Rand Wacker

Got up really early this morning. Not because I’m excited about Christmas (well, I am), but because I haven’t gotten much exercise in the past couple of days and I went to bed at like 8 or 9 last night. These combined forces usually lead to 3am insomnia, so here I am enjoying the warm glow of my Mom’s Christmas tree as well as my PowerBook keyboard…

I was knocking around the blog-o-sphere, and then trying to tackle a couple of personal todo items that have festered for a while. One was to finally get all my non-financial passwords into some form of organization: airline sites, /., that kind of thing. My default was to just use a text file or something, but figured I’d look around for other things that might be a bit geekier. Turns out there is no shortage of password/PIM vaults for OSX. After playing with a few good ones (Vault, info.xhead) I decided that I really liked Wallet from Waterfall Software.

After kicking down my fifteen bucks over PayPal I thought I’d poke around their site a bit. I’ve been very interested in the microcosm of low-cost software developers out there, and the OSX community seems to have spawned a vast array of very high-quality developers working in smallish groups to build useful and reasonably priced tools ($15 is definitely my sweet spot for a useful utility). Turns out that the company is essentially three teenagers collaborating virtually and located mostly in the Pacific Northwest. Very nice work guys.

So I explored a little more and found some of the same guys working at another small Seattle venture, Delicious Monster. Poking around a little bit more I discover that several of these folks work (or worked) for The Omni Group, which is responsible for two of my favorite tools of all time, OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle. Keep linking around and you see an expansive yet surely small/tight network of really good people building really good software. The total network isn’t huge though, I think I just stumbled across the blogs of 10 or 15 very talented individuals that all know and work together.

Early morning postulations from someone who needs to get their body clock back in check:

• Consumer software like this is fun, as opposed to the enterprise software market I’m in which is business.
• Apple has done a very good job of maintaining mind share among the leading edge developers. I have a number of friends in the OSX group at Apple, maybe I should go work for with them (oh, wait, that’s enterprise software).
• Wicked smart kids are building wicked smart companies based on a good idea, strong design, and the heart to follow it through, I admire that.
• My blog design is stale.
• I still want to move back to Seattle.

Happy holidays everyone!