How to Succeed Writing Mac Software

Or, How to Make a Zillion Dollars and Not Lose Your Soul

By Wil Shipley
CEO, Delicious Monster Software
Founder, The Omni Group

So, some innocent Apple employees asked me to talk to their "scholarship" students the Sunday before WWDC proper started, as their sort of "celebrity" speaker. Well, that's the word they used with me, but it may have just been to induce me to fly down early. Certainly, I hope the students weren't told they had a celebrity, because if you're expecting J-lo and all you get is W-il, you're p-ssed.

I spent three or four whole days working on this talk, and I was really tickled with how well it was received. One guy afterwards told me I'd inspired him to join the priesthood. Seriously.

A lot of the students (that is, more than one) asked me to put my slides online, and I found that old-skool PDF is the most compact way to do this. Sadly, without the audio portion you're missing most the jokes (and it's harder to tell what lines on the slides are jokes and which aren't), but I don't really have the time right now to make a huge multi-media presentation. Maybe I'll make a podcast later.

I should also mention that if you look at the slides you'll see another picture of my Ardent Red Lotus Elise. This bears mentioning because I actually agonized about whether to show off my car at all, ever. I decided that, in this context, it was OK, because essentially the whole talk is about how if you follow your dream you'll not only be happy, but you'll also be financially secure, and it's easier to believe that kind of advice when it's given to you by someone not LIVING IN A SHACK DOWN BY THE RIVER. I asked some of the students afterwards if they thought the car thing was totally pretentious and they said no, it came off the right way.

None-the-less, if you're a blog reader this will be the second time, for you, that you see a red Elise. For me, the second time I mentioned the Elise was the first time you saw it in the blog (the first time was in the student talk, weeks ago), and I figured the cork was already off the bottle and I can use it in jokes. Seriously, I'm not one of those people who is all about how cool he is because he drives a funny-looking car. (I'm cool because I'm so dang handsome. Snap!)

It gets a little technical in the middle, but it's still well worth reading, folks.