Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng sat down with Andrew Stone of Stone Design to talk about his products Create & Videator as well as his time spent working as a 3rd party NeXT developer in the early nineties, Steve Jobs, and the state of Mac development. Click the play button above to watch the entire interview.
Update (6/27/2007): Transcript has been added! Read the transcript after the jump.
JC: Here we are with Andrew Stone formerly of NeXT, currently of Stone Design. Thank you for sitting down and talking with us today.
AS: Thank you.
JC: So, you write a lot of software right now, what are two of your favorite applications that you currently write?
AS: Well, I think our biggest package is Create. Imagine combining Illustrator, InDesign, and GoLive in one, easy-to-use workflow. That's Create. And so it's sort of our most major, most sort of ambitious project. But I think right now I'm currently in love most with Videator. Videator does realtime effects on video, and you can take in multiple image sources and movies and mix them. And then individually apply really cool effects to all of them or some of them and then output that to a podcast or a Quicktime movie or something like that.
JC: I think you demoed that for us the other day and it was pretty cool looking. So, you used to work at NeXT...
AS: Well actually, in 1989 I bought my NeXT machine and NeXT came to me and said "Hey, do you want to be a developer? We really need this database." And pretty much within a few weeks of getting my machine, I had made this pretty cool type styling program called TextStart. After they saw that they go "Wow, you can code fast. Build us a database." I was always a third-party, so never working exactly for NeXT, but when your stuff only works on a NeXT, you're pretty much working with NeXT.
JC: Well, how was it working with them and doing that kind of development?
AS: Well that was a very small team and they were doing some amazing things. And so, we would routinely meet with Steve and the head engineers. Once, the founder of the appkit, Bill Parkhurst--he was the first guy to work on this, and he was an original Mac developer who had come up with a plugin for Mac Paint to flip bits and stuff and that was one of the first plugins. They wanted me to get on this thing, so he flew out to Albuquerque and hung out with me for a few days, and one of the things I remember from him that's real useful for coders, he goes "When you're looking for a bug, and you're looking at the code, REALLY look at the code." I remember him saying that and it's so true. It's like, you can't figure out what's going wrong but are you really looking at the code and reading each line and seeing were it's going.
So it was a great experience because it was a small team doing great things.
JC: So mentioned that you used to work relatively closely with Steve Jobs. What is it like to work with Steve? What is he like?
AS: I would say what's great about Steve is...it's sort of like...you know the first time he came into a meeting where I was showing off my software, I was in a panic. Cause this guy is such a legend and known to be, you know, a little temperamental...
JC: Right...
AS: And so I was showing him the software and goes "No, it's gotta be this way, it's gotta be this way!" And I was trying to defend myself and I really stood up for myself. And it was kind of odd because I know that's probably not what most of his minions do. He had a lot of lackeys who were yes-men. And so that was a little hard to do, but I had to hold my ground. But the guy inspires people to do their best, and that is what is so... the man has created this platform because he surrounds himself with really smart people that need his approval. It's sort of like, they probably didn't have fathers or something. I don't know what it was. Steve fills in and people work really hard for him.
JC: You've been in development for a long time. How do you think the landscape has changed in recent years for developers in general, including third party developers and that kind of thing?
AS: Well it's sort of like the way it was only much, much better. Because, for example, we heard Steve saying pretty much that Carbon was dead. Now, Gil Amelio said the exact same thing at in 1997 at World Wide Developer Conference. I was demoing my apps which were some of the first to run on Rhapsody, the preview before Mac OS X, because it was based on NeXT. And when he said that, first of all very few developers came to that developer conference. Second of all, when he said that, it was like "Booo!" and everyone was mad and upset. So what he said was right, but nobody realized it would take was ten years before somebody could get away with saying that to developers and them not freaking out. Because people are really finally grasping how awesome Cocoa is, how powerful it is, how easy it is to use. And what's so super cool is, for example, our application Create. We have a version that runs on Janguar, Panther, Tiger and now Leopard. I don't know if I can say that but no one has Leopard so it doesn't matter whether it's true or not. But even without recompiling Create, when you run it on Leopard all the new features are magically in there. And that is the power of the frameworks. It's just so counter-intuitive that your application can get better just by running it in the new OS, but it can.
So it is a better landscape for developers. And now there's so many of us, it's so vibrant now. And we used to have, ten years ago at WWDC we'd have little Cocoa BOFs, Birds Of a Feather. There'd be about twenty of us like, "Keep Objective C alive Steve!" And you know what? That was one decision that the Ex-NeXTers were able to persuade management to do. And because of that we have all this stuff today. It's great.
JC: So I guess based on what you just said, it's easier than ever for third-party developers to get involved now?
AS: Yeah, absolutely. This is a chance for young [developers], and that's what I love now. All the young developers, you know. That's what it's all about. It's not so much us old timers. We've been doing this forever. I've already made my sixteen apps. Now the young guys are gonna come, take the media and the way they use the world of the web, and start to make really cool apps. It's just gotten easier and easier. I've been throwing away code for fifteen years. Every time they come out with stuff, they've taken my ideas, rolled it in and now it's done where I don't have to maintain it, so it's kind of cool.
JC: Well I think that's it, so thank you very much.
AS: Well that you very much.
JC: I appreciate it.
VO: We'd like to thanks Andrew Stone for taking time to talk to us. Please keep your eye on ArsTechnica.com for more videos and interviews from WWDC.
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