One of the greatest things about visiting Macworld Expo is meeting the people behind all the toys and software we use on a daily basis, and there’s no better way to determine what goes on in their heads than to conduct an interview.  We were originally planning to conduct a roundtable discussion with several people, but we got several nays and no yays to that, so we went back to a normal interview format.  Except these aren’t normal interviews—they’re Xtreme Nterviews, completely unscripted and ad libbed as we go.  This makes it both more challenging and more fun, as it keeps you slightly on your toes to come up with another great question and keep the interview going.  And as you’ll see, I think we did a great job at that.

Disco burns a hole in your pocket

I ran into Austin Sarner, the young man behind the notorious applications AppZapper and Disco, not to mention My Dream App and MacHeist (but more about those later), at his small, but still very much existent booth.  I thought it would be good to get an opinion from the “other side,” and see what he thinks of all the hubbub his applications have been causing.  This X-Nterview is a bit short, mostly because it’s my first one ad libbed.

Austin Smokey Limits

Deep Thought: All right, I’m talking here with Austin Sarner, the developer of AppZapper and Disco.  Say hi, Austin.

Austin Sarner: Hey there.

DT: (for Austin’s benefit) This is for the web site Deep Thought, at DTGeeks.com.  All right, your applications have caused some controversy in the Mac shareware world.  Do you have any comments about that?

AS: Yeah, I think a lot of people had some backlash about the Disco smoke and the general idea about making software fun.  But in reality people are enjoying it, people are buying it and people are using it and I’d much rather have a bunch of happy users than a bunch of, uh, a handful of users complaining so it’s not that big of a deal.

DT: So what do you see in the future, for, uh… what kind of applications do you have in mind?

AS: Well, in the immediate future I’m gonna be working on Cookbook the MDA winner, so that’s gonna be a finish up; I gotta finish up Disco 1.0 and down the road we’re gonna be releasing a major AppZapper update as well as some Disco updates in regard to video compression and cross-conversion.

DT: And when does the mushroom cloud enter Disco?

AS: That’s a version 1.6 feature.

DT: Alright, and last question, what’s your favorite piece of hardware or software?

AS: Right now, the iPhone.

DT: Of course.  All right, thank you.

Schaut out to Microsoft customers

Microsoft has provided a “bloggers’ haven” for people to write about their Macworld experiences, as did I myself.  During my second visit here, I introduced myself to the infamous and quite jovial Rick Schaut, developer lead for Mac Word at Microsoft’s MacBU.  Rick declined to be recorded in order not to go on record saying something contrary to actual happenings, so this is an approximation of my conversation with him.  (Rick, if you’re reading this, feel free to correct anything inaccurate.)

Rick loves Mac coding

I asked him about some of the issues currently facing the MacBU and the new version of office, such as the brouhaha over the lack of compatibility (until spring) between the Mac platform and Office 2008 for Windows.  Rick informed me (at great length, I should add… the man certainly loves to talk) about the difficulties his department has encountered in keeping the Windows Office team interested in Office:mac and, as a result, the catch-up they have to do.  Since the Windows Office team decided to move ahead and release in a timely fashion (and to keep somewhat inline with the release of Vista), the MacBU has to do lots of work to push their product out the door.  They’ve ported MS-XML to maximize compatibility with the Windows version of Open-XML and to reduce the work needed to update later down the line.  They’ve also been porting the code for Office to the Mac, because a lot of it has been completely rewritten and they’re working to get all the features implemented correctly.

Rick explained how the target markets for the Windows and Mac versions of Office are significantly different.  In spite of the prevalence of Word at home or at work, the market for the Windows version is 99.999% targeted at enterprise.  Apparently, if you ask one of the engineers or marketers for Windows Office about the home market, you’ll get a blank stare.  Office:mac, on the other hand, is significantly more targeted at the SOHO (that’s Small Or Home Office) consumer base, giving them different priorities to the higher-ups at Microsoft.  He also tried to refute the notion that the MacBU doesn’t care about bugs in their software or what customers think.  As he explained, a comparably single-tasked application such as SpellCatcherX is much easier to maintain, relatively speaking, than an application like Word, with thousands of features.  He stated that as the number of features increases, the amount of work needed to keep it all going increases more than exponentially.  And different applications will implement the same feature in different ways; that’s just common sense, so it explains the differences between, say, SpellCatcherX and Word’s built-in auto-correct feature.

