Well, seems you were interested in finding out a little more about me, so I'll be happy to oblige!

I was born into a Mac using family, and grew up with a hand-me-down Quadra, PowerPC, then eventually my first brand-new Mac: an iMac DV when I turned ten. Soon after, I downloaded my first app with excitement: Internet Explorer 5. I downloaded it on a 56k modem, and it took like two hours, but I thought it was great. Ironically, IE for Mac is still at version 5, and is woefully pathetic now, but that's beside the point.

The summer of my high school freshman year, my dad bet me that he could make a game like Diablo 2 (which I was currently addicted to) in a week. We ended up working together, him coding and me on graphics side by side for a couple of weeks, and the result was myPong. Since we already had a host set up for my mom's math tutoring program (Math Game House), we took over the website to use as a front to our software, and released version 1.0. Because of the barren software landscape at the time, (Mac OS 10.0, Woohoo!) myPong was even eventually featured on TechTV's "The Screensavers". I still remember the look of utter disinterest on Leo Laporte's face as the (extremely nice) Mac person, Kate Botello, demoed our game.

The next summer, we worked on a networked collaborative word processor called iStorm, which, for the record, came out well before the now popular SubEthaEdit. However, not too long after its release, I was fired by my dad for conflicting opinions. (Mostly he didn't care about UI too much, and I did.)

Now freshly out of a job, I got pretty bored, and started chatting a lot with this random guy online: Adam Iser, developer of my new favorite find, Adium. I soon became a "contributor" (now "past contributor") through a process that mainly involved late night chat sessions with Adam on tab design and whether to go brushed metal or not. And Warcraft games. We later moved onto the World of Warcraft beta, and lost artist Adium icon artist Adam Betts to the game about then as well. My contributions also included bringing in brand new icon artist Jasper Hauser to create some new toolbar icons for the app, and we worked together for hours trying to come up with good visual analogies for things like "sound sets", "status", and "accounts". Most of them are still in use today, which is cool. You may notice that Jasper's first job was iStorm and iChalk icons for Math Game House. He's now became one of the most popular professional icon artists out there, and I'm still amazed at how incredible he's become in such a short time. Check out his portfolio!

Around the same time, I also started to get into the GUI customization community, which was nearly nonexistent at the time. After some months of getting to know the artists, I realized my calling had come, and I went to work on a community site for GUI enthusiasts, called MacThemes, with artist Adam Betts and developer/web coder Jan Van Boghout. You can read about its creation here. I'm pretty proud to say that it's now become the central destination for GUI customizers and fans alike.

Then, Tiger was announced, along with the Dashboard, and I realized I knew the perfect group of talented GUI artists and web coders to get something cool going, and a few months later, we launched Widget Machine, the first shareware company to exclusively sell widgets. We've since sold over $20,000 worth of widgets in a year, and created widgets for MacUpdate, Macworld, and MacZot among others. The coolest moment? Probably Apple featuring our shareware widget, VoiceNotes, on their front page. Take that you stingy whiners!

One of the programmers I worked with on Widget Machine, Jean Olivier-Lanctôt, notified me the following winter (December 2005) that he was working on a new iTunes remote application, and I quickly got involved. We decided to focus on skins, and it all sort of came full circle for me, as I had gotten into GUI customization in the first place partially due to Panic's excellent but not defunct Audion. So we released Menuet 1.0 during the 2006 San Francisco Macworld Expo on MacGrab.com (working with Scott Meinzer and the AppZapper team), which was a blast. (If you're in the business, do not miss out on the expo, it was an awesome experience!) And it was made all the more fun, as my parents thought I was still in New Hampshire starting my winter term at Dartmouth College. But enough of that.

Now, I've started this blog to give me a place to output some of my thoughts on the business, maybe sometimes a bit of insider knowledge, or who knows what. I just hope I have enough interesting things to say! And that's enough about me.