When it comes to covering technology, there are some things that I just assume everyone knows, and don’t even bother explaining them. It’s something we nerds need to learn, that not everyone is like us. In fact, we’re more unlike them than they are unlike us.

Every time there’s an Instapaper update, and we cover it, we do so assuming that everyone knows what it’s all about. After several comments and emails, I’ve come to realise that not everyone ‘gets’ Instapaper. In an effort to bring everyone to speed, here’s what Instapaper means to me, and why you must start using it if you aren’t already.

At any given part of the day, unless I’m doing something specific, I’m using my Mac (and now my iPad) to weed through Internet. Twitter, facebook, Tumblr, news sites. The Internet is a busy place, and there’s no time to stop. Especially stop and read a 3000 word article. Not while people are pinging you on chat, or someone mentions you on Twitter, or a friend pops in unannounced. It has become very apparent, that we need some quiet reading time. Those times when we’re not stressed, when there are no disturbances, when you’re sitting back rather than pushing forward. Instapaper, is that.

Instapaper adds a little bookmarklet to your Safari bookmarks bar. It could be anywhere, really. Come across something you think you might be interested in reading, just hit the “Read Later” bookmarklet, and the article is instantly added to your Instapaper queue. Upon launching the Instapaper app on your iPhone or iPad, the articles will be pulled down, ready for reading.

Instapaper keeps things quiet. None of the formatting from the website remains. Every article you read looks exactly the same as the other — optimised for reading.

Instapaper makes a great companion when you have nothing to do. Imagine all those pockets of whitespace, waiting for something to happen. At a bus stop, waiting at the doctor’s office, in the bathroom (*ahem*). Instapaper also takes over when you just want to read. Unlike on the desktop, the iPhone and iPad give you a focussed, distraction-free environment — push notifications aside — which allow you to indulge in long form reading, rather than hurrying through something. The longer the article, the better. Instapaper is especially good when going to bed, when you’ve just about exhausted the websites you would want to surf, say what you had to on Twitter, and just wanted to catch up on those interesting reads you’ve collected over the last few days. I got a chance to ask Marco Arment, developer of Instapaper, about his reading habits. “I get nearly all of my reading done in two places: on the train during my commute (iPhone), and for a little while in bed at night before going to sleep (iPad)”, he said.

Instapaper is not about urgency, and its design philosophy speaks about its intended use. There are no unread counts, anywhere. You don’t have to read something now, if you don’t want to. It will always be there, and that’s okay. Just flick through the list, which can go as long as you want, and pick something you like. If you start reading an article, and find that you aren’t in the mood for that kind of article, Instapaper will remember your position in that article the next time you open it. Heck, the new Instapaper even syncs your position across your devices.

A lot of people give up on Instapaper within a day or two of trying it. Usually downloading the free app as a means for testing the waters. If there’s one thing about Instapaper, is that it’s a habit. You’ve got to get yourself addicted to it for it to make any sense. Without articles in your queue you’re basically staring at an empty list. A lot of people are like this because a lot of people don’t read long articles on the web anymore. You’ve got to train yourself into finding long articles, and marking them for reading later.

But what if you don’t have the time to scourge the Internet in search of things to read? Developer Marco Arment curates a list of some of the most amazing long form articles on the web, in a service called Gimme Something To Read. Arment also has a list of suggested long form reading services, which when subscribed to, automatically download fresh reads. Says Arment, “As I branched out beyond web early adopters, I had to address the problem that not everyone browses the internet throughout the day and lives in a feed reader. Not everyone finds enough content on their own. The selections in the Recommended Sites and the Editor’s Picks (from Give Me Something To Read) serve dual purposes: they give people content when they run out, and they set the tone for the kind of content that Instapaper is intended for.”

And, if you have friends using Instapaper, you can subscribe to their starred articles, and have those trickle down as well. My Instapaper app is a reading feast. Unfortunately, the sharing feature isn’t popular as it should be so it’s hard to find good sources. “I had assumed that it would be used more, but in practice, Instapaper’s customers just aren’t very social with it”, says Arment. If you’re interested in amazing technology related reads, I’d highly recommend you add ‘marco’, ‘shawnblanc’, ‘brandonpittman@gmail.com’, and my personal shares, at ‘aayush’.

