Pirate Monkeyness

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 History

In 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.

Future

I 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.