John Hall of Bit of Paradise Products and creator of SonicMood, took the time to answer a few questions about his fantastic ambient music/sounds app.  You can read my review of SonicMood here.

Tech Universe (TU): Tell me about your background in software development?

John Hall (JH): Well, my degree is in physics, but I've been passionate about programming since the early '70s. I'm essentially self-taught, although in college I had a general ed class on programming basics, a physics class called "Computer Applications in Physics," and a Computer Science class called "Combinatorial Algorithms."

I did a lot of software development for my job, designing and testing "rotation sensors" (gyroscopes). Many of the programs I developed were to acquire or analyze data, although I wrote a pretty good simulator for the FOG (Fiber Optic Gyro). The four years before I retired, I developed navigation software for several different aircraft.

At home I developed software for my own amusement, some of which was actually useful.

I've written software in BASIC, FORTH, C, FORTRAN, Pascal, and assembler. My favorite language is probably Pascal, although modern object-oriented versions of BASIC, like REALbasic, are quite good.

Although I bought one of the first Macs in 1984, I didn't pursue programming on the Mac until around 2004. SonicMood is really my first serious attempt at developing for a "mass market."

TU: How did SonicMood come about?

JH: After I retired and we moved to Paradise, CA., I really started to spend a lot of time on the computer. I'd bought a G4 Power Mac and was having great fun learning OS X. This is really a beautiful area, with pine trees and deer in the yard, etc. We have wind chimes outdoors, but being on my computer so much I missed their relaxing "tinkle, tinkle." So one day I thought, "Why not write a program to make similar sounds?" I did some research on how different wind chimes are tuned, what scales are common, etc., and I set to work making a "chimes simulator."

So that was the original intent of SonicMood. But it has grown into something much more. SonicMood still retains the ability to sound like chimes, but many of the "Moods" I've made use other instruments than chimes, and sound quite different. It's become very customizable to the point that the user can define their own musical scales, keys, and note timings, and create sounds I'd never envisioned at the start. And I added "nature sounds" (just recordings of rain, birds, crickets, etc. that I include - but any digital audio file can be played, up to 32 at once) to provide a background to it all.

TU: What other products do you make?

JH: SonicMood is it at present. I'm still busy adding features that users request or I dream up. I will eventually slow down on SonicMood and create something else, I'm sure. I've a few ideas kicking around, but not much code to show for it yet.

TU: What's it like doing programming?

JH: Only that I'm having fun. Programming is a form of recreation for me. It's been my hobby since I was in college and microcomputerdom was in its infancy. I'm always amazed at how the application of simple logic can make the computer do what I want. When a program behaves as I designed it to, it's exhilarating!

Thanks, John for the great interview.  Find out more at SonicMood.com; this is one of my highly recommended Mac software apps!

Posted at 10:35AM Apr 15, 2009 by Heath McKnight in Inform  |  Comments[0]