Today marks a milestone that is perhaps only significant to me, but I feel worth noting anyway. Twenty years ago today, I started work on my first shareware product, SndPlayer. Yes, you read that right, 20 years... makes me feel old. :)

Dejal as a company was actually founded on September 20, 1991 — but I was away on vacation without internet access when that anniversary rolled around this year, so I'm celebrating my first paid product instead.

SndPlayer was first created on October 24, 1991, though wasn't in beta release until November 25, and general release on February 24, 1992. It had many updates over the years, with the last release on January 29, 2001. It was officially discontinued a couple of years later, since it could no longer be updated.

Check out the classy icon design, above... a construction crane seems a weird choice for a batch sound player, but the idea was that it could lift sounds out of any kind of file. And check out the About window: the icon was even animated (crudely)! Also of note in that window, other than hideous color choices, are the original Dejal logo, the "accelerated for Power Macintosh" (it was a "fat" app, running on 68K and PPC machines), and for the old-timers in the audience, ancient mentions like "Sound Mover", SoundEdit" and "HyperCard stack" may bring back memories.

Because SndPlayer was written for Mac OS 7 to 9, before Mac OS X was introduced, it doesn't run on modern machines and OS versions. If you have an old machine that supports those OS versions, or can run the Classic compatibility environment on Mac OS X 10.4 or earlier, you can run SndPlayer. It is still available on the Dejal site, and along with all other discontinued classic software, is completely free.

As a celebration of this event, I'm offering discounts on all of my Mac apps from today till the end of the month November 14. No special codes or coupons required, but you need to use the online store, not the in-app purchasing tool or Mac App Store, to take advantage of these low prices.

Buy now with the anniversary discounts!

Be quick — these specials expire at the end ofOctober — UPDATE: extended till November 14!

Note also that Simon Bronze is not discounted via the above link (Simon Silver and above are, though), but is available discounted as a weekly special from TheMacBundles — UPDATE: it's still available as part of their "Build Your Own Bundle".

This Friday is a milestone: 10 years ago my wife (Jennifer) and I moved from New Zealand to the United States.

I was born in NZ and she was born in the US. We met via the ancient command-line internet, she moved to NZ in 1994, and we got married on April 2, 1995. So yes, this weekend is our 16th wedding anniversary.

We enjoyed living in NZ, but eventually the call of Jenn's friends and family in the US became too much, and we decided to move to the US. It was quite a process, since I needed to go through the residency visa application routine, and of course shipping our household goods over in a container (and our three cats via plane) wasn't the easiest. But it was the right choice at the time, and still is.

We flew into Los Angeles on April 1, 2001. Of course, we visited Disneyland. Then we drove a rental car up the US west coast, staying in San Francisco for a couple of nights, then a stopover in Coos Bay, then up to Seattle to stay with Jenn's Mom for a week. Then we went back down to Portland (with a car borrowed from Jenn's grandmother) to stay in a friend's basement while we got established.

Jenn found a local job, we found an apartment, our furniture arrived, and we began to feel settled.

We've since bought a house and car (which we recently replaced), and I am now a dual citizen: I got my US citizenship back in 2004.

Naturally, my company came along for the ride. Dejal was basically a hobby in NZ, but one of my goals once in the US was to turn it into a real business. It has certainly flourished over the years, with revenues steadily growing.

Changing countries is quite a big deal, but it was worth it.

Will we ever move back to NZ? Who knows. We've learnt not to try to predict the future; plans can change. But we do have a dream of retiring in NZ eventually. We'll see!

I've always enjoyed looking at house plans. Many years ago, back around 1995, I had fun imagining an ideal house plan with an octagonal shape. It just seemed an intriguing shape for a house. I particularly liked the idea of having a large courtyard in the center of the house, with a private patio and swimming pool.

I sketched out a house plan based on my ideas, drawing it in the now-obsolete ClarisWorks application. Recently I came across the old file and converted it to PNG so I'd be able to continue viewing it and reminiscing:

(The above notes are part of the original image.)

The plan still has some good ideas, including some things that have become popular in modern luxury houses, like a media room... and some things are are no longer all that relevant, like a photography dark room (though my wife is still keen to have one for B&W photography). I'm sure I would do lots of things differently now, though I still like the general layout.

Now that I live in the US, it's interesting to be reminded of some of the NZ terminology. For example, we'd say "master bath" instead of "master ensuite", "living room" or "great room" instead of "lounge", and "sliding glass door" instead of "ranchslider". The 4-car garage is definitely an American touch, though.

Oh, and for those who don't think in meters, 16m is about 52.5'. So the house is about 105' across, all on one level, apart from the basements. Which makes it somewhere in the range of 5,000 square feet, if my rough math is right. Quite big!

Nowadays, I'm more enamored by Queen Anne Victorian house styles. For example, this plan is pretty much ideal in my book. I just love the pointy bits.

Fifteen years ago today, Jennifer and I got married. Actually, technically it was yesterday, since it was in New Zealand, but we ignore the time zone differences. It was April 2, 1995.

