Drew Thaler

Today I'm an independent Macintosh software developer. I'm working on developing a few nifty ideas of my own, but I'm also available for contracting if the job is right. A somewhat outdated résumé is available.

Highlights of my previous work include:

• The CD/DVD burn engine in the Disc Recording services for Mac OS X, and its Mac OS 9 predecessor.
• The filesystem generator within Disc Recording, including the virtual filesystem APIs and their implementation, for which I was the primary architect. This required detailed knowledge of HFS+, ISO-9660 (available free as ECMA-119), and Joliet, as well as a lot of algorithmic optimization.
• Universal CD/DVD and HD mass storage drivers for Mac OS 9, which supported drives via FireWire, USB, ATAPI, and SCSI.
• The ZiVA decoder-chip drivers for Apple's hardware-based DVD player.
• A technology demo of sub-pixel font rendering back before it became standard on Mac OS X with Quartz.
• A Java-based 3D molecular modeling tool for education, called eChem. It's still around but I don't think it's been updated much since I left.
• A Quickdraw 2D graphics accelerator for the Powerbook 2400/3400.

For what it's worth, almost everything in the list above is all still in active use, in some cases by hundreds of thousands of users.

I'm also the author of a surprisingly still-popular little Classic app called CLImax, which was an AppleScript command-line interface for the Mac and dates back to the System 7 days. Embarrassingly, it contained a time bomb that made it stop working in Mac OS 8 because I was so positive that it wouldn't run correctly in Copland. Uh, oops. The last release, CLImax 1.5d2, is available for download again and will soon have its own page.

I live in Brecksville, Ohio with my wife, Nancy, and an extremely cute little girl named Olivia. We live in a three-bedroom ranch, on a half-acre lot containing an abundance of trees that yield apples, plums, pears, and cherries.