And I realized that if you could stitch these things together, my gosh, you could have just about continuous coverage all the way around the block. This was just a few years into the Wi-Fi revolution, not even two years. I would put on a pair of headphones and walk up and down the streets, to the West Village, listening to network names.
It just an AppleScript that sat in a loop and read the network names, and read them out loud, using a synthesized voice. That was actually the first iStumbler that I wrote. I really wanted to wrap my head around this stuff, and back in Mac OS 9, there was actually an AppleScript API. I wrote it so that I could understand what was going on. And so, like a lot of really good products, iStumbler is written for me.
if you will of being able to pick the thing up and walk around with it and still be surfing the Internet.īut being a geek at heart, I really wanted to know how it worked. I ran out and got one and started playing with it. It all worked seamlessly.ĪW: It was amazing. The antenna systems were built in, the cards were built in, there’s nothing to attach, no dongles, no weird equipment to buy and configure. Between the slightly hucksterish presentation, the reality of what he showed off there, here’s this base station and here’s this laptop and everything’s integrated, and it’s all wireless, was something we’d never seen before. I distinctly remember a Macworld Expo in New York where Steve Jobs got up and demoed the iBook for the first time. So that includes the menu extra, the system preferences, the utilities and a whole bunch of stuff in the background that no one ever sees.Īctually, I started iStumbler 10 years ago.ĪW: Well, one thing leads to another. I was working in the Mac hardware group – which is responsible for the Wi-Fi client for OS X. I spent five years working for the Fruit company. But what many TMO readers may not realize is that while you were developing iStumbler and giving it away for free, you were working for a company that was making a lot of the wireless technology that TMO’s readers were using.Īlf Watt: This is true. Most of TMO’s readers are going to know you from iStumbler. In our eighth interview, Dave Hamilton chats with Alf Watt famous for iStumbler on the Mac.ĭave Hamilton: You’ve had a varied and interesting career. The result is usually a number of serious insights into the state of mind of the developer community. Each year at WWDC, TMO interviews a few Apple developers who want to tell their story.
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