To my surprise, Instapaper is a universal app, so if you had previously purchased the $4.99 iPhone version, the iPad version came free. I asked Marco why he didn’t charge separately for the iPad app, since he’s essentially giving away something new, for free. “Over 99% of iPhone and iPad owners aren’t Instapaper customers yet. Reaching new customers is therefore much more important, and much more potentially lucrative, than trying to extract more money out of existing customers. My customers are my biggest fans, and if I keep them happy, they advertise my product to potential new customers. I’d rather they recommend Instapaper to friends than give me another few dollars. I also get to reap the benefits of having a single, combined app in the App Store rankings and management interface.”

[tweetmeme]Without Instapaper, my iPhone and iPad experience would not be the same. It’s one of my most launched apps on the iPad and iPhone, second only to my twitter client and built in apps. If you haven’t already, you can start off with the free version (currently iPhone only), but I’d highly recommend the $4.99 Pro version (I cannot stress this enough, the Pro version makes a world of a difference).

Read it Later

Can’t avoid a mention for Read it Later. It’s an often asked question, as to which is better. While both fundamentally do the same thing—help you read long articles—they differ in their approach. For the longest time, I was in the Read it Later camp, as it sported a much better reading view, more features, and price. I think Instapaper has not just caught up with a strong featureset of its own, it exceeds Read it Later in readability and design. In my opinion, Read it Later sports too much UI chrome, is slower in interaction, doesn’t support inline graphics and has none of the subscription features. The difference is especially apparent when it comes to the iPad, as there’s a very clear difference in interactivity and readability, with Instapaper sporting much better typography and management. Both apps are $4.99 for their universal pro versions, and have free versions, though there is no Instapaper free for the iPad (yet).

We’ve seen some big shot developer interviews on SA, with more to come. Jonas is pretty dedicated to the task. However, software development starts at 0, and there are always young new developers making waves in the Mac community. One of them, and a good friend of mine, is Kyle Van Essen, the developer of Notify. Starting Mac software development just about a year ago, Kyle’s first project Notify is a roaring success, and they’re already poised to release Notify 2.0.

My main motives behind this interview was to know what goes on in the life of a new developer, what challenges they face, and then some. Without giving any more masala in the introduction, I give you Kyle Van Essen.

Hey Kyle, ready for some questions?

Guess so…

For those who’re not following your life’s history, a little introduction please?

I’m Kyle. I live in the capital of Canada, Ottawa, and have been using the Mac platform for about three years now. I’m studying Computer Science at Carleton University, and have been doing Mac specific programming for about a year and a half…

If I’ve known you, you’re more of a designer than a coder right? I mean, where do your primary interests lie?

Personally I’d consider myself more of a developer. Sure I’ve been designing for more than I’ve coded on the Mac, but I created my first program (a Super Mario clone) 3 years ago. That said, I prefer different aspects to both of them, neither one is really “better”. Developing is fun because you get to shape an idea out of nothing, and make it into a functioning thing used by many people. Designing is sort of the same, but on a much smaller scale in terms of complexity, usually.

One of the icons Kyle has designed, as seen on his portfolio.

And your first app on the Mac?

The really really old version of Notify. It ended up being a tangled mess of fail, so I abandoned the codebase.

[For the uninitiated, Notify is a menubar app, that currently gives you a brief preview of your Gmail messages. Notify 2.0 has a much wider feature set, and is set to release as soon as the beta testers are satisfied with its stability. You can read all about Notify 2.0 here; our review will be coming soon]

Where did the idea come from? I mean, were you looking for that functionality or was it just a cool idea to start with?

Well, I never really liked the standard Google Notifier, since it’s got a number of flaws, such as check times, single account limit, etc. I figured it would be fairly easy to replicate and improve the functionality.

What about Apple Mail? Are you a Mail user?

Nope. Gmail Web UI all the way. Notify was never really designed for mail.app users – I originally planned it for people who use the web UI exclusively. It’s one of the reasons Notify hasn’t seen any Mail.app integration yet. That said, with Notify 2, we’ve tried to make sort of a “light” email application with the pro version, so hopefully users won’t need to use mail.app so much. Hard to say what will happen for actual integration, as we haven’t done much planning for that yet. It was originally suppose to go into 2.0, but we ended up cutting that, and a few other features so we could get it shipped in a reasonable amount of time.

