In February 1988, I was hired by Robin Casady of CasadyWare as a PC DOS programmer. My job was to convert CasadyWare's Macintosh PostScript and screen fonts, Fluent Laser FontsTM, for use under Windows 2. 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. InfoGenie was a relatively simple flat database
application that had a freeform text field and optional,
user-designed named fields. It also inherited QuickDEX's
lightning-fast search capability.
When OS X came along, InfoGenie was rewritten as iData™ Pro, with one version
for System 8.6 through System 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. I joined with Robin Casady to market
iData online. I did the programming, while Robin did almost
everything else — tech support, web page design, and marketing.
Robin also did a pretty good job of keeping me in line when my
program design ideas get too user-unfriendly. We worked together
under the company name iData
Partners™.
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. Over the next seven years, another 20 or so new features were added to iData 3. Among the serious new features were label and envelope printing, phone dialing, and syncing datafiles on networks.
Along the way, we released iData
Mobile™
for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, and iData Lite™ as a cheaper
version of iData Pro, designed for synching datafiles to iData
Mobile. Because iOS at that time did not support the editing of
text styles, both of these apps used a
In August 2014, we finally came out with iData Pro™ 4, with another
eleven new features, as a replacement for iData 3. Since its
release, quite a few more features have been added.
In March 2016, Robin Casady decided to retire, leaving me as the
lone "iData Partner". I've kept the iData Partners name, though.
(Robin died on October 5, 2020.)
In July 2016, I released iData Mobile Plus™, which is a free replacement for iData Mobile, available through the iTunes Store. This version includes support for styled text and the inclusion of images in the Notes area.
On August 4, 2019, I announced that I would be retiring on August 4, 2020. Since I didn't think that it would be fair to sell iData Pro 4 to new customers when I wouldn't be around to provide tech support and bug fixes, I also announced that new licenses for iData Pro 4 are no longer available, although upgrades from iData 3 to iData Pro 4 would be available until I retired.
On August 4, 2020, at the age of 78, I did retire, but I still
published a few bug-fix updates after that. As of version 4.0.51,
iData Pro has become a completely free app, with no serial
number/license required.
Of course, I couldn't really stop trying to keep iData Pro
current, So I've been working on a much-updated version, which
will eventually become iData
Pro 5.
Now that I'm fully retired, I occasionally help my wife with her business, Smooth Transitions of Northwest Washington. I still play a lot of guitar, banjo, and mandolin. Our local weekly Bluegrass jam sessions were temporarily suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but they're up and running again now. I've also gotten back into Chinese-style watercolor painting.
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