In past years, I made a point of declaring an area of focus (similar to a New Year’s resolution). 2006 marked a year of making more mistakes, and in 2007 I focused on refinement. All my declarations hold for the future, so I still plan on making plenty of mistakes, and I will continue to refine the products that I release.

This year I held off on my public declaration due to the sensitivity of what I was proposing — in 2008, I declared independence. I resigned from my full-time job to pursue a career in independent Mac software development. My first day as a full-time employee of SuperMegaUltraGroovy is February 8th, which also happens to be my birthday.

This is huge. I am turning my life upside-down to pursue a dream I’ve had since I was in grade school. When I first started to program, I was interested in designing my own software, and making music with my computer. From that point forward, writing audio-related software on my own would turn out to be the ultimate career goal.

I’ve written a handful of applications to work with sound over the years (ranging from software synthesis to MIDI control applications), but the experience required to ship a complex application just wasn’t there. FuzzMeasure gave me an excuse to carry an idea to completion, though over the past year I’ve grown frustrated with my inability to devote more time to the software I love.

In June 2006, at WWDC, I started to wonder how long it’d be until I could live out this fantasy. I was a long way from making my salary with FuzzMeasure, and 3.0 had a few months left to go. During this time, Andrew grew older, and even more fun to spend time with — I very much prefer playing with my son to writing more code outside of my day job.

When FuzzMeasure 3.0 finally launched, the response was great. A healthy fraction of existing customers upgraded, and plenty of new customers came knocking at my door. I was still short of making my salary, but the upward trajectory of sales and interest was hard to ignore. I knew I had to start considering a move to full-time development of FuzzMeasure and future products, and quickly.

The final decision was made over the holidays. My wife and I deliberated over the sacrifices we will have to make, but we both agree that I have the passion and skill to pull this off. Given the current sales growth, and a possibility for increased revenue with new applications, it seems like the right thing to do.

We have enough savings to sustain us for about 2 years in addition to the current (relatively stable) revenue stream. Of course, I’m planning to revisit the whole strategy much sooner than that in case things start to go badly — I can’t afford to bankrupt my family.

So with some big sacrifices, a proven track record of skill, and a burning desire to create outstanding products, I’m confident that I can make this work. I look forward to bringing the world more SuperMegaUltraGroovy applications, and continuing to make FuzzMeasure the world’s best audio measurement tool.

I stumbled across these acoustics tutorial videos the other week, and was excited to see a solid resource for people new to measuring acoustics. Originally I caught the video on YouTube, and then Ethan himself pointed me at these higher quality versions on the RealTraps site. They are an outstanding resource for people new to room tuning, and using FuzzMeasure to measure and analyze the results.

Ethan uses the ETF software on Windows when he demonstrates the concepts, as he’s yet to switch to a Mac (I know — I’m working on it). However, I think that you’ll be able to easily transfer the techniques of reading waterfall graphs to FuzzMeasure.

I can now let folks begin banging on the next release of FuzzMeasure.

I haven’t reached 100% completion yet, but I feel that FuzzMeasure will not need much more major work before I release it. There are a few less-often-used-but-still-important features still pending, but I’d like to get the feedback loop started as early as I can. That way, I will get a better idea of where I need to concentrate my efforts before launching.

One catch: You must have access to a recent build of Leopard. Please contact me via email (chris@supermegaultragroovy.com) and I’ll give you further information about downloading the beta.

You know, I’ve been meaning to make some measurements of iPods with FuzzMeasure, and post them to this site. However, all my free time has to go straight into building FuzzMeasure, that I rarely get a chance to actually use it.

Well, one of my long-time (and very knowledgeable) customers, Marc Heijligers, has done what I’ve wanted to do for years now. Also, he’s done a great job of it and used many of FuzzMeasure 2.0’s new features in the process (step responses, minimum phase, etc).

Read Marc’s analysis to see how the latest generation iPod has decreased in audio quality. I’m curious how it compares to the ‘high-end’ iPod Touch and iPhone devices.

I get really caught up in adding new features that make up a new release of FuzzMeasure. What begins as an innocent idea from some of my trusted friends can quickly turn into features that absolutely must make the next release. One thing leads to another, and it’s been well over a year since your last major release.

Of course, part of the delay can be attributed to the very different life I live since Andrew was born. (By the way, he turned one yesterday, and I can’t imagine not having him around.) It’s hard to balance working on FuzzMeasure with playing with your son in your spare time, but such is the life of an entrepreneur.

That said, I think I’m doing very well. I will probably slip a little on the date I have set in my mind for my next release, but I will try my best to meet it. I want to try my hardest to get all the features that users have asked me for over the past year, and a few more that they didn’t even know they needed.

Anyway, I have a lot of work to do, and not much time left to blog!