Who’s we? Who does the Vibelicious team—the software development company that makes Notify—consist of?

Well, there’s Joel Levin, who has joined us to work on Notify 2, as well as some other projects. There’s also Matthew Rex, who does some media work for us. Daniel Bru is an advisor who we bounce ideas and thoughts off of. We’re what you would call extremely loosely associated – as far as I know none of the employees have ever met any of the other colleagues. None of us even live in the same state (and I don’t even live in the same country).

It’s a good thing Photoshop can draw geometrical shapes.

As far as I know, a tens (hundreds?) of thousands of copies of Notify have been downloaded so far. Pretty good for a first attempt (that was mostly your effort right?). I’d call it a success. What does it feel like, having so many users?

Initially, I was expecting *maybe* 10k in a year though, so it’s certainly blown all my expectations away. We’re clocked in 80 thousand downloads of Notify 1.0 so far—no guesses as to how many are actively using the application.What does it feel like? [Kyle was speechless]

Have you attained celebrity status yet?
[Kyle did not answer, thinking I was being sarcastic; I wasn't. I think all developers deserve celebrity status in the real world.]

Back to Notify, version 1.0 is kind of a plain simple notifier with a little bit of preview. Version 2.0 seems like a whole new app. What’s the story?

With 1.1 we originally planned on only switching the backend over to IMAP, but since Notify 1.0 was such a simple application, it was deemed better to just restart from scratch to build a more solid foundation. Then it sort of suffered through what is known as “feature creep”, i.e., “ooh, this would be cool”, and eventually we were going to plop in so much new stuff, it made sense to bump the version number to 2.0. The codebase of 2.0 is about 5 times the size of the 1.0 codebase, for those interested. Still pretty small in comparison to other apps, but isn’t ‘mini’ like it used to be.

This feature creep you mention. What’s the criterion for adding new features? Who decides what’s gets in and what’s out?

All of us, or at least a subset of us discuss it, and if we like it, it gets thrown in. Moreover, if we like it, but it isn’t top priority, we put it in our “FeatureList.txt” file for adding in future additions.

[If there are any good hackers reading this, note that this is the file you're looking for when in Kyle's machine. ]

With version 2.0 having a fresh new codebase, a bunch of serious bugs have crept in. My copy keeps crashing, and has performance issues. No no, I’m not whining. From a developer’s point of view, what’s the time frame and difficulty in understanding, finding, and fixing any bugs that testers submit?

The crashes you’ve been having we actually knew about before the beta shipped, but were literally at a brick wall on how to fix them. Neither me or Joel can replicate them, with any sort of accuracy. Usually it takes about 4 days for either of us to make a crash happen, and then we can’t replicate it. We really need more data from beta testers to try and solve it. Truth be told, we even managed to replicate them, but 10.6.2 came along and broke something. It barely worked. But now it’s fine (that is, we can’t replicate the crashes). We didn’t touch a single line of code—weirdest thing ever.

99% of the bugs submitted have been extremely easy fixes. I’d say we’ve spent more time fixing the two crashes that exist than we have all the other bugs and suggestions combined. [Since then, I got the beta 7, and things are pretty much RC-stable]

What about adding features? Beta testers are known to be feature hungry, and can’t help but bring up the “submit feedback” form. Are there any new features coming up, or is the FeatureList.txt forever updated?

That’s what 2.x releases are for. We’ve reached the stage of feature freezing 2.0, which means nothing else is going to be added to it before release. If we kept adding everything everyone asked for, we’d never reach release. Originally this was suppose to be public by early November, but features kept getting added. And with features come more bugs. So for now no new features at all.

For the sake of the readers, what is your Mac setup like? Hardware, core software, etc.…

My main development machine is a Mac Pro, accompanied by a white MacBook. It goes without saying, iPhone as well. On the software front, Firefox for web browsing, Photoshop, Xcode, Adium for chat, Versions for SVN, Cyberduck for FTP, Tweetie for twitter, Smultron for text editing.

Now about App Store programming. I know you’re still warming up to Cocoa and Xcode (with a little help from Joel), but you must have your eyes on the App Store. Or is the bureaucracy just too much for you to handle? Just today Paul Kafasis decided to stop app store programming. What’s your say in this whole approval mess? Would it still be worth your while?

