Interview with teen developer Martin Pilkington

by Judson Collier • 12/08/2006 at 02:00 PM

M Cubed Software recently released their new application, Minim- a music manager exclusively for Mac OS X. It lets composers store all their information about their songs and albums, from meta data to GarageBand files.  Minim is a management app for musicians. Music listeners have iTunes and Minim is there to fill the void for those who make music. It can also be the basis for collaborating on and sharing your music with others. Judson Collier recently talked with teen-age developer Martin Pilkington about Minim’’s creation, and his experience developing the software.
Where did the inspiration come from to create Minim?
Well, I write a lot of music, and I mean a LOT. Up until now I’ve just been managing it all in the Finder, which is far from ideal. Having folders of GarageBand files, text files with lyrics in and various different scores and MIDI files is not a great way to store music, and when I want to group them together I get duplicates. So I decided to write an application to handle all that.
Originally I wasn’t planning to make Minim, it was just a small idea in the back of my mind, quite different from the Minim I’ve released. I was working on a back up application, but of course with Time Machine coming in Leopard I figured I couldn’t compete and so I switched projects. That is a moral to all developers, have lots of ideas!
What are some of your favorite features in Minim?
That’s a very good question. The ability to group my songs by Albums was very important to me because it got rid of the whole duplication problem. Being able to keep track of the date I wrote a song is also something I wanted a lot. It’s a very small feature but I like to track how my music has progressed over time.
How does Minim integrate with other apps and sites?
Minim integrates with a website called iCompositions, which is a great site with lots of very talented artists who use using GarageBand and a few other apps to make music to share with the world. As I upload my songs there, I thought it’d be great if I could ease that process. You can store a lot of metadata about your songs in Minim so we thought, “Why not use that?”, and so, with the click of a button, you can be taken to the iCompositions upload page with most of the forms already filled in for you.
Minim also integrates with iChat, so you can add anyone else working on your song to the collaborators panel and see when they’re online. As for GarageBand integration, it’s an obvious avenue and we are most definitely looking into it
What are your plans for the future, if you’d like to reveal some to us?
Well, we want Minim to become your first stop when you start writing music. At the moment Minim is where you keep everything once you have finished, but we would like it to be where you formulate ideas and start getting the foundation of your song down. We’d also like to expand the collaboration and sharing features, as applications are moving away from being single entities and becoming connected. iChat in Leopard is a great example of this with iChat Theatre and Screen Sharing.
How did Mcubed Software get started?
Depends how far back you want to go? When I was 8 I started making simple games using Appleworks and Apple Media Tool on my Performa 5200. As I got older I created M Cubed Games, but as my games all sucked and I got into programming it became M Cubed Software. I’ve greatly admired companies like Panic and Rogue Amoeba and the idea of working for myself, making software that I enjoy and that others enjoy is just very appealing to me.
How many staffers are at M Cubed? Are they all teenagers?
There’s just the two of us, Joseph being the other half. I’m the only teenager, Joseph used to be one but grew tired of it when he turned 20. We pretty much handle everything between us. I do most of the application design and coding and Joseph handles the UI design and tech support as well as a few other bits and bobs (he made the rather nice Code Collector and Transceiver icons).
What other software does M Cubed offer?
We also offer two freeware apps, Code Collector and Transceiver. Code Collector is a simple app to store code snippets. I got tired of scrolling through hundreds of lines of code just to find a small bit I wanted to use again. Transceiver pretty much sends the contents of an iTunes playlist to a webscript. I wanted to have my recent tunes on my blog but my script to get it from Last.fm kind of messed up so I wrote Transceiver to do it instead.
We also have Helping Hand which we’re hoping to get out Early 2007, which is going to help reduce the amount of work developers have to do to create good looking help files for their applications but it’s still under development so we can’t say any more than is already on our site.
That’s it for now. Thanks for your time!
My pleasure.
Minim is available for $25.00 at http://www.mcubedsw.com/software/minim.php.