Computer programming is what I do for a living, but the computer is also one of my favorite toys, as well as one of my most useful tools.

I began programming as a hobbyist in 1980, learning about the Basic programming language on my son's Radio Shack computer. On retiring from the US Army in 1982, I went to the Apple II, programming in both Basic and Pascal, as well as in assembly language.

While employed as an engraver, I began working toward an AS degree in programming. Most of that involved Pascal and C on a MS DOS and PC DOS computers.

In February 1988, I was hired by Robin Casady of CasadyWare as a PC DOS programmer. My job was to convert  Macintosh PostScript and screen fonts, Fluent Laser FontsTM, for use under Windows 1.0. After CasadyWare merged with Greene, Inc. to become Casady & Greene, Inc., I began doing some programming on the Macintosh. Once I started programming on the Mac, I lost all interest in other platforms.

My first commercial software product was the Macintosh-only application, InfoGenieTM, which was first published in 1995 to replace the QuickDEX II desk accessory.

When OS X came along, InfoGenie was rewritten as iData Pro, with one version for OS 8.6 through OS 9, and another for OS X, up through version 10.2.

In June of 2002, I was laid off, but continued to work on iData Pro. In July 2003, Casady and Greene, Inc. went bankrupt, and I became the owner of InfoGenie and iData Pro.

In July 2004, I began work on iData 2, which began sales in August 2004.

By November 2006, I had added about 30 new features to the product, and it became iData 3.

In addition to many new features that require Tiger (OS X 10.4) and later, iData 3 is a Universal build, which means that it runs in native mode both on older Macs and on the newer Intel-based machines.

Although we try to take advantage of new OS features from Apple, we also continue to support customers who are not racing to each new OS as soon as it appears. iData Pro for OS X 10.2 and a version that runs under most versions of Windows are also available through the iData 3 site--along with a free version of iData Pro for OS 9. We also continue to sell iData 2 for those who are still using OS X 10.3.

All of these versions of iData are available at the iData 3 Web site.

In addition to programming, I designed a few fonts for C&G.

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