That’s a tough one. I’d like to develop for the iPhone; it’s an incredibly amazing platform. The user interaction on the iPhone is much more natural than on the desktop. If there was no approval process, I’d be more inclined to take part. However, it seems like Apple is a bit too fickle with strange things in the App Store. They need to be far more transparent in the review process, if not remove it completely. On the flip side, the App Store offers is an extremely easy way for developers to reach customers, and since it’s Apple’s platform, I understand they want to screen things.

The idea of spending, say, 4 months developing an iPhone app, only to have it rejected by apple for no reason scares the shit out of me. That’s tens of thousands of dollars of work down the tube, which isn’t acceptable.

Android? WebOS?

No thanks, and let’s keep it at that.

[But he couldn't keep it at that]

Don’t get me wrong, I support what they’re doing. However, those companies need to spend more time on interaction design. This is where the iPhone really shines. There was a great part in the documentary Objectified where Jonny Ive says, “[with the iPhone] everything defers to the display – a lot of what we seem to be doing in a product like that is getting design out of the way. And I think when forms develop with that sort of reason, and they’re not just arbitrary shapes, it feels almost inevitable… it feels almost undesigned. It feels almost like, ‘well of course it’s that way, why would it be any other way?’”.

The problem other companies seem to have is they think they can fix bad design with marketing. Apple has marketing too, but it focuses on the product, not the image of people using the product. Because the product can stand on its own.

I’ll leave you with another quote I cannot resist, “It’s really important in a product to have a sense of the hierarchy of what’s important and what’s not important by removing those things that are all vying for your attention”.

****

[tweetmeme] And with Notify 2.0, you’ll see Kyle has designed a beautiful little app, that gives you just enough and nothing more. We’ll have a full review of Notify 2.0 when everything’s all good to go (a few days hopefully), but you can have a preview of what’s coming at the Vibealicious blog.

And before I finish, I’d highly suggest twitter users give @Kyleve a follow. Developer interest or not. Consider this my followfriday recommendation of the month. Thanks.

[tweetmeme] Realmac Software has been a pillar of the Mac developer community since the company was founded in 2002. In 2004, they released RapidWeaver, an excellent template-based website editor, to an adoring public. In 2008, they released the much-anticipated LittleSnapper, a fantastic screenshot tool with special support for clipping photos of webpages and design inspirations. More recently, Realmac has been in the news for their acquisition of Socialite (née Eventbox).

Realmac is also notable for being the home of one of the younger Mac devs out there, in the form of one Danny Greg.

Hi, Danny! Thanks for talking to us. How old are you? How did you get into Mac development? Did you develop your own apps before you started at Realmac?

I am 20 years old, 21 next month [1. Danny actually just turned 21 a couple days ago. Happy belated birthday, Danny!]. So one of the youngsters in the community.

As for how I got into mac development, its a bit of a fairy tale story. When I was 12 I came back from a cricket match with the idea that I wanted to make something on the computer that would keep score of a cricket game with just one press of a key for each ball bowled. My dad is an accountant and therefore pretty awesome with Excel. So we came up with a spreadsheet that would pretty much do it.

At school I had a fantastic computing teacher, once he saw this he started introducing me to programming and giving me tasks to do in my own time. It just so happens that he was a complete Mac addict. This rubbed off on me to such an extent that I started running an OS X 86 box way before I got my first mac.

I learnt to program in REALbasic in and outside of the classroom. We chose that as it produced Mac as well as windows apps to a pretty decent extent. It was around this time, I was around 16, that I started becoming really interested in the indie Mac culture and applications. I also started writing reviews for some Mac websites which helped me start to chat to developers and immerse myself a bit more in the community.

I started my own company when I was 17/18 and created an app called BitClamp. This went pretty well and I ended up licensing the software to FastForward Software to sell which was great as it let me just do the development. I recently ceased selling the software as due to my current commitments I cannot maintain it at all. I also joined the Latitude Browser team with my friends Sebastiaan de With and Leonardo Cassarani.

It was that that caught the attention of a certain Nik Fletcher at Realmac. After a chance meeting in Brighton and subsequent lunch I was invited to the offices of Realmac. After a few more phone calls and chats with Dan (Counsell, founder of Realmac) I was offered a job on the cocoa team.

