical solitaire players but they just like 1 or 2 game types. After I realized what they really wanted I stripped Solavant down into Sol Basics, which has 2 Klondikes, Free Cell, and 3 Spiders. I knew I had it right when Sol Basics caught Solavant's unit numbers even though it was released a year after Solavant.

Sol Basics is so successful now that the Solavant Core and Solavant Spider packages will no longer be sold as of version 2.5. We sell almost none of these since Sol Basics came out. Current Core and Spider players will be upgraded to 2.5, it's just that version 2.5 won't be sold to new players and will be removed from the order web page.

We do offer upgrades within our solitaire package line and many players have used them. It's a simple formula: Smallware credits you 100% for your previous purchase and applies it to the upgrade. So if you bought Solavant Core for $17 and want to get the full Solavant for $27, just write us and we'll set you up with a store link that let's you upgrade for the $10 difference. There's no time limit on this.

Something I've been meaning to ask you for some time: Where do you get all those ideas for new solitaire games? Solavant 2.5 will add 17 new solitaire games, bringing it to a staggering figure of 240 solitaire games!

I have several reference books that have hundreds of historical solitaire rules and I've developed a few. I come from a huge family where we used to play games a lot as kids, and my grandmother and great-aunts taught me lots of solitaire games. I still have my grandmother's book she taught me from, "150 Ways to Play Solitaire" by Alphonse Moyse published in 1950. Most of the games in Solavant are ones I've known about and played for 20 years. There are certainly more than 1000 known solitaire games and probably many more when you count the proprietary games created for the huge solitaire packages on Windows. Everyone I talk to is surprised by the number, probably because solitaire isn't as popular as it was a hundred years ago.

How about Tom Cain as a mac user? You spend top dollars to get the latest and greatest mac pro hardware or are you a happy macbook user? What's your favorite apps that fill up your dock bar?

We tried to keep cutting-edge if not bleeding-edge Mac hardware in the shop when I was in advertising full time. But the last desktop Mac I had was a G5. Now I have a Macbook Pro and my wife has a Macbook. These Intel Core 2 Duo chips make these the fastest Macs we've ever owned and they can do everything we need. I just hook a Cinema Display, mouse, and keyboard up to mine and I forget it's a laptop. We shouldn't need new Macs for quite a while.

I have REALbasic on there for making software, but otherwise I use fairly standard apps. Safari, TextWrangler and Cyberduck for web development. Photoshop, Illustrator and FontExplorer for design. And Calculator because humans don't add manually any more. :)

Let's get back to the iPhone as a gadget. Do you own one? Do you think that Apple will ignite the mobile "pc" platform market with the iPhone as it did for personal computing with the original Macintosh 24 years ago and digital music industry with the iPod+iTunes ecosystem 7 years ago?

I do have one and it works great. But I've got the same complaint as everyone else - it's slow over the cell data network when you're used to broadband.

I think the iPhone will do very well, but I don't think iPhone will have the same effect as those other Apple products. Mac and iPod were among the first devices in a new tech space, but iPhone is a cell phone and an iPod, both of which have been around for years. From a marketing perspective I don't think the situation is similar enough for ignition. I think they could have done it with the Newton when the handheld idea was new, and would have done it if the press hadn't jumped on the handwriting recognition feature as the "coolest" part of the thing. I think Palm actually ignited this market when they picked up where Newton left off. The growth of Palm devices was staggering.

Also, iPhone is a convergence product, and those typically don't do as well as people think they should. I don't think the "why" of this market phenomena is completely understood but it does happen. Hopefully Apple will get over that hurdle and grow the userbase large enough to keep it going for a long while.

Writing software is cool, especially if you create games. But working for yourself brings lots of problems, the most obvious one being how to convince yourself to get to work. Do you self-impose deadlines to get some work done? What do you do with your spare time?

