iRooster, Open-Sourced
I originally released this in response to an Ask HN post requesting respondents to publish their old source code.
All the way back in 2003, I released my first-ever piece of commercial software, under what was called a ‘shareware’ model at the time. iRooster “[turned] your Mac into a $2,000 alarm clock,” and turned me into a lifelong believer that I could envision, build, ship, and sell software all on my own.
I originally made it because I had endless amounts of trouble waking up for my morning classes in college, and found that the only alarm that could get me up was a subwoofer right underneath my bed. So I hooked a 2.1 speaker system up to my Mac, wrote a little app to start playing an iTunes playlist at a particular time, and ended up productizing it.
It was never a huge commercial success; I think the best I ever did with it was about $2,000 in sales one month after Apple featured it in a newsletter (different times!), but it taught me several important lessons about building a commercial software product that still guide me today.
Enjoy checking out my super-janky, Objective-C code targeting PowerPC Macs!
