macelleria

About: Martin Kahr is a mac developer from Austria. He is the developer behind Sofa Control, Searchlight and most recently AlterEgo. This is his interview:

So Martin, how hard is it to be a "relatively" small software company? Do you manage developing / support / customers all by yourself?

As you already mentioned in your question, there is much more than developing the software. Spending a bit more time in a good press release is worth more than adding another feature to your app. As a technician I had to learn a lot in this area and I'm still a novice.
I did these tasks all by myself. This summer I thought about the future of CASE Apps and decided to abandon the Java consultant jobs and that I have to find a partner. I need a partner not just for splitting up the work but for a other important reasons as well.
It makes a big difference to have somebody to match with about feature set, UI concepts, marketing and all the other stuff that comes up daily. Sometimes it's not easy to motivate myself to fix the next 5 bugs or to answer the 20 support emails. The right partner is a big motivator and you are not feeling that overwhelmed by the amount of work that has to be done.
Spending more time on Mac development and splitting up work with a partner makes also room for new products and product updates. The first new product launched back in December.

Is the mac platform a viable business for a developer? CASE Apps, has to my knowledge, 2 shareware apps and a really cool free widget. Are these enough, or do you do some extra work to "keep the boat afloat"?

I started with Mac development 3 years ago. Until today I split my time to do consultant jobs (mostly Java) and for developing Mac software. I'll do some contract work (Mac software as well) the next year but the idea is to get enough out of own products to focus on that alone.

The market share of the Mac is pretty low compared to Windows but big enough to make enough money for living and more.

Let us talk about Searchlight. It's not the first time that Apple "kills" 3rd party apps with the release of a new OS. Leopard brings the ability to spotlight through other computers on the same local network and that was Searchlight's key feature. What will the future bring for Searchlight to compete with a "free" feature of the OS?

I was not upset by Apple when I heard about the new Spotlight feature. In fact it was very reasonable that they will extend the functionality of Spotlight to search on the network as well.
Of course that has a number of implications on Searchlight. We sat back and thought about the markets for Searchlight and came up with something much bigger. So Searchlight will be greatly enhanced and search will only one part of the new product.
We plan to have a first beta out in March.

How did you first start developing apps for the mac? What was your first app?

I started playing with Cocoa late 2003. In 2004 motivated from attending the WWDC for the first time I developed a freeware application with two friends. Searchlight, the first product, has been released in february 2006.

You're a big Apple fan and that holds true for nearly all indie mac developers. What was the craziest thing you ever did for Apple? I'd like to go to a Steve Jobs' keynote someday...

The craziest thing I did with some friends was to go to London for the opening of the Apple Store in the Regent Street. We waited there from 4am in the morning until the shop opening at 10am. When we finally entered the store the guy in front of us got the last "Lucky Bag". What a bummer!
But it was a very funny time waiting and chatting with people in the line.

You are from Vienna, Austria, one of the most beautiful cities of old Europe. Yet, this may be a hurdle for being an Apple fan. You had to wait for 4 months to get your hands on an iPhone for example and selling apps online is hard(er) because of the strength of Euro over Dollar. Here in Greece, things are much worse on Apple support and ecosystem. Do you think that Apple and macs will grow bigger over time and bring Apple's attention to the European market at the same level as with U.S.? Right now the best Apple presence in Europe is in the U.K.

If you go to one of the hype coffee shops in Vienna and look around you would think that the market share of Apple must be about 90% or higher. It looks like Non-Apple-Notebooks are not allowed to be in the wilderness.
That said, the market share of Apple is still very low in Austria (I don't have any numbers but would guess that it's about 3-4%). But I notice that the popularity is constantly rising and you could get Mac products at major electronic stores since a year or so.
It will probably never have the market share as in the US but I guess that a global market share of about 8% and a market share of 6% in europe is reachable in the near future (about 5 years).
The good thing about europe is that there is still a lot of room for companies that are focused on the Mac.

Given the chance, would you work for Apple? They say Jobs rules with an iron fist.

Absolutely. Working for Apple is for sure an adventure.
But it has to be the right job. There was a time where I would have taken any job just to work there.
Right now I find working on the upcoming products we have in the pipeline much more interesting than any job I could probably get at Apple.

I am a big fan of Sofa Control. I think of it as an "interpeter" of keyboard shortcuts and Applescript via the Apple Remote Control. I really like how you can create your own scripts or customize the existing ones without great knowledge about coding. It's one of the best contenders for a media-center mac or controlling lots of apps without a keyboard or mouse. Version 2.0 brought a virtual mouse and 2.2 a virtual keyboard. What's next for Sofa Control? Where do you plan on extending Sofa Control feature list?