Writing games is cool, but writing solitaire games is not so much cool. My nephews will tell their friends that I make games which they think is awesome - until I tell them it's solitaire and puzzle games. They just can't get excited about that.

I pretty much float around on getting work done. I've worked for myself or owned the shop since 1994 and I've worked at home for most of that time, so I've learned that I either get it done or I don't eat. Now that I have two kids I tend to take work more seriously. It's not that I'm a flighty type of person. I think it's 4 parts being easily distracted by many projects going on at once, and maybe 1 part laziness. :)

Honestly, I just know that it has to be done and I get it done. There's no formula to it for me. I wish there was, though, I think I could get things done faster.

My spare time right now is taken up with building a house. I'm doing the work with a contractor friend of mine, and we're doing nearly all of it ourselves. Mostly it's to learn how to build a house, but it's also so my family can live in a nice house that we otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. It's been fun so far and it's good exercise for me since I usually work at a desk. I recommend building your own house to anyone with a schedule that allows them to do it, it's going to be a good investment for us.

What's next for Smallware in terms of software?

I have several things I'd like Smallware to release. Currently I'm waiting to see what happens with the iPhone SDK. If that happens in a way that works for Smallware, we'll be making a few apps for it next.

Thanks Tom!

Martin Kahr Interview

2008-01-18T11:26:00.000-08:00

About: Martin Kahr is a mac developer from Austria. He is the developer behind Sofa Control, Searchlight and most recently AlterEgo. This is his interview:

So Martin, how hard is it to be a "relatively" small software company? Do you manage developing / support / customers all by yourself?

As you already mentioned in your question, there is much more than developing the software. Spending a bit more time in a good press release is worth more than adding another feature to your app. As a technician I had to learn a lot in this area and I'm still a novice.
I did these tasks all by myself. This summer I thought about the future of CASE Apps and decided to abandon the Java consultant jobs and that I have to find a partner. I need a partner not just for splitting up the work but for a other important reasons as well.
It makes a big difference to have somebody to match with about feature set, UI concepts, marketing and all the other stuff that comes up daily. Sometimes it's not easy to motivate myself to fix the next 5 bugs or to answer the 20 support emails. The right partner is a big motivator and you are not feeling that overwhelmed by the amount of work that has to be done.
Spending more time on Mac development and splitting up work with a partner makes also room for new products and product updates. The first new product launched back in December.

Is the mac platform a viable business for a developer? CASE Apps, has to my knowledge, 2 shareware apps and a really cool free widget. Are these enough, or do you do some extra work to "keep the boat afloat"?

I started with Mac development 3 years ago. Until today I split my time to do consultant jobs (mostly Java) and for developing Mac software. I'll do some contract work (Mac software as well) the next year but the idea is to get enough out of own products to focus on that alone.

The market share of the Mac is pretty low compared to Windows but big enough to make enough money for living and more.

Let us talk about Searchlight. It's not the first time that Apple "kills" 3rd party apps with the release of a new OS. Leopard brings the ability to spotlight through other computers on the same local network and that was Searchlight's key feature. What will the future bring for Searchlight to compete with a "free" feature of the OS?

I was not upset by Apple when I heard about the new Spotlight feature. In fact it was very reasonable that they will extend the functionality of Spotlight to search on the network as well.
Of course that has a number of implications on Searchlight. We sat back and thought about the markets for Searchlight and came up with something much bigger. So Searchlight will be greatly enhanced and search will only one part of the new product.
We plan to have a first beta out in March.

How did you first start developing apps for the mac? What was your first app?

I started playing with Cocoa late 2003. In 2004 motivated from attending the WWDC for the first time I developed a freeware application with two friends. Searchlight, the first product, has been released in february 2006.

You're a big Apple fan and that holds true for nearly all indie mac developers. What was the craziest thing you ever did for Apple? I'd like to go to a Steve Jobs' keynote someday...