Rick’s a very friendly guy, and he certainly knows what he’s talking about.  While he’d love to fix every bug that’s ever been reported for his application, he doesn’t have the time or resources to tackle all of them, and roll out a completely new version of Office.  These paragraphs are but a glimpse of the extensive conversation he and I had; perhaps soon I’ll be able to interview him properly, with questions he can prepare answers to, because I’d love to be able to divulge everything I learned about the Office:mac process.

Crash and burn, or bak it up

One of the vendors Eric and I started talking to (and who gave us some shwiggity-shwag) was Eddie Martinez, explaining his service MacBak.  It was interesting to learn about what MacBak was about and how it could save my business, and it got me thinking, “Hmm, this would make a great interview!” So we started over, and this is the result.

DT: I’m here with Eddie Martinez of the company MacBak, which specializes in taking your data off-site and storing it, and providing secure backups.  So Eddie, tell me about your company.

Eddie Martinez: Well, I’m glad you asked, Joseph.  MacBak is a service that provides data protection and management; we take the responsibility off the creative, the graphic designer, the marketing company who doesn’t typically like to deal with the responsibility of backups, so what we do is we put software on their computer and it sends the data up to our data center, and it’s encrypted.  They have a web interface so they can do their restores, they can also get their data back from any web-enabled browser should they be into.  If something bad happens, then we can also put their data back onto a Firewire drive and send it back to them so that way they can put it on the new computer.

DT: And it’s easy that way, right?

EM: It is, we really take the responsibility away from the customer so they don’t have to think about it or worry about it.  There’s a lot of people who really just don’t care about backup, but they know that they should be doing it so, that’s where we pretend to be their in-house IT department with all the services and software that we develop.

DT: And do you guys integrate with any other programs, like Retrospect or SuperDuper!, or is it all in-house?

He keeps your data safe.

EM: The MacBak software and code was designed to replace other programs; the process in itself is only designed to gather or to collect the important assets that belong to a company’s business as far as keeping it up and running, so if you actually crash the system you have the OS disks and the applications to reinstall, but that catalog that you’re working on, that your customer expects you to deliver next week, that’s the data that we’re gonna restore so that you can stay in business.  It’s all about protecting the customer.

DT: And so, can you back up everything on your computer?

EM: Well we work with you to choose the directories or the files where you keep your projects.  In other words, if MP3’s are not a vital asset to keeping you in business, then we don’t want to back those up.  We only want to get the good stuff, the InDesign documents, the Quark documents, Photoshop files, things like that—your media files that are going to be, you know, used in the advertisement or the promotion or the web site you’re building.

DT: And how much storage storage do you get, and how much does it cost?

EM: That’s a great question, Joseph.  MacBak gives you 10 gigs of storage every month, so the second month you have 20 gigs, at the end of the year you have 120 gigs.  We don’t have an artificial limit, so as long as you keep creating data we’re gonna keep backing it up.  And then we turn it into an archive after a period of time, too.  We can still restore from the archive since it’s all on disk, it just goes to the web interface, you search it, you choose what you wanna download and it comes back to your computer.

DT: And how much was it?

EM: The service is $89 a month, and that’s because we actually take care of the process for you.  We feel that just to charge by disk storage is not a good way to do it because everybody knows that disks are getting cheaper.  We’re for the person who doesn’t want to deal with backups, and we take the responsibility.  When they have a question they call us up; we let them know that the backups are going successfully.  So it’s $89 for the first computer, if you have multiple computers in your office then it’s $30 additional, and each computer after that gets 10 gigs of storage also, so if you do have 2 computers you get 20 gigs a month, which is just a great deal and a good service.

DT: Is there anything else you can tell us about it?

EM: Well MacBak is designed for people who don’t wanna get involved with backup.  We realize that people have good intentions, they have Firewire drives, but I can’t tell you how many times we’ve done disk restores on hard drives that have crashed, paying $2200 for that service, and the Firewire drive was sitting right next to their computer, never plugged in and used.  Those are the people that we want to take care of, and that’s what MacBak is about: servicing the customer, make sure that something bad doesn’t happen where they go out of business.

DT: And it’s all on your own servers, everything’s locked up tight?

EM: Yes it is.  If you want to get to the hardware, you need to have biometric hand scan-prints to get into the data center, it is behind lock and key.  We do do secure encrypted tunnels back and forth, so that way everything’s, you know, not getting taken over by bad people.

