Upcoming: Wil Shipley - call for questions

I'm happy to announce Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster and Omni fame will be joining me on CocoaRadio for an interview soon. Here's your chance to ask Wil your questions about Cocoa, Delicious Library, and whatever else is on your mind. Add your questions in comments below and we'll get to as many as possible during the interview.
Delicious Library has inspired many Cocoa developers for it's UI, use of Cocoa, and not mention its overnight success. We're talking about a few guys writing code in a coffee shop! If you have not seen Delicious Library, grab the demo and you'll likely find yourself buying an iSight next.

When Wil is not busy toiling on Delicious at Zoka in Seattle, he's advising students and pimping code. Some say he's a bit crazy but maybe he's just gotten moody after Mike moved to Cupertino.

If you're not yet familiar with his work, read on:
Delicious Monster, WWDC Student Talk, the podcast and slides, and the excellent interview on the DrunkenBlog.

Technorati Tags: apple, cocoa, mac, macmarketing, osx, tiger

Comments

[Matthew Buchanan]

Hi Wil - I love Delicious Library, but one feature I'd like is an option to export my library to the Web, so others can view it. Will we see support for this in the next version?

[cesar]

Hi, wil, I understand that you can not talk about feature projects (new software or new releases of DL), but could you provide a list of the Delicious Monster dead projects.

if you were Steve Jobs or someone big at apple, what products would you introduce to the Market (ProApps, iApps, proHardware, Consumer Hardware, Entreprise hardware). Just what products would you like to see from apple.

[Abhi Beckert]

Hey guys! Loved the panic interview and I'll probably love this one more! Can't wait. :)

I'd love to hear Wil's opinion on John Siracusa's recent blog posts on obj-c's lack of memory management.

(John's blog: http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars)

[Matt James]

My question for Wil would be how he and his team manage the balance between features and simplicity in their applications. How much does marketing influence the software's design as opposed to the other 2 pillars: usability/interaction design and technical merit.

[Weldon Dodd]

I'm curious about your reaction to the Spotlight implementation in Tiger. Do you plan to integrate search with Spotlight? While Delicious Library has received lots of praise for its UI design, how did you react to Apple's UI choice to place the spotlight search box in the upper right-hand corner of a window? Did the spotlight UI in Tiger make you cringe, consider changing the UI in Library to match, or have no effect at all on your design ideas for the future?

[Geoff Pado]

How does working at Zoka improve Delicious Monster's work habits? I, personally, could not stand working in a place with people other than my team. I'm easily distracted, so that may be the difference.

[Marcus S. Zarra]

Which tools does Delicious Monster use for bug tracking and source code version control?

I look forward to this interview!

[Aapo Laitinen]

I'd love to hear Wil's views on if the gap between what can be created with Interface Builder and what iApps etc. use (something he blogged a bit about already) will ever get narrower. And is that something he thinks should happen?

Also, why it seems that independent Cocoa developers aren't as keen as for example Delphi developers in turning their custom controls into drag-and-drop reusable components? On the other hand, BSD-licensed code snippets that implement some single feature seem very common. Coming from the Delphi-land where just about any custom control is readily available for purchase or for free I have wondered the reasons for this difference.

[Seth Willits]

What advice can you give to someone who has asked a Cocoa-related question at all the usual places (Cocoa Dev mailing list, #macdev, mailing list archives, Google, etc.) and found no answer? Where else is there to turn if you're as poor as dirt and can't ask Apple?

[Adam Gerson]

I am good at making a program 80% great. How do you take it too 100% awesome?

Adam

[Justin Van Patten]

Wil,

Here are several questions regarding entrepreneurship (these relate to both Omni and Delicious Monster):

1. What were the circumstances behind starting Omni and Delicious Monster?

2. How did you spot the opportunity? How did it surface?

3. Did you have a start-up business plan of any kind for Omni and/or Delicious Monster?

4. What did you perceive to be the strengths of your ventures? Weaknesses?

5. What was your most triumphant moment? Your worst moment?

6. Have your goals changed? Have you met them?

7. What did you learn from both your success and failure?

8. What do you consider your most valuable asset--the thing that enabled you to make it?

9. Some people say there is a lot of stress being an entrepreneur. What have you experienced?

10. What things do you find personally rewarding and satisfying as an entrepreneur? What have been the rewards, risks, and trade-offs?

11. Who should try to be an entrepreneur? And who should not? Can you give me any ideas there?

12. Have you looked at C# at all? If so, what do you think?

[Ken]

What to you is the most frustrating to use software on OSX?
What would you do in terms of changing the UI to make it easier to use?

What would you consider to be the most effecient and easy to understand "No manual required" kind of app?

Also, why do most carbon apps suck so much (esp. Finder) ??

[randy]

Do you still use a coffee shop as your "office"? Probably not. But when you did, how much coffee did you have to buy each day to justify being there for so long?

[Joachim]

Will,

1. If you were to start learning Cocoa/Objective-C today, how/where would you start?

2. Knowing what you know today, what would you've done differently when starting a career as a Mac developer?

[Amir]

Hi,
I know this may be quite hard to ask, but id like to know how did u get fired from the company you started, how did it affect you, and how long did it take you to get back on track and start your new company.
Amir

[Joachim]

Two additional questions from me:

1. Where did you get the idea for Library (if it was your idea, that is)?

Was it something you needed yourself? Did you see a need in the market? Or just wanted to do better than the existing solutions? Or...

2. How did you end up with the price tag of $40? Was it the "right" price and why?

[Damien]

What is your development process? Do you start with drawing UML diagrams (Class, Sequence, ...) in one shot, or do you make small iterations?

I find it hard to make a complete design before coding anything, especially when I'm using classes which I haven't used before.

[Joachim]

How much time is being spent on coding/design vs. support on Library?

[marc nothrop]

Similarly to Abhi I'm interested in Will's take on Sparkle/Avalon et al, and future API directions for Apple... maybe it would be pure speculation, but that can be a guilty pleasure, sometimes. ;)

...along the lines of Siracusa's blogging of late on the future needs for a new API, memory management etc.

WIll has a long history with the Cocoa frameworks, and the platform; some annecdotes could be interesting, esp. around Lighthouse, and what became of the rights to their apps (Keynote/Pages/?) : )

It would also be interesting to look at the wider implications of the Mac/Intel support, and Will sees OS X going, since he's been through CPU transitions, and multi-platoform support on NeXT.

As for the users, any clues on Library 2.0, or future apps would be great, too. : )

[Damien Trog]

As was mentioned before by others here, I would like to know Wil's stance on John Siracusa's article on ars technica. In particular thoughts on the need for a garbage collector in Objective-C or not.

[Adam Hall]

One Quick Question:

1) What inspires you the most to write software?

[Chad]

Several years ago I was looking for a decent PostScript viewer, and I stumbled upon OmniPDF...however, I couldn't find any mention of it on the OmniGroup website. What happened to OmniPDF? At the time it was around, it sounded like a pretty good PDF/PS viewer.