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Born 8th September 1976 in Glasgow, Scotland but moved to London at age 3. Studied in City of London School before taking a year out in Israel to travel, study and teach. I then studied two years of Computer Science and one year of Management Studies at Christ's College, Cambridge University. Right now, I have just finished a one-year Masters in Philosophy of Religion at King's College, London and in early January I'm moving to Israel to continue my work and studies. |
It is with great pleasure I present to you the author of Drop Drawers, Gideon Greenspan. Seldom has a single piece of software generated such enthusiasm from the readers of ResExcellence as with the announcement of Drop Drawers. Nothing but positive comments were sent to me when I first mentioned it. The decision then about who to interview for ResExcellence was sealed.
Cletus: Gideon, thanks for taking time from your busy work schedule to answer a few questions for our ResExcellence readers. I understand you are traveling "around the World" right now?
Gideon: Well, not quite "around the world". I'm spending two months in South East Asia, travelling from Singapore through Malaysia to Thailand. Right now I'm in Penang, near the Malaysia-Thailand border and I spent today motorbiking around this beautiful island.
Of course, I'm taking my work with me as I go and so far it's been very easy to keep up to date with my programming and my email. Since many people who live in South East Asia cannot afford their own computer, every town is full of Internet Cafes, and I am able to use the 'net in most places for under $1/hr.
Cletus: Before we delve into the Drop Drawers program, I’d like to give ours readers a little background insight into just who Gideon Greenspan and Sig Software is?
Gideon: I've been programming since I was a child, using BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20, BBC Micro, RM Nimbus and the Sinclair QL. When we finally got a Mac SE, I started working with HyperCard and was amazed at how easy it was to create GUI applications. But eventually it was time to move on to 'real' programming in C and I released my first fully-fledged Macintosh application, NameCleaner 1.0, in September 1994.
It took 6 months for the first $20 check to arrive, but by steadily improving the product in response to user feedback, NameCleaner began to do well. I was encouraged, signed up with Kagi to process my payments and in February 1997, I released my second program, Email Effects 1.0. I was simply blown away by the feedback I got from the Mac community.
So soon after, I decided to take shareware a lot more seriously. I relaunched my products under the name "Sig Software" and created a web site at http://www.sigsoftware.com/. Since then I've been rather busy, releasing MADE, Email Merge, Cross Platform, Email Effects for Windows, Analog Helper, and most recently, Drop Drawers. And all that while studying full-time at university!
Cletus: For our hardware fans, could you give us some details about what equipment and set up you normal use.
Gideon: Right now, I'm travelling with an Apple PowerBook Bronze G3/333, 128Mb/4Gb and before buying that, my main machine was an Apple Desktop G3/233. For testing, I also use an LC III, IIci, PowerBook 160, 7100 with G3/240 upgrade and 7500 with 604/150 upgrade. On the PC side, I have a Dell OptiPlex GXa Pentium II/233 but most of the time it sits idle - I bought it solely to create Email Effects for Windows. My only peripherals are an Iomega Zip Plus drive and a 56k voice modem made by Pace (who are now bankrupt).
Cletus: Considering the significant and dynamic abilities of Drop Drawers, I imagine it was not a product that was conceived and developed over night?
Gideon: You could say that! I been working on the idea of having a versatile catch-all data repository for some time. It took about 3 years from the first sketches until I finally came up with the Drop Drawers concept. Even then, the feedback I received in the early beta stages of the product made a huge difference - I only wish more users understood just how much software developers (or at least I) listen to what they say.
Cletus: What was your reason or expectations for even taking on the development of this product?
Gideon: Like all my other programs, it was a desire to do something with my Mac which was not yet possible. I have tons of URLs, text snippets and files to keep track of and I wanted to create a convenient way to organize and access them. And like all my other programs, I use it all the time!
Before starting a project, I always try to estimate whether I can expect it to sell well enough to justify the time I put in. But since Drop Drawers was such an original concept, I had no basis on which to make this judgment. So instead I released a beta version fairly early on in the development process to get some measure of people's reaction. The excited response from the online Mac community motivated me to invest another month in improving it before releasing Drop Drawers 1.0 at the end of August.
Cletus: Since Drop Drawers holds a great amount of capabilities I imagine there is a huge amount of designers and beta testers that are constantly working on the product? Do you ever need beta testers?
Gideon: Mainly, there's only one designer, developer and tester - myself. But users send me a lot of good feedback, much of which makes its way into the product. I could certainly use more beta testers, mainly to check for incompatibilities that may exist between Drop Drawers and other products. Beta test.
Cletus: What plans are in store for Drop Drawers? Will it work in Mac OS X?
Gideon: So far, reports from the field and local testing have shown no incompatibilities with either Mac OS 9 or the Mac OS X Blue Box. Since I try never to circumvent Apple's developer guidelines, I would not expect anything different.
In terms of future plans, Drop Drawers is just at the beginning of its life. Version 1.1 has many improvements. It has a new options interface and lets you move data between Drop Drawers and any application using key-presses alone. Plus there's password protection, extended arranging options, more control over click actions, and more actions to which keys can be assigned.
I'm planning to use the drawer metaphor to make Drop Drawers more than just a convenient place to store data. For example, there may be drawers containing a calculator, calendar, clock, notepad or list of running processes. Even further afield, I'm considering creating a drawer plug-in architecture to let programmers create drawers which show or do anything - play MP3s, search with Sherlock, whatever...
