Nobody learns if nothing is brok3n

So who is Rudy Richter anyhow?

I'm a software developer with experience in Cocoa, Carbon and the evils of the CoreAudio HAL.  I spent 7.5 years working for NASA, part of which I also worked for Rogue Amoeba on their Detour and SoundSource products.  I currently work for Rogue Amoeba's competition in the audio space, Ambrosia Software. Some people consider me to be entirely evil, I'm not going to disagree with them.

What kind of Mac do you develop on? Do you have any other macs, or have you had any others previously?

At work I've got one of those 3.0GHz Mac Pro's with 5GB of ram and two 24 inch displays. At Home I've got a 2.66 GHz Mac Pro, a Dual 2.0GHz PowerMac G5, and a 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 that I use for development. In all I've got in the neighborhood of 50 Macs from SE's to Mac Pro that all function, 2 Sun boxes, and just recently I was given the BeBox and NeXT Cube that Andrew Welch had bought in the 1990's.

What is your typical day like now that you work for Ambrosia Software?

I spend my day split between several support frameworks, publicly released products and unannounced products. A very different environment from both Rogue Amoeba and NASA, the projects range in their level of evilness which keeps things interesting. When someone needs a break from work we've got several video game systems hooked up to the big screen tv. We have a Wii and a PS3, so lunch time is usually accompanied by some Wii Sports.  The PS3 has a thick layer of dust on it at this point. I've been here a year now, and you can count the number of times the PS3 has been used on two hands. It is definitely enjoyable to work here.

So you really like the Wii huh? Me too. What's your favorite Wii Sports game, and are you looking forward to any other games for the platform?

We play a lot of Golf and Tennis, but not much else.  I don't have a Wii myself but I'm looking forward to Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. PS3-wise I'm looking forward to God of War 3, Final Fantasy XIII and Resident Evil 5.

What led you to work on iToner?

In the period of time leading up to the release of the iPhone there were discussions internally at Ambrosia to include functionality in our Exporter framework for being able to export audio from WireTap Studio to the iPhone.  I know quite a number of talented people in the mac development world and it turned out that one of them had written a program to do just that.  Cedric Pansky had previously worked with Rogue Amoeba and written AirFoil 1.0, currently he's doing contract software development through his company, Azlance LLC. I suggested to him (at the urging of Michael Simmons) that he might want to talk to Andrew about releasing it as a product through Ambrosia.  He agreed and 3 days later we started work on iToner.  I was given the task of getting him up to speed with our frameworks and in about a week's time iToner was in its complete and shipping form. It has been a crazy roller coaster ever since then.  Each Apple update to iTunes and the iPhone has been equally challenging and fun to work around.  When Apple first broke us with iTunes 7.4's wiping of the Ringtones.plist. We had a plan of action before i even got to work, and within 1 hour we had a proof of concept workaround.  The first test of my half of the solution with Cedric's half worked flawlessly.  We spent the next 8 hours or so getting the solution polished and integrated into iToner and had a build out to testers that night.  We shipped the update 24 hours after we started.

Why is iToner important?

Apple needs to realize that not everyone wants to use popular Music for their ringtones. Some people just want sound effects, others personalized ringtones (a lot of people we've heard from record their voices and use those as ringtones), others compose their own music and want to use that as ringtones.  iToner allows these people to load their custom sounds onto their phone, audio that they have no other way to get onto their phone.  Until Apple realizes this I expect we'll continue to have this back and forth battle with them.  The battle has been fun so far, but I'd much rather see them adding features to the iPhone and fixing bugs than working against iToner.

So do you think that this cat and mouse game between Cedric, Ambrosia and yourself versus Apple is going to continue, or do you think they're done for now with changing things up?

I hope they're done breaking iToner, only time will tell.  We all have iPhones ourselves and none of us are using music ringtones, we have a vested interest in wanting the product to continue working. We really like our iPhones but we want to customize them beyond the blessed sounds that the music industry is providing on the iTunes Music Store.

Do you think they are targeting iToner, or third party applications in general? Or do you think it's more that they are doing stuff that they need to do, and iToner is just collateral damage?

Some of the earlier updates appeared to whack us as collateral damage, but lately a lot of the updates seem to be directly targeting utilities that put custom ringtones in the user portion of the phone. iTunes 7.5 and iPhoneOS 1.1.2 seem to restore the rename a file to m4r trick, time will tell if that workaround will remain active.

You mean after Apple started selling ringtones through the online music store they seem to have started targeting iToner and applications like it, or prior to that?

Yup, it all started with iTunes 7.4.  We weren't impacted by 7.4.1 or 7.4.2 since we weren't using any of the trickery that people had figured out regarding renaming files in the Finder and tricking iTunes into syncing them over. iPhone OS 1.1.1 was the next update that impacted us. We had a fix within a week of 1.1.1 shipping, it took another week and a half to perfect it.

What type of things do you guys have on your iPhones if it isn't music?

My test suite is the Wii sound effects, it constantly tricks people on the floor into thinking its time to play Wii Golf.  The other Ambrosia employees mostly use sound effects or short audio clips from tv/movies. I think Cedric has sounds on his from the Final Fantasy games.

What do you think of the iPhone in general?

Its a great little phone.  I will be glad when 3rd parties can officially develop apps for it, hopefully they won't limit it to dashboard widgets as their native app development platform.  Having worked on EasyEnvelopes it becomes entirely apparent how limiting that will be.  The vast majority of EasyEnvelopes is written in Cocoa.

Wait a second, so you're hoping for full fledged Cocoa applications are not something equivalent to desktop widgets? I'm slightly confused since dashboard widgets can use Cocoa, can you explain what the problems here are?

Correct, i'm hoping for full fledged Cocoa applications. Dashboard widgets can make use of cocoa through the use of a javascript-> cocoa bridge and a cocoa plugin. I can easily see Apple limiting the sdk to html/javascript widgets in an attempt to prevent people from getting direct access to the phone's OS.

EasyEnvelopes? What's that?

EasyEnvelopes is a dashboard widget that works on 10.4 and 10.5 that allows you to print addressed envelopes using your printer. Half javascript, half cocoa, all evil.

What do you like to do for fun?

I enjoy watching movies, rowing, programming and poking around inside iTunes.  I recently took a trip to Las Vegas and went hiking in Red Rock Canyon, which was pretty enjoyable.

Addendum

I just spoke with Michael Simmons, Director of Marketing for Ambrosia. He says that iToner definitely works with 1.1.2, so happy toning. Here's what he had to say:

"In fact, it works better, as 1.1.2 now has a "Custom" ringtones section, keeping the iToner transferred ringtones separated nicely at the top of the overall iPhone ringtone list!"