Ours was a rather unusual story at the time, though not so much anymore. You see, we met via the internet, before most people had even heard of the internet. Before there was a web browser (or at least before we had heard of one: Mosaic technically was released a couple of months earlier).

Back in 1993, I was attending the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and Jenn was at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, USA. I was using the FirstClass BBS client software on my Mac, while she was using a text-based terminal at her part-time job at the college.

We were both fans of Star Trek, so were reading the rec.arts.startrek.current newsgroup via Usenet, and met via a posting there on June 18, 1993. We switched to email, and quickly became friends, and developed deeper feelings as we got to know each other better. This was all via text communication, so we discussed all sorts of things, and got to know each other really well. We still have a foot-high stack of printouts of our early discussions.

It doesn't seem so strange to have e-friends nowadays, that you've never met in person, but back then it was definitely not the norm.

In due course, it was evident that we were in love. So we talked about getting together in person — remember, we were separated by nearly 7,000 miles of ocean, and just had emails and a few photos and other airmail correspondence. So on February 3, 1994 I flew to Sea-Tac and we met in person. So the first time we saw each other in person was at the gate in Sea-Tac (this was before the increased security, when non-travellers could go right to the gates). I stayed with Jenn in Portland for 5.5 weeks, getting to know each other even better, and exploring the area. Then I headed back to Auckland.

Yes, I had hair back then, or some anyway. :)

Our odd long-distance relationship continued, though that time apart was quite difficult for both of us. On August 17, 1994, Jenn moved to New Zealand, and on October 15, 1994 on Long Bay beach near the water edge, I proposed, and she said yes.

We set the wedding date for halfway between our birthdays, on April 2, 1995. (For some reason, we didn't want to get married on April 1. Go figure!)

We've always been ones to do our own thing, and our names were another example. My surname was originally "Lambert", but rather than Jenn taking my name, or using a hyphen or other convention, we decided to both adopt a new name of our choosing. We decided on "Sinclair", and I legally changed my name, then she took it when we married (seems much easier for women to change their names when getting married).

Our wedding was in our own style, too. We didn't want a big fancy traditional wedding, so we opted for a small informal affair on our favorite beach, Long Bay. We rented a shelter for the reception, and had the ceremony on the adjacent grass overlooking the beach. The ceremony was conducted by my late grandfather, who was a minister and came out of retirement for us. That was very special. And since we were (and still are!) unashamed geeks, our wedding cake had bride & groom Macs on top (see the photo).

Since meeting via the internet was so remarkable back then, we were interviewed by a local newspaper and TV station, who filmed our wedding. Some of the best footage of our wedding is from their pro cameras. Apple even gave us a PowerBook 150 laptop as a wedding present.

That was 15 years ago. 15 wonderful, happy years, and we love each other all the more deeply now.

What's the secret of our success? The "four C's":

1. Communication: talk through concerns, don't use the "silent treatment"; always be honest.
2. Commitment: those vows really mean something.
3. Compassion: be supportive and considerate of feelings.
4. Compromise: be flexible, come to agreements that you can both live with.

That's worked for us. That, and starting out as e-friends, where all we had were our words, so we really got to know each other very well. We both work from home most of the time, so spend a lot of time together, without getting on each others nerves too much. :) So we must be doing something right.

Happy anniversary, Jennifer. I love you!

Saturday is the 25th anniversary of the introduction of the first Macintosh.

I first used a Mac back in high school in New Zealand, where I volunteered as head student librarian. The school had mostly Apple IIe computers, but bought one of the newfangled Macintosh computers in 1984. It was an original 128K Mac, with a single internal floppy drive. Back then, the OS, an application, and data fit on a single 400K disk. We used MacWrite for letters and other documents, MacPaint for occasional graphics, and the OverVUE database for some records... though not a full book catalog.

I bought my first Mac four years later while at university, in 1988. It was a Macintosh Plus, one of the new platinum-colored models. And I even had a second 800K floppy drive and a dot-matrix printer! Later, I added an external hard drive (I think it was 10 MB, though I could be wrong).

Those were the days... working on a 9-inch 512 x 342 pixel monochrome display... which is actually not much more than the iPhone screen resolution, to give some perspective.

Later I bought a Macintosh II, which I subsequently upgraded internally to be a Macintosh IIx. Then I used a number of other models provided by a Dejal client.

When my wife and I got married, Apple gave us a PowerBook 150 as a wedding present, since we had met while using Macs with the fledgling internet. Our wedding was covered on local TV news and newspapers. Yep, meeting over the internet was a novel concept back then.

Just before we moved to the US, we bought a clamshell iBook G3, which we still have, though I only use it for Mac OS X 10.3.9 compatibility testing. Then an iMac G4, which sadly seems to have passed away, a PowerMac G5 that I still use for Mac OS X 10.4 testing and as a music server, and lastly my current machine, a 17" MacBook Pro.

(We've also had a few other Macs: a Mac mini we use with our TV, a MacBook I bought to take to WWDC before I got my MacBook Pro, then subsequently gave to my wife's mom, and my wife has had a couple of 15" MacBook Pros.)

All in all, it's been a great 25 years. I've enjoyed using and owning the various Macs over this time, and look forward to many more years. Happy birthday, Mac!

