A retrospective on iRooster, my first Mac OS X app

Looking back on iRooster, my first commercial Mac OS X application from 2003, fills me with nostalgia and gratitude. What started as a desperate solution to oversleeping through morning classes became a formative experience that shaped my entire career in software development.

The concept was beautifully simple: turn a $2,000 Mac into an alarm clock that played iTunes playlists. Born from necessity—I’d discovered only a subwoofer under my bed could reliably wake me—iRooster embodied the shareware ethos of that era: solve your own problem, then share the solution with others who might benefit.

While it never made me rich (my best month was $2,000 after an Apple newsletter feature), iRooster’s true value was immeasurable. It served as my coding education, résumé builder, and confidence booster. The app was instrumental in securing my WWDC scholarship, landing job interviews, and proving to myself that I could envision, build, ship, and sell software independently.

The journey from version 1.0 in August 2003 to version 2.0 in October 2004, and beyond, taught me about user feedback, iterative development, and the importance of polish. Every bug report, feature request, and yes, even those searching for pirated serial numbers, contributed to my understanding of real-world software development.

In 2022, I open-sourced iRooster’s janky Objective-C code targeting PowerPC Macs—a time capsule of early Mac development. Today, it stands as a monument to the power of starting small, solving real problems, and the enduring lesson that sometimes the best software comes from scratching your own itch.