Cletus: Several readers wrote in to ask if there are plans for more customization options in a future release of Drop Drawers, in particular with colors?
Gideon: Right now I'm focusing on functionality in the product. But it will not be too soon before more aesthetic issues are dealt with, for example allowing background images to be set for drawers and tabs. But users should not forget that there are already 4 tab shapes available and that all text styles and colors can be freely changed.
Cletus: How are you feeling about Apple computer? Are they giving small developers the support they need?
Gideon: Despite the gloom that has surrounded Apple over the past few years, the Macintosh has remained an excellent market for shareware. And now that things seem to be looking up again, I think that the niche for products such as Drop Drawers is going to grow.
Since I am a full-time student, I can take advantage of Apple's $99/year student membership of the Apple Developer Connection, which is an excellent deal. The main advantage of joining the program is the developer mailings, which include the latest OS releases and tons of documentation. But for those who cannot afford that, all the information you need is also available on Apple's web site, albeit in a slightly less convenient format. So overall I feel that developer support is pretty good.
Cletus: What programs besides Drop Drawers, do you use on a regular basis.
Gideon: Programs I use daily are Analog 3.2 with Analog Helper 1.1, Claris Emailer 2.1, CodeWarrior Pro 4, ResEdit 2.1 (still going even though it's 8 years old!), FileMaker Pro 4.0, HyperCard 2.4 and Internet Explorer 4.5.
Other major applications I have installed are ClarisWorks 4.0, Microsoft Office 98, Netscape Navigator 4.0.8 and Virtual PC 2.1.3. As you can tell, I don't feel the need to always have the latest version of every program!
I tend to steer clear of anything that patches the system at startup. The only non-Apple control panels or extensions I have installed are the SETI@Home screensaver and Matt Slot's TSM Fix (which Drop Drawers uses).
Cletus: I see you've written several programs – tell us a bit about your other products please.
Gideon: Well, I'll make this quick since there are so many of them!
I have two tools to help deal with cross-platform issues - Cross Platform tells you how easy it will be to use your Macintosh files with Windows-based computers and NameCleaner deals with many issues in moving files to and from foreign file systems, such as file extensions and illegal characters in file names.
I also have two tools to help with email - Email Effects is a versatile ASCII Art creator ("The Photoshop of ASCII Art"), letting you send pictures, drawers and tables in plain email text and Email Merge lets you merge a template with a database to create individualized email messages (not spam!)
Lastly, Analog Helper is a graphical configuration shell for Analog, the popular and fast free web log analysis program and MADE is a small package of C source code which provides a foundation on which a Mac OS application can be built (all my products are at least partially based on MADE).
Cletus: One of these programs, Email Effects, is cross platform. What is it like developing for both systems?
Gideon: Having learnt to program on the Mac, porting a product to Windows was not as difficult as I thought. Although there are lots of differences between the two platforms, I was often able to go through the Mac code line by line, replacing Mac OS system calls with Windows ones. Of course, parts of Email Effects that are totally GUI-independent (for example, the table conversion) can be copied across with no modifications.
Some things about Windows are better for the programmer and some things are worse. Coming from the Mac, the most noticeable improvements were in memory management and the built-in hierarchical window and control support. And since Windows NT has pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory, I never had to reboot the machine because of a crash occuring during development.
But on the flip side, graphics programming in Windows is far harder and color management is a real pain. Compared to the nightmare that is the Windows registry, the Alias Manager built into the Mac OS is a dream for tracking files. For Drop Drawers, the fact that the Mac has so many standard data formats for styled text, pictures, sounds, movies and URLs was a huge bonus, as was the simple, clean design of the Macintosh API for drag and drop.
Cletus: Have you spent any time with the Linux OS, and as a programmer, what are your feelings on Open Source?
Gideon: I'm afraid I've never used Linux, and don't know enough about it to comment. I guess I would want to wait for there to be a standard GUI on that platform before devoting any serious time to developing for it. A lot of people have asked about Email Effects for Linux and one day it might happen.
As for Open Source, there's no way I could take advantage of it while wanting to charge for my products. Perhaps if one of my programs stops selling, I will release the source code, but I may decide not to since my programs share a lot of code. In the software business, source code is your only important asset!
Cletus: Who in the computer world do you most admire or who inspires you the most?
Gideon: I mostly admire the people who developed the fundamentals of computer science - for example, Turing for effectively inventing the algorithm and Von Neumann for his work on binary computation. Absolutely everything that is done with computers today is based on a few fundamental principles developed by these people - the rest is simply a matter of speed and user experience.
Cletus: Do you have much time left to surf the web?
Gideon: I tend to avoid 'surfing' the web since I have more than enough work to do on my computer! The sites I visit daily are BBC News, MacCentral, MaCNN, Macintouch, MacResource, MacWeek and News.Com. Mostly this is to make sure I'm on top of any developments in the Macintosh sphere and in computing in general.
For search engines, I often use Yahoo and AltaVista, but one of the best resources for finding out anything at all is Deja.Com - you'd be amazed at how much you can learn by doing a search through newsgroup posts for a few keywords.
Cletus: Gideon I would again like to thank you for answering these questions and wish you well in all you endeavor to do in life. Thanks!
Gideon: Thank you and good luck with your site!
Gideon Greenspan; Sig Software
 the end
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