The craziest thing I did with some friends was to go to London for the opening of the Apple Store in the Regent Street. We waited there from 4am in the morning until the shop opening at 10am. When we finally entered the store the guy in front of us got the last "Lucky Bag". What a bummer!
But it was a very funny time waiting and chatting with people in the line.

You are from Vienna, Austria, one of the most beautiful cities of old Europe. Yet, this may be a hurdle for being an Apple fan. You had to wait for 4 months to get your hands on an iPhone for example and selling apps online is hard(er) because of the strength of Euro over Dollar. Here in Greece, things are much worse on Apple support and ecosystem. Do you think that Apple and macs will grow bigger over time and bring Apple's attention to the European market at the same level as with U.S.? Right now the best Apple presence in Europe is in the U.K.

If you go to one of the hype coffee shops in Vienna and look around you would think that the market share of Apple must be about 90% or higher. It looks like Non-Apple-Notebooks are not allowed to be in the wilderness.
That said, the market share of Apple is still very low in Austria (I don't have any numbers but would guess that it's about 3-4%). But I notice that the popularity is constantly rising and you could get Mac products at major electronic stores since a year or so.
It will probably never have the market share as in the US but I guess that a global market share of about 8% and a market share of 6% in europe is reachable in the near future (about 5 years).
The good thing about europe is that there is still a lot of room for companies that are focused on the Mac.

Given the chance, would you work for Apple? They say Jobs rules with an iron fist.

Absolutely. Working for Apple is for sure an adventure.
But it has to be the right job. There was a time where I would have taken any job just to work there.
Right now I find working on the upcoming products we have in the pipeline much more interesting than any job I could probably get at Apple.

I am a big fan of Sofa Control. I think of it as an "interpeter" of keyboard shortcuts and Applescript via the Apple Remote Control. I really like how you can create your own scripts or customize the existing ones without great knowledge about coding. It's one of the best contenders for a media-center mac or controlling lots of apps without a keyboard or mouse. Version 2.0 brought a virtual mouse and 2.2 a virtual keyboard. What's next for Sofa Control? Where do you plan on extending Sofa Control feature list?

Sofa Control will get another update in the next few weeks with some minor enhancements and bug fixes. We already defined the feature list for an upcoming 3.0 version that we plan to release later this year.
It will be Leopard only to be able to use some of the cool new things that came with Leopard. We think about extending the visuals and making it even easier for the user to do his own scripts.

What do you think of the iPhone/iPod touch? In your opinion, what are their major shortcomings (if any)?

The cool thing about the iPhone is that the software and the UI controls matches the abilities of the hardware.
The major achievement of the iPhone is that it didn't take existing UI concepts but that they invented new ones that fit for the device and multi-touch. The major shortcomings are the missing synchronization of Todos and Notes. I'm sure that will be updated by Apple in the near future.

We're very excited as mac users, for the new OSX Mobile platform of iPhone/iPod Touch. The way I see it, this platform will get bigger than the Macintosh business eventually. Now that Jobs (finally) announced plans for real 3rd party apps for the iPhone, do you have any plans for creating a killer iPhone app?

I'm looking forward to third party applications and how they will be delivered to the end user. I think Apple will allow installation of third party apps only through the iTunes application and developers need to submit their applications to be in the iTunes store.
We will do an iPhone application that syncs its data with a Mac application (if there is a sync API). It probably won't be the killer iPhone application but I'm sure it will get some attention. More on that in March hopefully.

Leopard is installed on our macs and now you (developers) can freely talk about its underlying cool new technologies. What's so great in Leopard developer-wise? Will it really make things better and easier for you?

It's incredible how much easier animations are with Core Animation.
I remember the days when I wrote the visuals for Sofa Control and spend hours to improve performance and frames per second to make it as smooth as possible.
Interested persons should check out AlterEgo where I used Core Animation for the whole UI. The cover flow effect is being done with Core Animation as well as the morphing buttons.
So for me as a developer the best thing about Leopard is Core Animation and the enhancements we got in Core Data and Cocoa. Interface builder is a huge leap forward and some Objective-C 2.0 enhancements are also very cool.