The Realmac team: [From L-R] Luke Hefson, Danny Greg, Aron Carroll, Dan Counsell, Nik Fletcher, Keith Duncan. [via]

Somehow I had managed to fall into one of the few full time Cocoa jobs before leaving college (I think that’s high school to those in the states) and my career path as a mac developer was set.

Quite the fairy tale story indeed. What’s it like working at Realmac? What does a typical workday look like?

As Realmac is my first real full time job I have no way to compare it to anything but I’m pretty sure it’s damn good :p. I get to work with some of the most talented designers and developers in my chosen field, on a daily basis. It also happens that they have become great friends of mine. So really a day in the life of someone at Realmac is just doing what you love to do with your mates who also happen to have the same passion as you. We also have not-so typical work days when we are in the office to crazy hours, get some food in and make sure we meet that deadline. But that’s another story .

Danny snaps a shot of Dan “The Big Man” Counsell ordering Aarol Caroll around, while goofing around on his own screen. [via]

We like to play hard too though, there is a fair amount of Call of Duty 4 played outside of office hours and we enjoy our trips to the pub where we usually just end up talking about “work” again.

I want to issue a collective congratulations on the acquisition of Socialite. I was a fan of EventBox since day one, so I’m looking forward to seeing what you all do with it. How long has that been in the works, and what brought it about?

Well thanks very much! I would rather not comment about the particulars of the business side of things as that isn’t really part of my job at Realmac. However, I will say that it is an app that we have all followed from the start of its beta period and we are very excited to have the opportunity to put our stamp on it and ensure it has a bright development future.

The acquisition is a big deal. Has the community reacted as well as you hoped?

There were a few unhappy or unsure comments floating about and I can understand that. I think the comment who suggested we were the “new Adobe” was my favourite. Some people seem to think we are some giant software corporation who are going to ruin their favourite app. The reality is we are just 7 guys who love to make Mac software—we don’t intend on ruining anything.

I will also say, to allay some fears, that Socialite doesn’t affect our other applications. We are hard at work writing updates for both RapidWeaver and LittleSnapper as well as Socialite.

It seems like Realmac competes with Apple (as well as Karelia and perhaps loosely Adobe) with RapidWeaver, and competes with Apple and any number of other companies with LittleSnapper. Obviously, you guys are doing pretty well despite (or because of) the competition. What do you think sets your software apart from the competition?

We try and find that spot in the market which isn’t being directly catered for rather than directly compete. We like to think that RapidWeaver offers you a large chunk more flexibility than iWeb for example. LittleSnapper is something that we really wanted, a way to capture and manage your inspiration. Although comparisons can be drawn with other apps because we targeted it at that specific use it means different design decisions get taken and the app tends to fit more nicely in the target workflow.

Enough about the work side of things. You mentioned running an OSx86 machine for a while; when was that? When did you get your first Mac?

I hacked OS X onto my family computer mid-2006 I think… stretching my memory now :p. My first proper mac I got in 2007 I think.

What do you run now?

My main development machine is my Unibody MacBook Pro, which runs a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo with 4 gigs of RAM and a 320gig HDD. I am very much an advocate for the “1 laptop lifestyle” as it means I can work from anywhere. That said I of course plug it into big displays at home and work :p.

Aside from the other guys at Realmac, who are your favorite Mac and iPhone developers? What are your favorite pieces of Mac and iPhone software?

For companies I have to mention Panic and our friends over at Sofa and Marketcircle. All are similar teams doing what they love and cranking out really great software.

I am a bit of a Mac app junkie as I am sure readers can appreciate, but apps that I use on a daily basis tend to be developer tools so I have a slight bias towards them. Not counting all our software that I use, I really dig Billings for managing the small amount of freelance I do. Changes for file diffing and Cornerstone for SVN working copy and repository management. For web development I shift between Coda and Espresso & CSSEdit. :p I also love Tweetie (on both platforms).

If I remember correctly from Twitter, you’re in a band and involved in theatre. Tell us about that.

Well I have been a musician since the age of 5. My mum is a classical violinist and my Dad… well he just likes The Who… a lot. I ended up learning the guitar. I was member of a band called Silent Disguise (I think that is the one you are referring to) up in London for a few years and as we started getting places I also started working for Realmac so I had to leave fairly recently, which is a shame. However I have formed another local band called “Above our Station” with my brother where I currently play guitar and sing.

