Once I was interviewed...


Marc Zeedar 2006 interview for the xDev Magazine

Tell us a little about your background. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school?

Despite my name sounds English I was born and grew up in France. Actually my great grandfather was american so my parents decided to name me after him. Perhaps it was premonitory as nowadays most of my customers are american. I left France when I finished studying electronic engineering and moved to Spain where I reside since then.

How did you get interested in computers and programming?

My first contact with programming was when I was 12. A math teacher were giving free programming classes at lunch time. I enrolled and later found out I was the youngest of the classroom. We were Using Texas Instruments calculators, the TI-30 if I remember well. That was in 1979/1980. Later I purchased a Casio calculator and made a lot more programming. A few years later I went to Phoenix for holidays. I saw a ZX-81 for the first time. Once back home I bought one and started to learn Basic. It was the real start thus since then I have never stopped programming.

Tell us a little about your company and the products you make.

I founded Max Programming, LLC in 2001 right after living my previous job at an Apple wholesaler, in order to declare the incomes I was already generating from selling software in my spare time. I started developing email applications, a few internet tools and I finally created a Personal Finance software and a tool to control online sales. Originally my goal was to concentrate in developing Internet tools only but I needed some applications to control my company so I created and added them to my catalogue.

How did you discover Xojo?

I started doing shareware in 1989 for MSDOS using mainly the Pascal and C languages and later Delphi on Windows. Once I discovered the Mac it took quite a long time to continue programming as I was used to Delphi and there were no RAD tools at that time on the Mac. If I remember well I discovered Xojo in december 1999 browsing thru the internet. It simply changed my life. I started using it and one year later I left the company I was working for and funded my own.

Why do you use Xojo?

I use Xojo because it offers a great Rapid Application Development environment, it uses a wonderful easy-to-use language, it is OOP and because it is multi-platform. I don't imagine myself using another tool actually. I spent too much time fighting with Code Warrior when I tried to create my own OOP libraries to manage Windows, menus and so on. With Xojo you concentrate yourself on the real stuff. I think it is ideal for creating commercial software.

What are your favorite Xojo features?

I love the 2006 IDE and the power of built-in sockets. The list of favorite Xojo features could be long as I personally feel very comfortable using it. It is amazing how the product has evolved since I started to use it in 1999. I had no problem to adopt the new IDE as I was used to Delphi's in the past.

What's the one feature you'd like Xojo to add/improve?

I would love to see a full-featured DNS lookup socket. A profiler would be great as well. About improvements there are always a lot to do but right now I think we are going in the right direction. Bugs use to be fixed soon if they refer to something hot. However it can take sometimes months to get others fixed. It is a bit annoying but I guess a developer has to deal with that.

What's your biggest development challenge?

If you would have asked me last summer I would have responded 'Porting my products to Universal Binary'. Finally it has been much easier than expected. Right now my main challenge is to make all my products to evolve in the right direction and make time to create new ones. Perhaps porting a few of them to Linux could be interesting in the long run. I have no idea yet of what Cocoa support will represent in term of code portability but the switch could be really interesting.


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