The inclusion of Wikipedia on Dictionary.app and its plugin-ability is one of my best "small" new features of Leopard. What's yours?

My favorite small features are in Xcode and Interface builder. Both applications are improved in a number of ways that make my daily life as programmer a lot easier. The Xcode editor can be launched from the command line with "xed". Since that I abandoned the use of TextMate for most jobs. TextMate is a great product but I found myself using only 5% of the feature set. I prefer to know one editor pretty well and therefore try to stick with the Xcode build in.
My favorite non-developer feature is the increased speed of Spotlight. I use spotlight for launching applications, searching for source code and documents.

Your dock bar contains...

Beside standard Apple applications I only have Things in the Dock. I'm using Spotlight as an application launcher for the rest. I'm not using that many third party applications. I use MarsEdit for blogging, iWork for Office stuff, Coda for the website stuff and Xcode for editing. I recently switched to Google Reader for reading RSS feeds as it has that nice iPhone interface as well.

Any plans on a cool new app?

There are a number of things in the pipeline for the first half of this year. The brand new "Searchlight" is already in work and we will launch a new product that has an iPhone interface.

Other than Apple products, where else do you divide your time?

Since last year I'm doing a lot of sports. After using my body for years just to move my head from A to B that's a totally new thing for me :-)
I'm running and play tennis.
Beside that I'm constantly searching for new places that serve good food (therefore I have to do sports as well). If you plan to visit Vienna send me a message and I'll give you some recommendations of some great restaurants.
I also like to match with my nephews in console games (preferable PES - Pro Evolution Soccer).

Time travel isn't at all possible but let's say we fast forward 5 years from now: What changes do you think we'd see on the tech industry? Where do Apple, Google and Microsoft stand?

Microsoft will still be the big company as it is today. No one could get their OS/Office market anytime soon. But as I read somewhere some time ago, Microsoft isn't the company to be afraid of. They want nock you out because they come up with a more innovative product. They probably will buy your company but they will not surprise with big innovations.

Google will try to extend its market in different areas. It will be interested to see if Android (the google mobile phone OS) will get a reasonable market share. I'm not sure about how good it works out to provide a OS for devices that have completely different specs (touch, wheels, normal buttons, ...). Hopefully Google will improve the UIs of their web apps in the next year. They are useable but not very attractive.

And Apple. Who knows. I think that they still will do different things from Macs, iTunes to iPhone and Pro-Business (FinalCut, XServe, ...). Beside the iPhone I guess they will focus more on the living room and how to get their AppleTVs and other hardware installed there.
The Mac and Mac OS X is the enabler, the foundation for all of these things.

That's it! Thanks Martin.

Brent Simmons Interview

2007-09-27T10:33:00.000-07:00

About: Brent Simmons is the sole developer of one of the most successful desktop RSS readers on any platform, NetNewsWire. He is generally conceived as an easy-going, mild-tempered guy that has only friends in the Mac community. He also loves cats and spaghetti (who doesn't)! This is his interview:

NNW is one of the most used piece of software in the mac realm. How does that make you feel as an Apple geek?

It feels great! I've been using Apple computers for 27 years, since before there were Macs, and it feels like I've been able to give something back to the community. It's a wonderful feeling.

Where do you see RSS technology going in 1-2 years? Is it going to get even bigger? Right now it seems to have already change the way we consume news on the web - what's next, media?

Podcasting is already a big thing. We'll probably get more and more media via RSS.

I don't think there's any single huge thing that RSS is going to do in the next couple years. I think it's going to keep growing, though. You'll see more RSS in the enterprise, more websites providing branded readers and widgets, more relevance and searchability, more support (both reading and writing) in all kinds of software, connections with other formats, and lots of little surprises that people invent.

