wil_shipley

It’s odd literally no apps that we’ve ever seen did the front view before we did it in November 2004. I think it required a large database of front covers before anyone thought of it — before Amazon came along there’d be no decent way to get the covers to display.

Apple certainly was inspired by the look of Delicious Library but I’m not upset to have influenced them. For me the whole point of UI design is to move the state of the art forward for everyone. I’d be disappointed if Apple didn’t take my interface and use it, it’d mean Mike and I kind of failed.

I mean, I didn’t invent the push-button, but I use it everywhere in my apps, as we all do. Someone, somewhere invented it first, and I thank them.

We had amazing developer advocates back then. Jim Black (he's now at Nvidia), for instance, used to actually pick us up at the airport when we'd fly into town.

Nowadays I don't actually have an official developer's advocate at Apple. The last two people I had quit and they weren't replaced. Luckily I still have people from the old days I can e-mail if needed, but I wish there were official channels.

On the other hand, the number of Cocoa developers has gone from about 80 to like 80,000, so I can see why Apple can't assign each one a person.

Thank you. Actually my programmer "Mila" suggested I fix the entry—for the first couple hours it ended with the bit about us doing other ports, which was pretty weak.

Thanks! I really hated this entry—it feels like I'm sitting on a porch on my rocking chair with my shotgun and going, "In the old days, we didn't have these fancy MOTORcars! We used horses, and we liked it! And I wore an onion on my belt, as was the fashion at the time."

Thank you for the kind words!

Even up to the original Mac they had volumes and volumes on the hardware—friend of mine (Sean O'Brien) just made a tiny circuit board that lets you hook up an original mouse and keyboard to modern Macs, based on Inside Mac specs.

Man, I'd forgotten about that. I really have to update the old entries so they're easy to find and contain responses and are validated for Mavericks.

We never saw "DoomEd." In fact, I have no idea what it is. I assume it's a level editor?

The games were developed on the NeXT but a lot of things were missing. Like, key bindings. And the mouse. And sound. Also, there was no dithering on grayscale machines, and most of them _were_ grayscale back then.

Also, he was just blatting bitmaps to the screen from a simulated VGA buffer he had, so it was quite slow (blatting bitmaps was NOT fast with Display Postscript). We ended up hooking into something called "Interceptor" which was a very early version of direct VMA (and which he'd done experiments with, and turned us on to).

But, make no mistake, Carmack did ALL the heavy lifting here. I in no way want to take credit for Doom or Quake. I just hooked the plumbing up so we NeXTers (and later OS Xers) could enjoy the amazing games he wrote.

Thank you so much! Unfortunately my [super init] thing is now wrong—Apple has modified the runtime and actually reserves the right to change the object returned by [super init] from the object you allocated.

I learned to program by reading Woz's assembly code for the Apple //e. They used to give you books of "source" code when you bought the machine. Crazy times.

A few years ago my old business partner Mike Matas was at a party and he called me and was all, "Woz is here!" I asked if I could talk to him, and so I chatted with Woz for about 10 minutes. He was the nicest guy you could imagine. He was so incredibly happy to hear that I'd learned to code from his stuff.

When we first launched OmniWeb Woz bought ten or fifteen copies. He was always a huge supporter of the little guys. A real mensch.

Have you used Pages recently? It’s got a button in the default toolbar to “Publish on iWork” which has never been out of beta and is now cancelled. It doesn’t work in HiDPI modes of Lion. It doesn’t support Lion’s keyboard macros. I wrote one letter in it last week and ended up filing three different bugs.

So, yes, software does “rot,” if it’s not kept up-to-date with the latest operating systems and, to an extent, the latest user interface metaphors.

A game is a different animal. If you add some new levels to a game people have finished, they’ll dive back in. That’s news.

If you’re making a productivity app, and you dribble out features, the press is going to ignore you. Can you imagine anyone running a story like, “Delicious Library 2.8 is out, and it includes a pretty new way to look at tables”? It’s just not going to happen, unless your name is Apple.

The press hit we get on a major release is part of what gives us the important spike in sales. It creates “buzz.” There’s a reason why even Apple doesn’t, like, just release iOS 5 feature-by-feature – they want to spring the whole thing on the world, so they get a ton of attention.

We generally don’t charge to update our apps to a new operating system. In fact, that’s been a lot of what we’ve done to version 2 over the last couple years – it now runs on an OS TWO major versions beyond what we wrote it for. And that was a free upgrade for all users.

But if I rewrite an app and improve the art and the flow and the interaction and every little part of it, there’s no way to say, “Hey, pay and we’ll give you the better interface.”

I spend years tweaking every single part of my apps when I make a new version. I can’t just throw a switch to turn those on or off.

Finally: it’s pretty much my job to bitch about what Apple does wrong, just as it is yours: it’s the only way they will improve. They’re not gods. They need feedback.

Angry Birds and other games are in a totally different category. If you buy “Angry Birds Space” it’s reasonable to assume (a) you’re done with the original, and (b) you’re going to get as many hours of enjoyment out of it as the original, so it’s fair to pay as much.

This isn’t the case with productivity applications, necessarily – you can keep using Delicious Library 2 and it’ll keep working great, so we need a way to reward customers who say, “Yes, I’ll pay to have some extra functionality.”

Based on my numbers, it’d be great if the Mac App Store changed how it works so small developers can continue to reward their customers.

I’d rather offer existing customers a discount, since I figure some percentage of what they’re getting is the old functionality, and they’ve been there for me in the past.

Put differently: if I’ve written an app that 50% new, don’t I deserve to get paid by existing customers for that work?

The model of selling only the new features really doesn’t work well when you’ve spent years refining every part of an app. How do you “sell” a whole new interface?