![]() The Pirate Monkeyness organization currently consists of me, Tim Moses. I do the development, the website, the marketing and promotions, the accounting (there is nothing to account for), and the janitorial services. A Short HistoryIn 2006, a couple days before International Talk Like a Pirate day (Sept 19th), I was looking at Pirate translators and found that most of them only did a few basic replacements on words. I thought it would be fun to write a more sophisticated version, so I threw something together as a Perl CGI that used a library of regular expressions to do a more clever translation. I had recently gotten a beta version of Dashcode, Apple's new development program for developing Dashboard widgets, so I made a widget to call the CGI and submitted it to the Apple site on International Talk Like a Pirate day.In the first month, it made it to #4 on Apple's top widgets list with more than 100,000 downloads and also made it to the staff favorites. I was shocked by the response. I ended up making an online version for the website and then made a version people could install on their sites. When the iPhone SDK came out last year, I decided to write some piratey app for the iPhone, but there weren't any books available yet, so figuring anything out at the beginning was a challenge. I wrote a Pirate Insult Generator by modifying Apple's Hello World example, but I really needed to write something from scratch if I was going to submit it to the app store. This summer, I took a look at “Beginning iPhone Development — Exploring the SDK” by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche. That got me started again. Their book covered everything I needed to get going and, once I was halfway through, I was able to write a clean Pirate Insult Generator from scratch. FutureI am submitting the free Pirate Insult Generator to the App store and hope to follow it up with free apps for the Pirate Translator and a Pirate Name Generator. I will also combine all the functions into one app to sell for 99¢. I hope to also do web versions of the insult generator and name generator. There already is one for the translator. |
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