Drunken Batman on Wil Shipley & Delicious Monster
Posted on July 22, 2005
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Drunken Blog does great interviews. To date Drunken Batman has interviewed Martin Pittenauer of SubEthaEdit fame, Jonathan Rentzsch of mach_override fame, and Christopher Forsythe of Growl fame. Put these guys together in a room and you have the Mac software equivalent of the ‘92 Dream Team.
Just added to the fray: a typically-long, rambling, fascinating interview with Wil Shipley, code brains behind Delicious Library, possibly the single most successful piece of Mac shareware ever released: On Being and Deliciousness, with Wil Shipley.
Undoubtedly the nay-sayers about Mac software out there will be taking umbrage with the “successful piece of Mac shareware” statement right about now, especially the Windows users, so for the record: Delicious Library netted $250 000 in sales in it’s first month. $8333 a day for v1.0 software. I kid you not.
In the interview Wil talks about everything from his time at Omni, another Mac software company that creates great product (think OmniGraffle), battling depression and obsessive/compulsive disorder, business partner Mike Matas’ decision to jump to Apple (which can only be a great thing for Mac UI advancement to come), and the development process and perils of Delicious Library.
We were basically lucky in that we came out of the gate with a product that people really, really wanted (I think every programmer’s first project is some kind of media database) and a look that was really, really cool (Go Mike).
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I am very much in awe of the guy who invented barcodes; they are incredibly elegant. One trick is to notice that every digit in a barcode is two black stripes and two white stripes, so if you’ve read black-white-black-white you know you have a digit, no matter how quickly it happened. (If it happened too quickly, you can decide you’re reading garbage and just bail.)
One of the rules of writing algorithms that I’ve recently been sort of toying with is that we (as programmers) spend too much time trying to find provably correct solutions, when what we need to do is write really fast heuristics that fail incredibly gracefully.
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Frameworks are the substance of programming. You build on top of a good one, your program is solid and fast and comes together beautifully. You build on top of a bad one, your life is miserable, brutish, and short.
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Extreme gardening is when you rent a twenty-foot backhoe (amazingly, they require no license!) and buy a diamond sawblade and cut up the asphalt in your parking lot and dig it out with a CAT and have dirt put in and pick a bunch of huge trees and plants and put ‘em in place with your giant backhoe, again.
You turn parking lot into jungle, with big machines. I’m self-taught, I’m proud to say. It was totally fun.
Mike Matas also put together a PDF booklet detailing a brief visual history of the Delicious Library UI development process. If you do nothing else, download this PDF and take a wander through it. The art is fascinating to see as it evolves, and the images and designs are gorgeous. I’ve mirrored it here:
The Art of Delicious Library [PDF]
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Sincerely glad you dug it