DT: All right, one last question, what’s your favorite piece of hardware or software?

EM: My favorite piece of hardware of course is the Macintosh, and the software that runs on it of course is the Apple software next to MacBak’s.

DT: All right folks, well hopefully you didn’t hear it here first, but if you did, it’s MacBak, M-A-C-B-A-K… back up all your data securely, go for it!

I Dream of Heistie

After the exhibit hall closed at 6:00 p.m., Eric and I hiked a few blocks to a party hosted by Phill Ryu and the My Dream App/MacHeist crew.  We saw this as an excellent opportunity to get the whole team behind these ventures together to answer a few questions.  We talked to Phill, Chirag Monde (please correct my spelling here), the previously-Nterviewed Austin Sarner, and John Casasanta.  (Note:  Eric and I both asked the guys questions; for Eric’s questions, I will notate with “DT-E.")

Richest kids in the Macosphere

DT: I’m here with the team at MacHeist; I’ve got Phill Ryu, Chirag Monde, Austin Sarner and John Casasanta, and we’re going to do an Xtreme Nterview so (chuckling in background) so first of all, um, how did you guys come up with the idea of My Dream App?

Phill Ryu:  Well um, I was actually with a friend at Dunkin Donuts at 4 a.m. and we were just thinking to ourselves, like, I was talking about like uh, you know I’m not a programmer myself, and actually I’ve worked with a couple people before on some ideas I had for software, and it’s hard, you know, if you don’t have programming skills.  So I was talking with my friend about like an opportunity for anyone to get into software with a great idea, and—

DT: So since you’re not a programmer, you wanted anybody to be able to...

PR: Exactly. And uh, you know, I was thinking about American Idol and how that’s just captivated like millions of people, and I thought, well why not just have a contest for people with great ideas, and have the users vote on them, have guest celebrities judges, just make it fun and make it exciting, and so it just really was from like a, maybe, couple hour long discussion with a friend, and afterwards I just came back, I got on iChat and was telling John all about it, and Austin, so.... Good times.

DT: So how’d the rest of you get involved with this?  He just kinda told you about it?

Austin Sarner: Well basically what happened was I was on iChat, and Phill sends me this link with the standard application icon in a spotlight, and I’m like so what is this?  And Phill’s like, I can’t tell you (laughter) and that went on for about a week where he felt like he was really being exclusive or something.  I’m like, dude just tell me… (laughter in background) and he tells me about it and I’m like, okay I’ll be involved (chuckling) and uh, that’s how it happened, so…

DT: And you thought it was this fantastic idea?

AS: I thought it was a good idea, I thought it was a good opportunity to branch out the world of shareware to more than just the standard cycle of development.  I mean, in a lot of ways it’s a show, but, you know, after the show we’re actually gonna be producing some real apps that people are actually going to use, so in that way it’s a really interesting take on the whole development process as well.

John Casasanta: I thought it was a really stupid idea at first, but it grew on me. (chuckle in background)

DT: So, um, have you guys gotten really into the ideas for the applications that you’re going to be doing?  Like, I’ve read that you really have to love what you’re going to be programming to do a good job, so have you guys found the love for these applications?

AS: Um, well I don’t know if I love the idea of Cookbook really, but what I do love is bringing an application to market in a way that people can use, they can enjoy it and they can appreciate how it looks.

PR: Now let’s be honest, like, from the first time that we found Cookbook as one of the, you know, 3000 entries, Austin was immediately on it, he was like, wow this could be really cool and, you know, come on, like, you were pretty enthusiastic about it.

JC: i think the same thing is that he doesn’t cook… (laughter)

AS: Actually I do cook, I can make a really good omelet. (chatter) ... cook-off time! (laughter and chatter) interview, interview…

DT: Whoa! (laughter) Don’t worry, don’t worry!  It’s an Xtreme Nterview. (laughter) This is as extreme as it gets! (chuckling) this is extreme… Uh, so do you guys have a timeline for when you’re gonna start the applications, when you’re gonna finish the applications...

Blah blah MACHEIST blah blah...

JC: They’re in progress right now; we’re hoping to have them over the next several months, like start rolling some of them out.

(pause)

AS: Yeah that’s not gonna happen. (laughter)

PR: That’s not to be quoted! (laughter)

DT: So where’d you come up with the idea for MacHeist?

