Just Write
After a bit of a lull, here’s the latest in the ‘Sessions‘ series of interviews on The Masterplan; an exclusive interview with Jesse Grosjean, founder of Hog Bay Software, best known for his popular WriteRoom application. For those of you who haven’t heard of WriteRoom yet, here’s how Jesse describes it:
WriteRoom is not Microsoft Word. It won’t generate a table of contents, it won’t place borders around your documents, and it doesn’t have an animated paper-clip looking over your shoulder. Instead WriteRoom just provides the essential features required to get words on the page. Stay focused with WriteRoom’s distraction free environment. Stay on track with word count. Stay safe with autosave. You just type, and WriteRoom will do its best to stay out of your way.
To start with, what have you been up to of late, both personally and with Hog Bay Software?
My focus at Hog Bay Software has been on TaskPaper 2.0, since, well last October when I released 1.0. My initial plan was to release 2.0 a month or so later — well, that’s obviously not quite worked out, but 2.0 is coming along nicely I think. I make fairly regular “development” drops in my user forums for users to try out and comment on.
Personally, we have a two-and-a-half-year old, and thats been taking up lots of my free time in a great way. We are also planning a month long trip to Korea and Japan in a few weeks (in celebration of my wife’s graduation with an engineering degree). So that’s the big exciting thing we are looking forward to.
Would you like to tell everyone reading this a little more about Hog Bay Software? When was it formed? What made you start your own software company?
I started working on “it” (had a few other names to start with) when the OS X beta came out. At the time my real job was at the university of Maryland HCIL lab, working under Ben Bederson. He was doing lots of cool research in zooming user interfaces, and I helped write the frameworks to support that work.
In many ways, that was pretty much the perfect job, but in the end I still wanted to work “all” on my own and that’s why I started Hog Bay Software. I was particularly interested in the Mac from the technological side of things — I wanted to be working in Cocoa, instead of in Java, which is what I was doing my job in.
What other names had you thought of for the company? How did you come to settle on “Hog Bay”?
For a bit I was “Livingsoftware”. There I was trying to encode some of my goals (flexible software that involved my users) in the name. But it turns out that even though livingsoftware.com was available, there were lots of different companies that thought the term was “theirs”.
I decided to go with “Hog Bay” because that’s where I grew up. And my parents have a shop named “Hog Bay Pottery and Weaving“. So I was pretty confident that I wouldn’t have trouble with other people thinking that they owned the name.
For a while, the “Hog Bay” name seemed to be a bit of a drawback — I had quite a few people e-mail [me], saying that they loved the apps, but hated the name, but for some reason (I think once I’ve become a bit better known, and people have had a chance to get used to it), all those complaints seem to have gone away. Probably been years since I’ve [last] had a complaint.
Why did you choose to develop software for the OS X platform specifically?
Cocoa, or Objective-C, specifically. I’ve always wanted to be a SmallTalk developer, but I’ve also wanted tight integration with “real” frameworks. Objective-C seemed like the closest match. I can’t say that it’s my favorite language — I’d rather be using something closer to SmallTalk — but for me it’s the best language that’s “native” to an OS platform for building commercial applications.
You mentioned earlier that you’ve been doing this since 2001. Would you care to elaborate on some of the applications that you’ve developed over these seven years?
Sure. The first was HBTimer (or well for a while LSTimer). The idea there was to create a the simplest possible app, so that I could have time to figure out license keys, payment processing, website, etc. In the end, it was a pretty good way to go, but I wish I’d thought a little more about the app — for me, it didn’t turn out to be all that useful, so I didn’t really use it myself very much.
After that I started HBNotebook (later named Hog Bay Notebook). That was sorta my “dream” app, for keeping organised. I concentrated on that app for a few years, and then did a rewrite for OS X 10.4 that used coredata and named the new app Mori. And then worked on that app until last year when I sold it to Apokalypse Software. Along the way I also rewrote and renamed HBTimer to Clockwork, which was also sold to Apokalypse Software.
The Hog Bay Notebook/Mori series was lots of fun, but in the end I felt that I’d somehow missed something, because in the end I found myself still using TextEdit to keep many of my notes. That’s when I decided to approach the “note” problem from the other end and focus on really simple applications. For example, TaskPaper started out as TextEdit, and then I just added features (as I used it more and more) that would make it better for storing notes and tasks.
And last, in between Mori and TaskPaper is my most popular app, WriteRoom. That started out as a feature request for Mori, people wanted a full-screen editing mode to edit there Mori notes. Lucky for me I decided to write that feature as a separate app.
Now, WriteRoom is really popular. What’s important is that I didn’t invent the whole full-screen thing, or even [come up with] the revivial of the whole full-screen thing. But what I did do is turn that “feature” that was part of a number of other apps, into just a simple application with no other baggage. And I think that made a big difference. Since then, most of my smart moves have been resisting the temptation to add more features.
Coming to WriteRoom, it seems to be one of the most popular apps available for OS X. Also, a lot of people swear by it when it comes to the productivity aspect of it. You’ve received a lot of great reviews from prominent publications as well. How does that make you feel?
Great! And lucky — I can’t say I really expected or planned the success. Mostly, I’m trying to just study it really hard to see what made it happen. My big takeaway has been that the amount of work that you put into an application doesn’t have a huge correlation with its success. Hog Bay Notebook/Mori were moderately successful, but I put years into them. The 1.0 version of TaskPaper took about a week, and in that time it already got a lot more interest than Mori/Hog Bay Notebook ever did.
