John Martellaro

Gregorio Zanon is a co-leader at DigiDNA, in Geneva, Switzerland. His company is the developer of the iMazing app for macOS and Windows that backs up an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and allows access to that data. Gregorio’s career essentially began when started programming in BASIC on an Amiga at age 10. But he also had a love for classical music and learned to play the piano. That led to college, in London, where studied music and received his degree. Later, inspired by a technical music project, Gregorio got back into coding and so impressed DigiDNA that he was hired. We chatted about the evolution of the DigiDNA company, the iMazing app, how it works, its features and some of the developer challenges with this kind of software as iOS has evolved.

Daniel Jalkut is the founder of Red-Sweater Software. His company is most famous for the WordPress blog editing software, MarsEdit. Daniel holds a B.S. in Computer and Information Science from U.C. Santa Cruz. As a teenager, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, but his evolving interest in computer science derived from his father who was a software compiler engineer. Daniel soon discovered, with his Timex Sinclair, that he had a knack with computers. In 1995, he went to work for Apple and started working with Mac OS 7.5 as a quality engineer. Later, he transitioned to Mac OS X, maintaining the Carbon APIs. Red-Sweater was born in 2000, and Daniel has been an indie developer since 2002. Tune in to hear how Daniel made it all happen.

John Kheit is a New York attorney and a regular Contributing Editor for The Mac Observer. We share many common interests, including the 4K/UHD TV revolution, and have recently been comparing notes on that technology. So, for this edition of Background Mode, we just geeked out, chatted about his acquisition of an LG OLED 4K/UHD TV, compared OLED to the older Plasmas, covered LG’s use of webOS 3, talked High Dynamic Range (HDR), did some comparisons to LCD TVs, and offered our thoughts about the future of TV, including 8K. We finished the show chatting about last week’s Background Mode interview with Car and Driver magazine’s Eddie Alterman and the future of autonomous cars.

Dr. Alan Stern is a planetary scientist with the Southwest Research Institute. He’s also the co-founder and chief scientist of World View, working with high altitude balloon research. He is perhaps most famous as the principle investigator for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. Way back in grade school, Alan was interested in space exploration and wanted to be a part of the Star Trek future. He received his Ph.D. in planetary science from the University of Colorado, and that launched his life-long interest in Kuiper Belt Objects and the Oort Cloud. He’s a licensed pilot, was selected by NASA as a Payload Specialist, and has flown research missions in high performance jet aircraft. We talked about his career, the New Horizons mission design, Pluto discoveries (and planetary classification) and his latest research.