Pelting out some tunes with fellow guitarist Carl [via]

The other aspect of my performer life is I am also an actor. Again I started young, I was 7 when I was first on the stage if I remember correctly. I have been involved with various professional, semi-pro and amateur productions but these days I am heavily involved with a local semi-professional theatre company who I usually perform with. They also have a drama school where I teach on saturday mornings.

Well, it sounds like you have a lot on your plate. Thanks for taking the time out of your schedule to talk to me!

Thanks for the interview!

•••

[tweetmeme] Man, I’m twenty-two and suddenly I feel like an old man. I’m off to go learn Cocoa, join a rock band, and start acting classes. In the meantime, if you’ve got any questions or comments for Danny, you know where to put ‘em! I’ll be back in two weeks with an interview with a rockstar Cocoa dev whose apps tend to put Apple’s development team to shame.

I’m a Mac geek. No, really, with the emphasis on the geek part. Some people love their Macs because they’re easy to use, and they’re right; I love mine because of all the awesome indie software it runs. And I’m right too.

This is the first in a series of interviews with independent Mac developers and small development houses. If you’re interested in knowing the story behind the software you use every day, what decisions guided the developers to code it so, and what plans they have for your favourite app, this series is aimed at you. It’s my hope that some of you reading this will get to know the developers behind the software in a way you wouldn’t get to otherwise.

Appropriately enough for the christening of a series that will focus on Mac developers and the software they create, this first article focuses on the developers and designer behind Bodega, the first (and so far only) app store for the Mac. Chris Zehm first covered Bodega for Smoking Apples when the app was released back in August. Without any further ado, let me introduce the Bodega devs—or rather, let me let them introduce themselves.

How did you all get involved with creating Bodega?

Rick Fillion: I’ve been an IDFusion Software employee for a couple of years. Phil Letourneau and I own Centrix.ca, through which we build our Mac and iPhone software. We didn’t come up with the Mac app store concept; it’s been discussed in the Mac developer community for a long while, and it was coming up more frequently after the AppStore’s release. Phil and I were talking it over one night (this would have been around December of 2008), thinking about what could be done to make it really good, and how neat it’d be to have such a thing… for kicks we started writing down a feature list. Before long we realized that it was quite pointless to keep imagining this because we simply didn’t have the time to write this during nights and weekends with Centrix.ca. It just so happened that around that time, IDFusion was looking to get involved in the Mac market. The next morning I pitched the idea to the CEO, he thought it was a good idea, and offered to fund the project. Within a few weeks we hired Phil as a designer at IDFusion, and started the spec’ing and design of Bodega. In February we hired Chris Verwymeren as our second coder, and we all got cracking on development.

I’ll ask the obvious question first… er, second: why Bodega?

Phil: We spent weeks agonizing over a name and a brand for Bodega. We wanted to create something approachable, with a recognizable name and something people could relate to. The term “bodega” is a word of Spanish origin, which is used in primarily in the large cities on the East and West coast of the US. It’s short and catchy, and has firmly entrenched meaning of “small convenience store”, which is exactly what we want to convey. Bodega is for everyone, built from the ground up by independent Mac developers, for independent Mac developers. It’s the store at the end of the street where you get to know the shopkeeper, and run into your neighbours while you shop.

The much-debated Bodega UI, complete with convenience store awning. (click for larger image)

A slightly less obvious one for Phil: why the awning? Part of the general market metaphor?

Phil: The awning was one of the first design elements to take shape in Bodega. When we decided to name the product Bodega, I immersed myself in images of convenience stores all over the world, taking inspiration from the various things that make bodegas unique. A colourful awning was a recurring theme in small neighbourhood convenience stores, to catch the eye of the passerby I suppose, and it felt like a fresh take on the standard rectangular application window. It’s definitely one of the more polarizing aspects of Bodega, people either love it or hate it, but I feel that it sets the application apart and brings a little character to the screen.

Third parties getting there first has never stopped Apple from walking into (and often dominating) a market. Karelia Software has actually had it happen to them twice, although they seem to be doing just fine these days. Are you at all concerned that Apple might do the same to Bodega with a new Mac App Store?