My one regret is that I did add RTF text editing to WriteRoom. I really wish that I hadn’t added that, though I won’t be taking it out at this point. Who knows, maybe RTF is what made the application successful — but personally, I hate that feature!
What would you say the average user base is like for WriteRoom? What do people mostly use it for?
Unfortunately, I don’t really keep very good track of things like user base or what people use it for. But since I released TaskPaper last October, WriteRoom’s sales have really picked up. At least a couple hundred a month. My guess is that many people use it for medium-length writing like blog posts or long e-mails, but I don’t really know.
Mostly I go by the requests from people in my forums, and generally, those are just detail requests — they don’t give me great insight into how people are using the application.
Do you use TaskPaper and WriteRoom on a daily basis? What do you use them for?
I use TaskPaper on a daily basis for all my notes and tasks, which are generally all related to Hog Bay Software. I don’t use WriteRoom everyday, but I use it when I need to really focus and write something carefully. Or often, when I want to brainstorm an idea. For instance, I’ll use it when I’m writing a project description page for my website, or when I’m brainstorming a solution to a problem that I’m working on.
Nice. That seems like a good way to come up with stuff, actually.
Yeah, I think that plain text is a great brainstorming medium, for me [it's] almost always better then the graphical brainstorm/mindmap tools that are availble. I always used to use TextEdit, but I think WriteRoom has a big advantage over TextEdit for brainstorming.
WriteRoom and TaskPaper have both widely received good reviews as applications that enhance productivity. Having said that, what is your take on the whole obsession with productivity that seems to be happening on the Internet due to sites like Lifehacker?
As someone who has created software that makes people more productive, I’d be interested to know your perspective on the whole thing. Do you think people have started to get more hung up on deciding which application to use for a given purpose, instead of focusing on getting the job done?
Hard to say. I think it’s really a bit odd — I have two apps, WriteRoom and TaskPaper, but I’ve never been a very good writer, and never been all that organised a person. But the “problem” of figuring out how people work and think has always (at least since I started programming) interested me.
As far as productivity apps go, I really like the ideas laid out by GTD, but in the end I don’t actually practise them very well myself. I mostly start up my computer every day, and mess around until I find something that I want to work on; I don’t just jump from one action to the next. But that’s why I think TaskPaper has received the amount of interest that it has. It supports getting things done for people who work that way, but it also supports just recording information for people who aren’t very disciplined.
I’m not really sure about the second part of your question. I’d say that in many cases, yes, people do get hung up on stuff, but that doesn’t really mean the applications or ideas are bad, just that people (myself included) are often good at wasting time.
I guess that’s a good, fair answer that plugs my product in the end… ha!
Ha. Notebook-style applications like Mori have slowly been gaining a lot of popularity — there are the Web-based apps like Google Notebook and Zoho Notebook, and then there’s Evernote, which offers both Web-based access and a desktop client. Have you played around with any of these apps? Do you regret selling Mori when you did?
No, selling Mori was the best thing that I ever did. I think it’s a great application, and “notebooks” are a useful software category, but for me personally, I finally realised that notebooks were not the way that I worked. In the end, I don’t like to collects lots and lots of information (I use Google for that) and so all the search and scalability provided by a notebook interface didn’t turn out to be that useful to me. And just typing into a text file like TaskPaper, where I can see everything at once in a big scroll view if I want, works much much better for me.
What software do you personally use on a daily basis?
I’m ashamed to say that I’m not much of an app connoisseur myself. Mostly Xcode, Safari, Mail.app, then NetNewsWire, iChat, and recently Twitterific.
Do you have any other applications in the pipeline that people can look forward to, or are you focusing all your attention on TaskPaper and WriteRoom for now?
Yes, but it’s a long pipeline with a lot of twists and turns. So I would say that realistically, it’s just WriteRoom and TaskPaper for now. Long term, I’ve been talking with Keith Blount (of Scrivener) about writing an app together — that would be lots of fun, but we are both so busy with our current projects that it could be a few years. And of course, even next week is hard to predict, so a few years is even harder.
I also have some ideas for “mini” applications, one for the iPhone (no, not TaskPaper yet) and one for iTunes album art. Those might come out sometime soon, but they will be “mini” apps from a developer whose “big” applications are WriteRoom and TaskPaper.
Do you have any advice for aspiring programmers/application developers reading this interview?
First, do it instead of thinking about it (you can spend years planning out potential projects), and second, keep everything as simple as possible for as long as possible.
I have tons of advice, but I’m really not sure which parts of the advice are good and which are bad, so I’ll just stick to what I said earlier. I guess I’ll add one more thing — read a bunch of marketing books. Marketing isn’t really that bad of a thing (well, you have a choice about how you do it), but it is important to tell your story as clearly as possible, and marketing books can teach you things that your programmer brain might not figure out. Actually, this forum contains a pretty good outline of my recommendations for building Hog Bay Software-style applications.
Lastly, do you have any last words for everyone reading this interview?
Nothing much, except that I hope you like my apps!
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Thanks to Jesse for taking the time out to do this interview. You can purchase both WriteRoom and TaskPaper here.
I hope you all enjoyed reading the interview. I’d love to know what you thought of it.
Comments and stuff.
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Fantastic interview bro. I love his honesty.
Great interview man.
I must get the write room applicatio I think.