(Listen to this interview - 4.57 MB, link fixed)

So I’m here with Cris Pearson of Plasq, and in case you’re not familiar, it is the company that makes Comic Life, a program that allows you to take the photos from your iPhoto library, apply effects and such to them and make your own comic book. It’s one of the cooler apps out there for the Mac; it won an Apple Design Award, and Deep Thought gave it a 5 out of 5 rating when we reviewed it some months back. So, first of all, because you may be unfamiliar to our readers, we’d like to get a little personal background on you and your company.

I do user interface design, graphic design; we started up Plasq to kind of be an open company to get people to come in and do their apps under the Plasq name--that’s how it worked previously--we’re heading towards incorporating. How far do you want to go with it?

As far as you want to go.

Yeah. About me?

About you...anything you want. Tell us a little about yourself.

Okay. I’ll tell you who’s at Plasq. There’s people from — you know, I’m from Melbourne, Australia; and the programmer for Comic Life, he’s in America, then there’s a guy in France, and a guy in Geneva, and another guy from Melbourne as well. So, yeah, we’re very spread out.

So, we’re [Deep Thought] similar in that regard; we’re kind of spread out. How, as a software company, do you deal with such an issue?

Yeah, it can be a problem, with lots and lots of emails and instant messages. We use Skype for that, which has a group chat function in it, and we feel we’re all connected through that group chat so we can see what each other’s doing and hear what each other’s saying to each other. We’ve got wikis set up to put stuff on there.

Comic Life is your main app, or the one that has most notoriety, but for some of our readers who are unfamiliar with your other apps, can you give a brief description of them?

Sure, the other one is RAX, that holds Audio Units. It’s really handy for live music. You can load up your music, audio units, instruments, and you play them through that with a MIDI keyboard. Then there’s Wormhole, ...[where] you can transfer from within your audio host the audio straight over your LAN. So, say for example, you’re using [audio] in RAX on your Mac, and you want to get it into Cubase on your PC, you just set up wormhole on both those machines, and the audio comes straight out on the other machine.

And definitely most of your apps are audio-oriented. How did Comic Life come about, given you are, and have been in the past, audio-oriented?

We’re all from musician backgrounds; that’s how that came about for audio. And the developer of Comic Life, he used to read these old...teen comics — photo comics done in the 70s making fun of falling in love and all that business, and he just thought, ‘Wow, that’s a cool idea for an app.’

So what kind of features — interesting question — what kind of features were you unable to include in comic life?

Unable?

Unable. Features you tried to implement but haven’t been able to, for example.

Well, I guess you could always, as a programmer, you can add about anything, but I think the thing about good software is you gotta figure out what you gotta leave out to make it user-friendly. Comic Life can be picked up in five minutes by someone who has never used it before. And Apple goes that route as well.

Yeah, and some have considered [Comic Life] to be an iLife-style app.

Yeah.

A programming oriented question here: what kind of features differentiate your app on a programming level?

I’m not the programmer, I’m the interface designer. Um, let me think about that. It’s very much Cocoa-based. On a programming level, yeah, it’s very much Cocoa-based.

I’ve noticed that Freeverse Software is a distributor. Is there a particular reason why you chose to distribute through them? Is it infrastructure?

CP: Uh, yeah, they’re doing the boxed version, they just publish that...Comic Life suits that kind of market, so [people] can buy a real product in an Apple Store.

So you guys obviously did win an Apple Design Award. How — what was your reaction to that? Did you expect it?

Um, I was fairly confident; I think we had a really good product, and we’re certainly all very happy about that, and it led to good sales.

And 2006 is obviously going to be a big year for the Mac with the Intel transition, and, you know, Windows Vista, which is supposed to come out later this year—

CP: Maybe.

(Laughs) Heh, yeah, maybe. So what do you see as this year’s impact on the Mac, how the Mac will end up at the end of the year and beyond?

CP: I think with going Intel, they’re very much targeting PC users. The name change, trying to get the Mac into everything, to eliminate the confusion because everyone knows the Mac and otherwise people are getting confused — you often hear newbies say, ‘Oh, that’s made by iMac’ or whatever, and it’s very confusing. So they’re definitely going that way. I think it’ll definitely increase their market share a lot. As far as Comic Life, I’m not sure if you knew, but we’re actually now bundled on the new MacBook Pro and the iMac.

Really? Wow!

Yeah, very cool. It’s a huge thing.

Yeah, yeah. Um, so a couple questions for fun here; your ultimate computer setup. Unlimited budget, you could pick any computer setup, any peripherals, what would it be?

I really like laptops; I like being portable. Probably the ultimate thing would be one of the new MacBook Pros. They’re very nice machines. And then also a cinema display to plug into it at home. That’d be nice.

Cool. What question would you like to be asked most, and how would you answer it?

Heh. Um, give me a minute...what question would I like to be asked most? (pauses) Can I email it to you? (laughs)

(laughs) I imagine you could. So, thanks for joining me here, and good luck with the Expo, and good luck with Plasq and with Comic Life.

Thank you.