The Genesis of iRooster

Ah, another successful day in terms of the growing popular appeal of iRooster. More and more people are hitting my blog looking for serial numbers for iRooster. For anyone who runs into this entry trying to find a way around paying $10 for the app, you won’t find a serial here, seeing how I write iRooster.

Actually, I’ve spent a good deal of time working on it over the past 11 months or so, now.

iRooster began as a project to provide an integrated weather/comics/alarm/news application for Mac OS X. It proved to be far too unwieldy in the way I had originally conceived it, so I ended up scrapping most of the work, and turning the best piece into iRooster. I have some intentions of providing more of this functionality over time in a integratable, but not integrated fashion, but that’s highly dependent on my time, my motivation, and the interest from my user base.

iRooster’s real purpose, originally, was to build my résumé. By the time the project was started, I already had worked for The Geek Squad, Microsoft, and Remote Pipes. What I didn’t really have under my belt, though, was a real application. So, I built one. Or started to.

I cannot express how valuable this experience was (and continues to be). The money is a nice part of it all, but realistically, it doesn’t do more than pay for the sixDollarChimp hosting costs, and it usually pays enough for my coffee (I should point out that I drink a lot of coffee, as I sit here sucking on a Cafe con Leche at El Diablo). This application was instrumental in getting me my scholarship to WWDC last year, and securing my job interviews last Fall.

All told, to all of you college students out there (U of MN students, are you guys paying attention?), do what I did. It’ll help. A lot.