RSS is like a slow-moving form of ice-nine. It gets everywhere and changes everything it touches.

Are you on the camp of people that think that Apple is dropping the ball a lot lately? More and more anti-consumer choices make their appearance, like the ringtones and iPod games buy twice to use, iPhones' 2 years contract if we're lucky (we are looking at a 2008 launch in Greece) and so on. Do you think that the price of fame and very successful products will cost Apple's soul? I hear more and more complains from Apple's faithful lately (myself included).

Apple has to make deals with phone and music companies. Unfortunately, those companies are notoriously consumer-hostile. I believe Apple is doing the best it can, given the circumstances.

However, I do think Apple is making a mistake by not opening up iPhone and iPod Touch to developers. I hope they plan to do so. I understand that it takes a great deal of time and effort on their part to finalize APIs, write documentation, and so on, and I'm willing to be patient. I just wish I knew what Apple's plans are.

NNW 3.1 features some beautiful new icons for the toolbar. I didn't care much for the previous ones but I LOVE the look of the new ones. Do you hear a lot of complains about the look and feel of NetNewsWire or does addition of new features come first?

I get feedback of kinds, tons of it -- most of it has nothing to do with look and feel. However, there were a few people who didn't like the 3.0 toolbar icons. I was one of those people myself! So I was very happy when Bobby Andersen agreed to do new toolbar icons for 3.1.

I can't say that look and feel is more or less important than new features -- everything is taken on a case-by-case basis. (Well, in general, bug fixes comes first.)

On your beta release notes you state that pagination on Combined view is coming. I use combined view extensively, mainly on flickr feeds and I have to say that when there are a lot of unread news on a feed, combined view isn't much of use on a slow connection. Do you also plan to offer stylesheets for the combined view as you do for the other 2 views?

I think you'll find the Combined View is much, much faster with pagination. The slowdown happens when you have dozens or hundreds or thousands of items to display at once. Each item is like a small web page. It's kind of like opening hundreds of small web pages at once in Safari. Slow.

But the new version displays 20 items at a time, so it's fast. You still navigate the same way: space bar, arrow keys, and so on, and it handles automatically loading the next page as needed.

I don't plan to do stylesheets for the Combined View for 3.1, since there's less to style. The traditional view uses HTML to display the title, date, time, subject, and creator -- but the Combined View uses HTML just for the description. The title and so on are drawn via Cocoa, as in a regular table view. Thus, with so much less to style, it's not really worth having support for stylesheets. (I may change my mind, of course, for a release after 3.1 ships.)

NNW used to offer a "Lite" free version, without lots of bells and whistles that worked well for simple to moderate RSS viewing. You haven't upgraded Lite to 3.x versions yet. Is this coming or you won't offer a 3.x Lite version anytime soon?

I plan to release NetNewsWire Lite 3.1 at or around the same time NetNewsWire 3.1 is released.

Let's change gears for a while and talk about iPhone and iPod Touch. This is clearly a new platform - one that will far exceed the existing mac customer base. Yet Apple wants to offer a closed device at first, leaving their developers out of the party. There are apps like Apptap that offer the ability to bypass Apple and bring 3rd party apps to the mix. Have you thought of going that route -even just for fun- for a portable NNW or it doesn't even worth the effort?

It would be totally fun to do NetNewsWire for iPhone. Right now I'm using NewsGator's mobile reader for iPhone . I like it, but I didn't write it, and it's a web app. I'd love to write a native NetNewsWire for iPhone.

Because I have a responsibility to NetNewsWire users to fix bugs and add features, I can't justify spending the time iPhone-hacking. There are only so many hours in the day. Alas.

Now, if Apple makes it so that developers can write for iPhone, then you can bet I'd get to work on NetNewsWire for iPhone as soon as possible.

