Developer: “Mac App Store Almost Killed Our Business”
18.05.12
Dave Hamilton attended MacTech 2011 and had the opportunity to interview several Apple developers. Here’s the conversation Mr. Hamilton had with Mr. Tim DeBenedictis, founder of Southern Stars . They chat about the popularity of a mobile astronomy app [ Sky Safari ], porting a complex iOS app to the Mac App Store, and how, after building a Mac version, the Mac App Store almost killed the business.

Dave Hamilton: My guess is that you had an interesting path that led you to being a Mac developer. Tell us a little bit about that story.
Tim DeBenedictis: I’ve been a space nerd my whole life. My parents got me a telescope when I was eight, and I had many fun nights looking at the sky in our suburban back yard in Syracuse, New York.
I went to school originally to become an aerospace engineer and discovered that that’s a lot of work, so I ended up going into planetary science. And I took one programming class in college — an introduction to C programming. I graduated in 1993, the [public] Internet happens, and then I somehow got shuffled off into this mystical land called Silicon Valley where I got involved with bank security software for many years. Not anything to do with astronomy.
Source: The Mac Observer