Rick: Everyone we’ve talked to at Apple has been quite supportive of Bodega. They agreed that the Mac community could really use something like this, and even hooked us up with some of the press contacts for our launch. Of course, none of this means they won’t railroad us, but we’re not too worried about that, and here’s why: This isn’t a new market, they can’t dictate the rules like they did for the iPhone. Nor can we. The developers have the ultimate veto power, you need to get developer buy-in. Every developer has a different store and payment processing system that they’ve hand-tweaked, a different license key format, etc… Considering how rampant piracy is in the iPhone market (something very few people like to talk about), I don’t see developers jumping at the opportunity to let Apple control that for them.

How has the developer response to Bodega been? Are there any apps you’d like to see available on Bodega that you don’t? What do you have to say to developers who aren’t currently interested in Bodega?

Rick: The developer response has been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve received a lot of amazing email. There are a lot of applications that we’d like to see on Bodega that aren’t in there yet. We won’t name any, because I don’t think that’d be fair or nice, but there are a few heavy hitters that we’d love to have on there. Our pitch to developers is: what do you have to lose? It’s free. Worst case scenario you’ve lost 10 minutes of your time adding your application. If you can get a single sale through Bodega, it will have paid for that time. And if we all work together we can make something that’s of real value to end users.

Bodega’s currently pretty young, at version 0.8.0; what have you been working on, and what should we expect to see as Bodega matures?

Rick: We think there’s a lot of room for improvement in the speed area, refinements regarding usability, and making the whole experience cleaner. Bodega 0.8 was supposed to bring in two primary things: client-side caching and in-app downloading. In-App downloading was the first step towards having Bodega actually install the downloaded software for the user, which was a feature that got dropped from 0.8 due to time constraints. We decided to push that back to 0.9. In-App downloading makes the download experience much more fluid. Client side caching makes the application feel much snappier by requiring fewer trips to the server for data.

How did you all get started working in software development (or design)? What projects have you worked on beside Bodega?

Rick: I’ve been a Mac developer for around 6 years now. Before then I was a web developer and assembly programmer (’cause the two go together so well) doing operating system development. As a Linux user, no less (back when “The Year of the Linux Desktop” wasn’t a joke, we actually believed it). Software development has always interested me, but the tools made me feel constrained, and that I was spending too much time doing the simple stuff. XCode/Interface Builder and Cocoa rocked my world, and with that I kicked Linux like a bad habit.

Phil: I’ve been a designer for 6 years, a full-time UI designer for 2. I’ve worked in print and graphic design, web and web application design, before going into UI design full-on. Rick and I started centrix.ca 6 years ago and have been developing Mac products since then, and more recently iPhone projects as well. Our first and longest standing project is NetworkLocation, a location management application for OS X that changes settings on your computer based on where you’re located. We’ve also built Jet Lag, FridgeNotes for iPhone, Where to Wee for iPhone, and have some other projects in the works. Bodega was one of the first projects we really put full-time effort into.

Chris: I started programming by learning Pascal in high school and then went to university for a computer science degree. I’ve spent a large part of my career doing C/C++ and Java development. A few years ago, I started learning Objective-C and Cocoa in my free time and was impressed with how the language removed a lot of the glue code I would normally write had I used another language. I met Rick and Phil last year and started working with them on Bodega a few months later. For most of my career, I’ve worked on large commercial systems for the government and telecommunications industry. Bodega is the first consumer product I’ve worked on.

Screenshots of FridgeNotes and Where to Wee, two of Centrix.ca’s other projects.

Do you have any other projects in the works that you’d like to tease the readers with?

Rick: We’ve been pretty busy. In August we released Bodega and our first iPhone application FridgeNotes, and Where to Wee hit the App Store in September. Those two iPhone apps were both very fun projects to work on, but honestly I’d love to be able to write an iPhone app that isn’t tied to a server for a change.

We’re now working on Bodega 0.9 which should have in-app installation of new applications and updates, and a bunch of other features.

We’ll look forward to the next release. Thanks for talking to me!

In chorus: Any time!

Well, that’s it for the first installment of this new series. I’ll be back in two weeks with an interview with one of the coders at Realmac. In the meantime, make sure to check out Bodega if you haven’t already and leave your thoughts in the comments. How did I do? What questions didn’t I ask that you wish I would have? If you ask very nicely, it’s just possible that Rick, Phil, and Chris will turn up and answer them for you.

[Header img via Flickr]