Gus: I had another application called VoodooPad even before that, which was a desktop wiki. That’s how Acorn got started.Īlexis: Was Flying Meat kind of like a consultancy that you started out or did you start it for this kind of screenshot application? My users would send a request like they want layers or they want bitmap editing and I was like, “I’ll see if I can do that” and all of a sudden it turned into a whole new application. I had another application called FlySketch, which was used for taking screenshots and marking them up so you could draw little arrows and highlight text and stuff like that. Flying meat is named after a rock climb I’m an avid rock climber. The rest of it, it was all just self-taught.Īlexis: Yeah, for nowadays, it’s kids looking at GitHub instead of books.Īlexis: So which came first – this is a question that humanity has asked itself for a millennia – the flying meat or the acorn? That’s basically how I learned how to program –just copying programs out of books. They were little programming books with the program all written out and you would basically copy that into a new text file on your Apple IIc and eventually run it, find your errors. ![]() Gus: A long time ago, they used to publish little BASIC books. How did you learn to program? Did you get started with it or did it take a while and maybe several other computers before you dipped your toes in the pool of programming? It’s more about being able to push the pixels around fast.Īlexis: So you had your Apple computer back in the day. It’s also probably a lot less that you need to know for algorithms and stuff like that than you would think. It goes very deep, but it’s easy to get a good, broad overview of how to manage pixels, basically. Once you get into it, the algorithms for graphics aren’t too hard. There’s been a couple of things that I’ve hired people for, but for the most part, it’s all just me. Gus: It’s mostly I like to do all the work myself. How do you deal with that nowadays? Do you hire it out or do you go, “Damn it, I’m going to take this book and I’m going to absorb it and whether I learn by osmosis or otherwise, I’m going to figure it out”? I imagine when it comes to image editing and all these kinds of effects that you have to work with in Acorn, there’s a fair amount of algorithms involved. I hated Art History, but I had all those credits so I just turned it into a general studies degree that way.Īlexis: Now we’re getting ahead of ourselves here, or at least I am, because I’m curious – you mentioned not being very good at algorithms and that kind of stuff. The Art History happened because I was going to be an art major for a while, and you needed a lot of Art History credits. It wasn’t planned at all it just happened that way. That’s just two interests of mine that just sort of fell together. I wasn’t very good at algorithms and stuff like that, and actually the only class I ever flunked was a Computer Science class – go figure. That’s how I got the Computer Science stuff. I would create my own little Computer Science classes, which were basically projects I was working on at work anyway, and they would sign off on it and I would get credit for it. ![]() It’s the central IT department for the university and some of my co-workers were actually professors. I didn’t take very many hardcore Computer Science classes I actually worked for the Campus Computing – as it was called there. Computer science, I just kind of enjoyed too. So when I went to college, I just took a bunch of art classes just because it was fun I really enjoyed it. I was just playing games on it and I would write little basic programs, and I also liked drawing. I had an Apple IIc growing up it was my first computer. And I’m mostly just self-taught.Īlexis: Now why did you combine those three minors or your interests? Was it because, “Well it’s just what I’m interested in so it’s going to happen” or was it more of a calculated, “Well I think these could go well together,” like the Steve Jobs intersection of technology and liberal arts kind of thing? Add in the Computer Science and that’s what’s going to happen. So that’s sort of where my art background comes from when I do image editors and stuff like that. ![]() I basically studied Art, Art History and Computer Science and I took them all together and sort of made my own degree. I basically ended up getting a general studies degree by combining three minors together to get a single major. I went to college at the University of Missouri, Columbia. SUBSCRIBE ON: iTunes PocketCasts Stitcher Show notesĪlexis: Gus, thanks for coming on the podcast!Īlexis: Now, before we get to Flying Meat and Acorn, tell us a bit about your background.
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