Home ➲ code & iphone & mac ➲ mini Interview with Designer Coder Steven Troughton-Smith
MacHappens . Steven Troughton-Smith
1. How do you tackle a deadline?
In short – badly! Due to the pressures of university and the fact that I work alone most of the time, my time management is all over the place. I only have my leisure time in which to work, and must therefore struggle to motivate myself into getting the job done; if a project is getting awkward, I end up leaving it for a while to find something more cheery to do.
2. Give us a brief breakdown of your workflow on a given project.
Usually I start off with a ‘cool-looking’ idea in my head, and at once I jump into Xcode and don’t stop until I have something that resembles it running before me. I’m great for starting projects, but the usual ‘Programmer’s ADD’ clicks in and unless I get somewhere interesting fast I start to lose interest. Because of my limited time, I have to ensure my projects are small, and thus it allows me to think of fully fleshed-out ideas in my head and create them as fast as I can.
3. Your favorite OS and why?
iPhone OS – this is a brand-new platform with the UI layer and APIs built from scratch without twenty years of legacy code; to program for it’s a dream, and because the entire interface is designed on top of Core Animation it makes some awesome things possible. There are many parts of the iPhone APIs that I wish we had back on the desktop.
4. What applications do you use primarily to create your work?
That would be Xcode/Interface Builder and Photoshop CS4. I’m a designer at heart, and coding just comes as a means to an end. I usually draw out everything in Photoshop before writing a line of code.
5. What hardware do you use primarily to create your work?
Currently the Late 2008 MacBook Pro, before that was the Air and a previous generation MacBook Pro. I don’t use peripherals much; though I do have a Wacom tablet for more arty work, I have yet to use it in a software project.
6. Your thoughts on resolution independence?
This is something Apple have been pushing since the early seeds of Tiger and is an important step for the future. Eventually we will be designing UIs in centimetres or inches so that they always look the same size on screen (Microsoft’s Avalon / WPF already takes this step), but display technology is moving pretty slowly and I posit that it will be several years (on the desktop) before it is needed. For mobile devices, that’s another matter, as I see smaller and smaller devices with higher resolution screens.
7. How do you contribute/share with your community?
I have many open source projects, and keep active in the IRC channels for movements I’m interested in, i.e. Android, iPhone Linux, etc. I have small contributions all over the place from NES.app for iPhone to the iPhone Linux project to full-scale software testing for certain companies. Other than that, I help out and impart knowledge wherever I can =)
8. Who would you like to work/collaborate with?
Tricky question – I *would* have said the Tapulous team before it split apart: Mike Lee, Louie Mantia, Tristan O’Tierney, among others. I feel I already collaborate with some of my heroes, but I’m fully open to anyone who needs me!
9. When did you justify to yourself that you could make a living off what you do?
When the App Store was announced =) While I cannot say I make a living, being merely a part-timer, the income generated from the App Store is incredible. It is a veritable gold rush, where even the tiniest of 99c apps can bring in hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a month.
10. Your favorite creation?
Stack for iPhone – the 2.0 version. I broke a lot of new ground in this plugin, and learned a lot about the internals of SpringBoard, the iPhone shell. My biggest ‘ooh’ moment was when I figured out how to make drag & drop work from SpringBoard to Stack, and that is what made the project worth it for me.
Steven Troughton-Smith . Mac OS X & iPhone Developer
MacHappens, Mac Happens
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