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Volume Number: 24 (2008)
Issue Number: 07
Column Tag: MacTech Spotlight
MacTech Spotlight: Matt Giger, President, Lunar Software
http://www.earthbrowser.com
What do you do?
I am president of Lunar Software, which sells a software product called EarthBrowser. I run the whole show from programming to web design, technical support and server administration.
How long have you been doing what you do?
I have been selling EarthBrowser full time since 1998, but I've been programming Macs since 1986 where we had souped up Macs with 512K of memory.
Your first computer:
A Vic-20 that kept my lap warm on many cold mornings.
What's the coolest thing about the Mac?
Stability and access to the Darwin command line is probably the best thing about Mac OS X right now, but I'd have to say that over the years the thing that has been consistently superior about the Mac is the quality of text rendering. It puts every other operating system to shame.
What advice would you give to people trying to enter this field?
Never be afraid of learning a new thing, no matter how daunting, just take it one step at a time. Always be learning something new.
What's the coolest tech thing you've done using OS X?
I've got a mothballed version of EarthBrowser that uses OpenGL to render shaded relief mountains and the solar system based on a C++/Python game engine with an embedded database.
Ever?
Probably the coolest code I ever wrote was a library that can do colorspace transformation and geographic re-projection of almost any geo-referenced dataset using various resampling kernels.
Where can we see a sample of your work?
The next way I'm going to impact IT/OS X/the Mac universe is:
EarthBrowser 3.0 is written using Adobe Flash technology and I will be releasing a Javascript API in the next few weeks. This will allow anyone to embed a 3D globe directly on their website to display their own geo-content (even KML files).
I blog about my EarthBrowser work at http://blog.earthbrowser.com
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