Interview with Gus

MacStories interviews Gus Mueller. I like Gus’s story of how Acorn got started:

As for why I created Acorn in the first place – it’s got a bit of an interesting history. It originally started out as FlySketch 2.0 (FlySketch is another app of mine, meant for taking screenshots + marking them up), but the update got a bit out of control and I ended up making a new product out of it. I originally created FlySketch because I wanted to see if I could force myself to draw more, and writing an app for that seemed like a good way to do that. Acorn continues that tradition.

Here’s how you know you’re a software developer: if the answer to any question — like how could I force myself to draw more? — is write an app, and then you write it and ship it, then you’re a software developer.

I use and enjoy both Acorn and VoodooPad — but the bit of Gus code I use the most is his open source SQLite wrapper FMDB. It’s in everything I’ve shipped for years.