Introduction
We’d like to welcome our guest, Wil Shipley, Chief Monster at Delicious Monster. Delicious Monster develops products for Mac, iOS, and Wil took some time to tell us about WWDC and how it impacts the company.
What were you most excited about hearing in Apple’s recent announcements?
iCloud Drive is something I want to use all the time. I like the improvements in Mail and Safari a lot, and I appreciate that they’re concentrating on making those apps solid instead of doing crazy new stuff and letting their old apps rot.
Continuity is a technology I’ve wished for every time I go to a website on my Mac. I end up texting a lot of stuff to myself, this is SO much nicer. And we used to have caller ID and dialing our phones from our Macs back in 2004 with iSync and our Moto RAZRs, it’s nice to see it’s finally back with the iPhone.
Swift seems like it could be really fun, but I’m a bit more guarded about that. New languages are hard to get right, and I’ve been using Objective-C for 25 years now.
What does your company do?
Delicious Monster sell Delicious Library, which lets users catalog all their books, DVDs, music, hardware, software, and other collectibles on their Macs.
What is the coolest thing you can tell us about what you do?
We pioneered the "shelf" interface that iBooks uses and invented the videocamera-based barcode scanner which is now industry standard.
Did Apple make any announcements that will impact your direction?
Their HomeKit ties in directly with work I’m doing on my next, unannounced product. I hope like heck it’s supported on the Mac and iOS!
I’m also incredibly glad to see SceneKit on iOS. I lobbied hard for this, since both Delicious Library and my new app use it extensively.
I may be able to use the new iCloud features to publish users’ libraries from Delicious Library even more easily, but I can’t make any promises until I’ve seen what it does.
What’s coming from you and your team?
I’m working on my first all-new product in 10 years. I haven’t announced what it does yet, but it’ll be amazing if I pull it off.
Anything more you can tell us?
I’m excited by the changes in OS X and iOS. I think Apple has taken a close look at the apps we use every day, and trying to make them incrementally better for us. I spend 90% of my time in Mail, Preview, Safari, Calendar, and Xcode, and so it’s great to see those get lots of love, instead of them announcing some new way for me to play drums.
Find out more
For more information on Delicious Monster, see http://delicious-monster.com
This developer interview was put together by the staff of TUAW and MacTech Magazine about how Apple’s new technologies will impact them and you, their customers. If you’re a developer, consultant, or IT Pro, come join TUAW and media throughout the industry at MacTech Conference 2014.