Last year I was featured in MacTech magazine as their developer spotlight for the month. They asked me some questions about my background; here are my responses:

What do you do?

Dejal is a small ISV, so I do pretty much everything, including Cocoa development, customer support, accounting, PHP web development, graphic design, etc. I do have a developer that helps with Dejal Simon plugins etc, and I've used graphic designers for some app icons and the new Dejal logo. In addition to my own products, I do contracting work part-time.

How long have you been doing what you do?

I learned BASIC in 1982 as my first programming language, and knew that's what I wanted to do with my life. In 1988 I switched to Pascal on Mac Pluses at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and started playing around with apps, but didn't sell anything until I created Dejal (originally called Dejal Userware, for user-friendly software) in 1991. Back then it was just a hobby, selling utilities for System 5 through Mac OS 9 (they're still available as freeware: http://www.dejal.com/classic/). There wasn't a web back then, though; I distributed my software via Compuserve, AOL, floppy disks, and later CDs, and provided licenses via airmail (from New Zealand), hand-written on photocopied certificates.

When my wife and I moved to the US in 2001, I learned Cocoa, developed my first Mac OS X apps, and registered my company as Dejal Systems, LLC in 2002.

Your first computer:

I got my first computer in 1983: a Sinclair ZX81, with 3.25 MHz Z80 processor, 1K of RAM, a cassette tape drive, tiny membrane keyboard, and hooked to a B&W TV. I first used a Mac at school: an original 128K Mac in 1984... but I didn't own one until I got a Mac Plus in 1988.

Are you Mac-only, or a multi-platform person?

Definitely Mac-only. I have a Windows box I got a few years ago for a project, but it just gathers dust.

Do the products you develop scratch a personal itch, or are they for others?

A bit of both. Obviously I need to keep marketability in mind when working on products. Most started out as fulfilling a need I didn't see being adequately serviced with existing products in the marketplace. Narrator started as a fun way to learn Cocoa. Simon began as a way for me to watch for website updates, and became more sophisticated as it became popular. I created Time Out to improve my health, since I can suffer from eyestrain when staring at a computer for hours on end. Caboodle was written to compete with others in the snippet-keeper market, as I didn't really like the approach existing ones took. Macfilink was created in partnership with an affiliate marketer to serve that community. BlogAssist was written specifically for my wife, who was really into LiveJournal blogging at the time. All of the products have grown and evolved over the years based on customer feedback -- it's really important to listen to what people say about products and incorporate their ideas into the design, as makes sense. I keep track of all suggestions, and tally votes for them to determine the most requested enhancements, to which I give priority when deciding on features for an update.

What's the coolest tech thing you've done using OS X?

One thing I'm quite pleased with is the Script plugin in Dejal Simon. Simon is a server monitoring tool that uses a plugin model for services, notifiers, and reports. The Script plugin allows running AppleScripts, shell scripts, Perl, Python, Ruby, or other scripts to perform checks and notifications for local or remote servers and processes. I like it as it leverages Mac OS X's unix underpinnings to significantly enhance the reach of the product. That would've been much harder under Mac OS 9 or Windows.

Ever?

I wrote an integrated environment for an old SpectraVideo MSX computer (loaded off 5.25" floppies) around 1986, complete with a basic word processor, spreadsheet, and more. It was never released, though.

Where can we see a sample of your work?

Try my products: free trials are available at http://www.dejal.com.

See my code: open source Cocoa at http://www.dejal.com/developer/.

Read my thoughts: subscribe to my blog at http://www.dejal.com/blog/.

The next way I'm going to impact IT/OS X/the Mac universe is:

I'm excited about the upgrades of the Dejal apps for Leopard. Simon 3 and Time Out 2 will be major upgrades, with much-improved UI and features.

Today is the 16th anniversary of founding my company. 16 years ago today, on September 20, 1991, I started Dejal, with an aim to produce high quality Mac software. Actually, the exact date could be argued: I had used the Dejal name informally for years before that, as a kind of nickname for myself, and the company grew organically over time, with things like getting a commercial bank account and registering the name at different times during the growth. But September 20th was when historic evidence points to me having started treating my programming hobby as a business.

I had produced a bunch of freeware products beforehand, but my first shareware product was called SndPlayer, a Classic Mac app to play a bunch of sounds easily. It was started on October 24, 1991, and first released on February 24, 1992. It's still available on my site (now freeware), too.

Thanks to everyone who's purchased products or offered congratulations this week. You've still got a couple of days to take advantage of the anniversary specials:

Buy now with the anniversary discounts!

Be quick — these specials expire on Sunday, September 23, 2007.

I first started selling Mac software under the Dejal name in September 1991... which makes this Thursday the 16th anniversary of the founding of the company. Wow... it's certainly been a while!

As a celebration of this event, I'm offering discounts on all of my products from today till the end of the week. No special codes or coupons required, but you need to use the online store, not the in-app purchasing tool, to take advantage of these low prices.

Buy now with the anniversary discounts!

Be quick — these specials expire on Sunday, September 23, 2007.