I'm trying this approach because I don't just want to put out the next iPhone Twitter app. TMO: Are you thinking that in the iPhone version, one might want to just follow a few friends rather than the hundreds - or thousands - of people followed on the desktop? If I started in a different place, I might get a new perspective. But my thinking was that I wanted to see where that led me. For the iPhone/iPod touch version, I started with the user list - that's all I have implemented so far. In the desktop version, the focus is on the timeline. Basically, I started a little differently. TMO: Are you thinking about doing an iPhone version? Actually, I'd rather start with a paid app with a new idea right now. It really surprises me how many downloads I still get for that. My first app was NameChanger, and I still get ore downloads for that than anything. Mostly because I'm doing it as a learning experience. Roberson: I had thought about it, but I decided not to. TMO: Had you thought about taking 2.0 to be a paid version? TMO: And as I recall, Syrinx is a free app? TMO: You built it in Xcode and Cocoa, right? It didn't have a lot of features, and I just did it in my spare time. The first version was pretty simple and straightforward. TMO: How long did it take you to write the first version? That's when I realized I was only about five minutes ahead of the wave. Roberson: Right after I released it, there was a wave of Twitter clients released. TMO: Why, then, hasn't Syrinx gained wide popularity? So I put it out there and a lot of people started downloading it and giving me feedback. Eventually, I got to the point where I realized, I'll bet a lot of people would like this. SO I started improving on it, and Mike had feature requests that I added in. Roberson: Well, then I started work with Michael Fey, and he also didn't like anything out there. Then I started looking at NSCollectionView in Leopard and realized that if combined that with MCML's Twitter engine, right there, I'd have a Twitter client with very little work invested. It took me fives minutes to figure how to quit it. It didn't have a window it didn't have a dock icon. I didn't like Twitterrific because it didn't seem to be a first-class citizen on the Mac. Back then, there was only Twitterrific and a few others. Roberson: When I started doing this a few months ago, I didn't really like the look of any of the Twitter apps. (I'm using Recorder v 7.1 for the iPhone from Retronyms Software.) Mickey, how did you get started doing a Twitter client? TMO: We're here with Mickey Roberson in the WWDC dining hall. In this first interview, we chat with Mickey Roberson, founder of MRR Software in Saquoit, New York and the developer of the Syrinx Twitter client. As part of this year's WWDC coverage, TMO is meeting with several notable developers to bring our readers insights into the people behind the apps they use.