about KlepHacks Shareware
Contents:
The KlepHacks team consists of one engineer, one technical writer, one VP of Marketing, and one President. They are all the same person--Scott J. Kleper
The following was taken from the NetBots 2.5 documentation:
[Disclaimer: This is probably more than you wanted to know.]
I was born on 7/2/77 in Rochester, NY. I got my first Mac on 9/13/91. Nothing in between really matters. Just kidding. I actually did quite a bit of computer stuff as a kid. My father, who has been interested in printing all of his life, made the transition to electronic publishing rather early so we always had several computers around our house even in the early 80's. My dad actually invented some way to connect Apple II's to typesetters, but to this day I have no idea exactly what it did. I used to take classes at the Rochester Museum and Science Center, where I would learn useless things like SuperPILOT and BASIC. As a 7 year-old BASIC programmer, I used to write out adventure games on little pads of paper and type them in whenever I got a chance. It was fun to give them to other kids and see if they could solve the mystery, but I still have nightmares about GOTO's.
Around 4th grade, I finally got my own Apple (I think it was a //+). By then I was known as the computer kid at school and I continued to write games in BASIC. My odd fascination with BASIC continued until I got my first Mac, when I was a freshman in high school. I wanted to continue to write programs, but the only BASIC I could find was Microsoft BASIC. Even then, I hated Microsoft, so I looked for a better language. I ended up taking some classes at the Rochester Institute of Technology as a high school sophomore. The classes were extremely valuable, but were taught in Pascal, which ain't C but is still much better than BASIC.
During Christmas that year, a friend of my mom's came to visit us. At the time, he worked for Apple. He encouraged me to dig through some of the volumes of Inside Macintosh to learn Macintosh programming. I printed volume 1 out from a HyperCard stack and was soon able to do basic QuickDraw stuff, still using Pascal. By this time, I had a PowerBook 100 and for a few weeks, I would stay up all night working on "ScottPaint", a very weak little paint program. When that was done, I attempted to write an Artificial Intelligence game called "Reality Sucks," but that never got very far.
That summer, I came to Stanford as part of a program they have for high school kids that wanted to know what college was like. During the summer, I learned C and wrote some little Macintosh programs that just played sounds. When I got back home, I started writing a text editor, called Jot. I worked on that for quite a while on my new Duo 210 and it was great to get feedback from people on a local BBS and to have an actual group of testers.
After Jot 1.5.1 came out, I slacked off a bit, under the false impression that school work was more important than programming. I should qualify that by admitting that working hard in high school got me into Stanford. Anyways, during my senior year, I came out with a mess of new programs like MacFolklore, PowerSpaceTabsPlus, HTML Markdown, and eventually HTML Markup. The latter was the first program that really brought me into the shareware business and received lots of attention and feedback.
Since then, I've come out with new versions of most of the above programs. I've also done NetBots and a bunch of other utilities. I'm now back at Stanford (a sophomore as of this writing) and I've had programming internships at Be, Inc. and Xerox Corp. This summer I'll be working at Apple Research Labs.
If you'd like to know anything else about me, feel free to visit my personal home page at http://htc.rit.edu/scott.html or send email to my personal address, klep@cs.stanford.edu
Writing shareware was a really great way for a kid to get into Macintosh programming. After I learned Pascal, I couldn't find any classes that taught GUI programming so I decided that I'd start writing small programs (hacks) for myself and eventually release them as shareware. I've also found that writing shareware is a great way to meet some really interesting people and getting my name around. I've gotten to talk to industry folks like Adam Engst and Jon Wiederspan. I've also gotten to talk to a lot of really great users who send me lots of suggestions.
Then why do you charge for it?
I love writing shareware, but it takes a lot of time and there are expenses involved like compilers, books, and internet presence. I charge mainly to cover my costs with the hope that some day, it will help me pay off my student loans. I'm not making anywhere near that much now, but I'll continue to release software as long as people continue to support my efforts.
Will you be writing a version for Windows?
Absolutely not. I have written Windows software and it's something I would never choose to do. That said, it's very likely that my software will be able to run on Windows since starting next year, I'll be developing for Apple's Yellow Box framework. This framework has a free runtime for Rhapsody, Mac OS, and Windows. So no matter which you use, you'll be able to run KlepHacks programs.
Can I have some of your source code?
I haven't been releasing code in the past, but I may begin some open-source projects in the near future. Other than that, I don't generally give out code.
Can we distribute your product with our CD-ROM/book?
I will almost always say yes, but I do require that you contact me before doing so. Send email to <klephacks@kagi.com>
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©1997, by Scott J. Kleper
All Rights Reserved.
Last Modified 11/15/97