Greece is a state member of the European Union yet it doesn't enjoy Apple''s full care. There are no Applestores or official Apple here and new devices like iPod touch and possibly iPhones don't support Greek language or Greek keyboard. Furthermore prices are even higher than in other European countries. Apple seems to care mostly for U.S. and select European markets stating with their actions that they don't care "for the rest of us". For a company that supposedly is "thinking different" this is clearly a poor choice, yet despite many vocal concerns by many Greek Apple users ( www.wewantapplegreece.com ), Apple still turns a deaf ear. How hard is it for a customer and a developer like you to work with a company that simply does not listen or care to respond to complains?

I wasn't aware of the issues you're having with Apple in Greece. I can't begin to speculate why they're treating you differently, and I'm sorry to hear about that.

Apple does sometimes respond to complaints. For instance, giving iPhone users a $100 store credit after dropping the price was not something Apple had to do. But they did it anyway, after many people complained.

As a developer, I don't really work with Apple as a monolithic entity -- I work with individual engineers and evangelists and support staff. My working relationship with these folks has always been great: I have no complaints.

The one big thing I wish Apple would do is open up the iPhone to Mac developers. We've supported the company through a bunch of transitions: 680x0 to PowerPC, Mac OS 7/8/9 to OS X, Macintosh Toolbox to Cocoa, PowerPC to Intel. We were working hard on Mac apps in the '90s, when it looked as if the company might not survive. And we're still here, and we'd like to work on iPhone apps.

As a heavy user of NNW I have a lot of feeds. In order to always have easy access to the most significant ones I have made an "essentials" folder. What's your "essential" feeds?

The feeds I care about the most are weblogs of fellow Mac developers. I also read I Can Has Cheezburger?, of course.

Is it true that the shareware market in macs is more healthy and suffer less from piracy than the Windows' one? I know that I buy a lot of shareware now that I use a mac, but I also think the general quality of mac shareware apps are better. What's your favorites sharewares?

Actually, these days I prefer "indie" as a term for the small developer teams and the software they create. It's all commercial software these days: there isn't really any such thing as shareware anymore.

I do think we're in a golden age of indie software. The quality and quantity is stunning. It's a wonderful time to be a Mac developer and a Mac user.

A list of my favorite apps is pretty long: Acorn, Adium, BBEdit, Camino, Coda, Colloquy, Comic Life, MarsEdit, OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, QuickSilver, Radioshift, SpamSieve, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, Transmit, Twitterrific, VoodooPad.

Are there any plans for a new app on the horizon? Working constantly on an app must be boring sometimes.

No plans for something else.

Sure, some work is boring -- but that's no different than working on a new app. In some ways, working on a new app is more boring because you have to get all the boring stuff done first. With NetNewsWire, most of the boring stuff is already done, so I can concentrate on new and cool stuff.

And an offbeat question or two: What do you think of Greece? Have you ever been here?

I've never been to Greece, but I'd love to go. It's the birthplace of the intellectual and artistic tradition that I hold most dear. The home of Socrates is my home too -- it's the home of every westerner.

So you're a cat person. The majority of people are into dogs, so that makes the cat preference an "alternative choice". I see a Mac vs. Windows analogy here. Do you think that not being into "defaults" is a great way to live your life by? I tend to disagree with the majority of the mainstream ways and ideas. What's your stance in life?

I was raised by my parents to think for myself. That doesn't mean to be contrary all the time, but it does mean going with the alternative when I want to. The important thing is to think, and keep thinking, and then re-evaluate your thinking -- and ask yourself questions. I don't want ever to become rigid and set in my ways: it's important to be mentally nimble and open to changes of mind, and open to new -- and old! -- ideas.

That's all! Thanks for your time Brent!

Thank you!

Anthony Sigalas

2007-01-09T01:54:00.000-08:00

I am a 33 years old mac fanatic from Greece. I live mostly on rss feeds and macs but I enjoy living outside my macbook for brief periods of time. You can find traces of my internet life on sigalakos.com. You can contact me at anthonysigalas at gmail dot com.