ObjectiveSee | Sam Soffes

Who are you and what do you do?

I'm Sam Soffes. I live in San Francisco and work on stuff at Nothing Magical. It's the company I started after leaving my role as the lead iOS engineer at Hipstamatic. Currently, it's just me. I just released Cheddar. I work on other stuff occasionally too. I'm @soffes on Twitter and soffes on GitHub.

How did you get started in developing for iOS?

In high school, a friend and I drove 8 hours to one of the Leopard Tech Talks Apple was putting for free just because we were Apple fans. Sitting in sessions about what was new in Xcode blew my mind. I went home and bought the Aaron Hillegass book, and started learning Objective-C. I made a few Mac apps, but nothing too excited happened.

After high school, I got my first real job writing PHP. When Steve announced the iPhone SDK, I was ecstatic. My boss agreed to let me write an app for one of the web products we had. It was called Bible and launched on day one of the App Store. (The last time I touched that code, iOS 3.0 wasn't out yet. It's maintained by others now.)

The first few days of the App Store was super exciting. No one knew it was going to be a big deal yet. I remember breaking 100,000 downloads and being blown away. Suddenly software was cool again. I remember standing in line at a fast food place and seeing my app on the home screen of the person in front of me. Amazing feeling.

After leaving that job, freelanced a bit, worked a few start ups including Hipstamatic, and now I'm on my own again. I'm so thankful I had a chance to get started the day it was released. It's been amazing so far.

What does your computer and workspace setup look like while developing?

I'm a big minimal fan (heh, big minimal). I sit at a birch 63-inch IKEA GALANT desk. One $9 IKEA lamp, a pair of Yamaha HS80M monitors, a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display sit on my desk. That's it. I love only having a couple of things on my desk. Here's a photo.

My desk is in front of three windows. I can look to the left and people watch or look to the right and see the ocean. It's spectacular. Highly recommend.

I do all of my work on my 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro. I don't Spaces, or Dashboard. Having my whole desktop scroll drives me nuts. I Command-H and Command-Option-H a ton. I usually only have Rdio, Xcode, Chocolat, and Terminal open. Lately I've been working without Twitter, Mail, or iChat open. It's fantastic.

What are your favourite Apple iOS API's to use within apps you develop?

UIAppearance is awesome. Making custom UIBarButtonItems takes so much time (especially if you do both orientations). I really love Core Data though. I've used it in ever app except my first 2 apps. The new child contexts in iOS 5 is amazing.

Core Graphics is a lot of fun too. Drawing custom controls and whatnot is a good time. I'm not amazing at geometry, but I like the challenge.

What is some essential software that you use outside of Xcode for development?

I use git for everything. I exclusively use the command line client. I use Rake a lot for variously day to day scripting.

From a developer's perspective, what are your hopes for the next major iOS update?

TI'd love to see more flexible in-app purchases. I really want to use auto-renewing subscriptions in Cheddar, but only magazines can use them now. Faster iCloud sync would be awesome. I used to wish for a collection view, but the new in iOS 6 looks awesome.

Honestly, I'm pretty happy with the state of iOS. In the past I've had lots of complaints about stuff I want them to fix or add, but not so much anymore. It's a good time to be an iOS developer. I can't wait to see what Apple will surprise us with next.

Finally, what is your favourite app?

On my iPhone dock, the only non-Apple app is Tweetbot. It's just fantastic. I constantly use Rdio, Gauges, and Instagram as well. (I'm soffes on Rdio and samsoffes on Instagram.)