Sofa Control will get another update in the next few weeks with some minor enhancements and bug fixes. We already defined the feature list for an upcoming 3.0 version that we plan to release later this year.
It will be Leopard only to be able to use some of the cool new things that came with Leopard. We think about extending the visuals and making it even easier for the user to do his own scripts.

What do you think of the iPhone/iPod touch? In your opinion, what are their major shortcomings (if any)?

The cool thing about the iPhone is that the software and the UI controls matches the abilities of the hardware.
The major achievement of the iPhone is that it didn't take existing UI concepts but that they invented new ones that fit for the device and multi-touch. The major shortcomings are the missing synchronization of Todos and Notes. I'm sure that will be updated by Apple in the near future.

We're very excited as mac users, for the new OSX Mobile platform of iPhone/iPod Touch. The way I see it, this platform will get bigger than the Macintosh business eventually. Now that Jobs (finally) announced plans for real 3rd party apps for the iPhone, do you have any plans for creating a killer iPhone app?

I'm looking forward to third party applications and how they will be delivered to the end user. I think Apple will allow installation of third party apps only through the iTunes application and developers need to submit their applications to be in the iTunes store.
We will do an iPhone application that syncs its data with a Mac application (if there is a sync API). It probably won't be the killer iPhone application but I'm sure it will get some attention. More on that in March hopefully.

Leopard is installed on our macs and now you (developers) can freely talk about its underlying cool new technologies. What's so great in Leopard developer-wise? Will it really make things better and easier for you?

It's incredible how much easier animations are with Core Animation.
I remember the days when I wrote the visuals for Sofa Control and spend hours to improve performance and frames per second to make it as smooth as possible.
Interested persons should check out AlterEgo where I used Core Animation for the whole UI. The cover flow effect is being done with Core Animation as well as the morphing buttons.
So for me as a developer the best thing about Leopard is Core Animation and the enhancements we got in Core Data and Cocoa. Interface builder is a huge leap forward and some Objective-C 2.0 enhancements are also very cool.

The inclusion of Wikipedia on Dictionary.app and its plugin-ability is one of my best "small" new features of Leopard. What's yours?

My favorite small features are in Xcode and Interface builder. Both applications are improved in a number of ways that make my daily life as programmer a lot easier. The Xcode editor can be launched from the command line with "xed". Since that I abandoned the use of TextMate for most jobs. TextMate is a great product but I found myself using only 5% of the feature set. I prefer to know one editor pretty well and therefore try to stick with the Xcode build in.
My favorite non-developer feature is the increased speed of Spotlight. I use spotlight for launching applications, searching for source code and documents.

Your dock bar contains...

Beside standard Apple applications I only have Things in the Dock. I'm using Spotlight as an application launcher for the rest. I'm not using that many third party applications. I use MarsEdit for blogging, iWork for Office stuff, Coda for the website stuff and Xcode for editing. I recently switched to Google Reader for reading RSS feeds as it has that nice iPhone interface as well.

Any plans on a cool new app?

There are a number of things in the pipeline for the first half of this year. The brand new "Searchlight" is already in work and we will launch a new product that has an iPhone interface.

Other than Apple products, where else do you divide your time?

Since last year I'm doing a lot of sports. After using my body for years just to move my head from A to B that's a totally new thing for me :-)
I'm running and play tennis.
Beside that I'm constantly searching for new places that serve good food (therefore I have to do sports as well). If you plan to visit Vienna send me a message and I'll give you some recommendations of some great restaurants.
I also like to match with my nephews in console games (preferable PES - Pro Evolution Soccer).

Time travel isn't at all possible but let's say we fast forward 5 years from now: What changes do you think we'd see on the tech industry? Where do Apple, Google and Microsoft stand?

Microsoft will still be the big company as it is today. No one could get their OS/Office market anytime soon. But as I read somewhere some time ago, Microsoft isn't the company to be afraid of. They want nock you out because they come up with a more innovative product. They probably will buy your company but they will not surprise with big innovations.

Google will try to extend its market in different areas. It will be interested to see if Android (the google mobile phone OS) will get a reasonable market share. I'm not sure about how good it works out to provide a OS for devices that have completely different specs (touch, wheels, normal buttons, ...). Hopefully Google will improve the UIs of their web apps in the next year. They are useable but not very attractive.

And Apple. Who knows. I think that they still will do different things from Macs, iTunes to iPhone and Pro-Business (FinalCut, XServe, ...). Beside the iPhone I guess they will focus more on the living room and how to get their AppleTVs and other hardware installed there.
The Mac and Mac OS X is the enabler, the foundation for all of these things.

That's it! Thanks Martin.