PR: MacHeist?  John actually came up with the original idea; he came to with me with, uh—

JC: Oh don’t be so humble (laughter) you came up with it.

PR: I am humble Phill, that’s what they call me. So anyways, he comes up to me with an idea for a bundle sale, you know, just instead of, like, basically take MacZOT! and just rent out space for a week and just, you know, just max it out with great applications.  And so, you know, we started talking. We brought in Scott Meinzer pretty early who programmed it, and we started brainstorming like, how do we make a sale fun? you know—

JC: Adam Betts as well—

PR: Yeah, Adam Betts as well—

JC: His artwork is fantabuloso—

PR: So, uh, we just started discussing ideas and settled on this—(laughing in background)—settled on this idea of like a heist… (laughing in background) and uh, you know just have some fun with it and let our users, you know, enjoy themselves, and we had done some free application giveaways on My Dream App before, and people really enjoyed that, so you know we talked to developers and asked if they would be interested in doing, um, getting some exposure for their software, and a lot of people joined, so… it was a lot of fun and definitely an idea among like all four of us basically… and Troy, a little bit… (laughter)

JC: And we owe a lot to John Gruber and Paul Kafasis and Gus Mueller for all the help they gave us… (chatter) and Rory Prior

(major chatter; at this point some introductions were made, and the DT team got to meet Arnold Kim of MacRumors… after a picture and some more interruptions and chatter, the interview continued, to an extent)

PR: I bought a Daring Fireball T-shirt as a little note of thanks to him for being a positive influence to… (chatter) MacHeist, and he actually wrote me back saying, you know, hey I really appreciate that you’re supporting Daring Fireball and I told him it’s nothing.  So, I still have yet to, uh, to receive that T-shirt. I still haven’t gotten it shipped yet but hopefully sometime soon.  You know, I was hoping to wear it proudly to Macworld, but unfortunately that didn’t happen.

DT-E: Like Gates and Jobs, right? (chuckling) So John, what exactly was your involvement in My Dream App and MacHeist?

DT: Besides coming up with the idea for MacHeist in the first place.

John: Um, yeah, with My Dream App, I helped a lot with the planning, like right now I’m the development manager so I’m helping actually get the apps to market and I am helping Austin on the UI of Cookbook.  For My Dream—for actually MacHeist, I worked on most of the heist, on puzzles and stuff like that. (chatter in background)

DT: So, one of the controversies about MacHeist was that, well, here you guys are giving 25% of your proceeds to charity; what do you do with the other 75%?

PR: Yeah, there’s one developer, there’s one out of ten who was a little disappointed with that, um, [name and application deleted at request of those involved besides Phill], and he’s kind of, uh, like basically he thought that it would have been better to emphasize the developers more than the charity.  And, uh, you know, like to counter that, like… (laughter) like to counter it, um, to be honest, we had literally hundreds of emails from people who had bought shareware for the first time in their lives because of this.  Like I feel that, you know, like it was on like Wired.com, um, a lot of Slashdot, a lot of sites where Mac shareware is not frequently featured, and I think it got the word out beyond the normal shareware crowd, and that’s probably one of the biggest impacts that MacHeist has had. I do feel that developers got a lot of focus on this stunt…

I loves me a Macmac!

JC: Yeah, and they’re all really happy about it. There was a lot of support from the developers involved, whether it was the freebie developers or the ones involved in the bundle; a lot of them blogged it, they were really excited about it. We’ve heard word from some of the developers that their sales (in background: had doubled) yeah, throughout the month of December, so they’re really excited about that, and we’ve actually had a bunch of developers come to us, talking about how they want to be involved already in the next heist.

(chatter)

DT: Xtreme Nterviews, people!

(chatter and laughter)

PR: Gus Mueller’s actually coming to the party tonight, so… (chatter)

That’ll be just funny if he doesn’t show up, like that TUAW interview that he just… He and John Gruber were invited to this TUAW—you know, The Unofficial Apple Weblog—roundtable podcast with some developers involved, like Wil Shipley was gonna do it—

JC: Paul Kafasis—

PR: Yeah, right. And like, basically the detractors [of MacHeist] just like pulled out saying that they didn’t want to give more attention to MacHeist.  And like, we were like, “Well do you want to do it after it’s over?” They’re like, “No,” so, whatever. (chuckles)

Editor’s note: I believe this was supposed to be our event.

DT: So, uh, future plans: what do you have cooking?

JC: We have something in the works; it’ll be sort of like a part 3 for the year. (laughing)

DT: Sort of like a what?

JC: It’d be like the part 3 of what’s going on; we’ll sort of have a trilogy. We have My Dream App, MacHeist, and then (chatter)

AS: We call them very different acts so MacHeist was act 2, and I remember that during My Dream App, John kept calling it Act 2 and I’m like, “what is Act 2?” And he’s like, we can’t talk about Act 2—

PR: Although The Empire Strikes Back was the best Star Wars movie; I think the third act will be kind of a failure, but we’ll see.

Chirag Monde: An intentional failure.

AS: Will it have Ewoks?

PR: Ewoks would be a terrible call, I feel. (chuckles) That kind of, that kind of, you know, made that movie suck.

DT: So any hints as to what we’re… what we have in store?

PR: There’s a lot of good stuff, but, uh, we can’t say. I mean, come on, what are you asking here? (laughter)

DT: C’mon, spill the beans, Phill! (laughter)

PR: Eh, um, It’s gonna involve some good food and a good party sometime next year. (laughter) And people will enjoy it, you know? I mean, we’re focusing on the community again, which is, which we found was an extremely important part of MAcHeist and My Dream App, and—

JC: It will not involve monkeys in any way, shape, or form.

PR: Yeah, Hubert was—

AS: Don’t talk about Hubert.

PR: Alright, fine. (laughs) You can’t talk about him, can’t talk about him.

Like I really care.  La la la...

DT: Alright, one last question for you guys: what is your favorite hardware and/or software? Phill?

Phill: Definitely my, uh… Xbox.  I mean, I hate to say it, but the Xbox 360 I’ve been playing a lot recently. And you know, actually one of the guys who made it, J. Allard—works for Microsoft—was a guest judge for My Dream App, so… just give him an email, be like, “I want an Xbox right now,” and he’d have to oblige, but um, Gears of War, it’s a sweet game, definitely.

CM: I don’t know what my favorite software is, but it sure as hell isn’t Disco. (laughter) As for hardware, Xbox; you know, it’s pretty good, but I think I’d go for the Wii. It’s been pretty good so far.

PR: We stayed up… we waited outside Wal Mart for like 5 hours… yeah, it was me and Chirag… (chatter) oh, and Austin. Yeah, I forgot about Austin. He’s kind of, like, not very memorable. (laughter) But anyways, we waited for the Wii for like, good 5 hours. It was freezing—

AS: Upstate New Hampshire, middle of nowhere…

PR: But it was worth it. We played Zelda for like 36 hours… (chatter) Actually the Wii might top the Xbox. Yeah. Although the keynote, this keynote was amazing. This is the second thing in my life I can’t doubt for, it was definitely worth it.  The iPhone?

AS: The iPhone is probably my favorite hardware—

PR: I’m sure that if it was out I would definitely say it was my favorite.

JC: You know, we actually had a car hired at like 11:20 right when the keynote ended ready to drive us straight to the Apple Store in the event that the iPhone was released. Uh, it ended up not being released, but we were still prepared in case it was.

DT: So Austin?

AS: Hmm, well, I’m not going to name the Wii or the Xbox. (chatter)

PR: I think Austin’s favorite hardware is like hair-straightening products… (chatter)

AS: Well the thing is, hair straightening-wise, I don’t know, these days I’m not so much into it. (chuckling) Yeah, a few months ago I would have definitely done it.  But, uh… I would have to say… well, I would say the iPhone but I haven’t used it yet so I can’t really judge that. I don’t know. Gaming-wise, definitely the DS. Um…

DT: Hardware or software. And/or software.

AS: Okay, software-wise, let’s see…

DT: AppZapper and Disco don’t count.

I think Yummy soup is the answer. (laughter) No, no, by far I think it’s that Toast 8, for sure. The Web 2.0 interface is excellent, so, there you go.

JC: Two words: Dell, Minesweeper. (laughter)

DT: That’s it?

JC: That’s it.

AS: He spent like an hour thinking about it.

PR: I think I just fired you from My Dream App. (laughter)

JC: Fired me? You can’t fire your boss!

(laughter)

DT: Alright guys, well I guess that about wraps it up, so thank you all.