The Thinkyhead Story

Scott Lahteine Photo Thinkyhead is a software dojo committed to the creation of fun, interesting, useful, deeply simple software products that push the limits of convention and extend the powers and aesthetic of Mac OS X.

Hi, I'm Scott Lahteine, the programmer behind FretPet X and the founder of Thinkyhead Software. This is a brief account of my programming career and some of the milestones that led to the creation of FretPet X, TabletMagic, and this gaudy web site.

I first got hooked on personal computers in 1978, when as an 11-year-old kid growing up on Cape Cod I spied the inner workings of a TRS-80 computer at the Radio Shack adjacent to the local arcade. One moment there was a blocky picture of a tank on the screen, then with the press of a key the man at the console brought up skeins of mysterious green text - the magic code that lay behind the image. Wow. Up to that point I had enjoyed playing video games, but I never thought of what went into making them go. I wanted to get in on the secret. I begged my dad to buy me the fat BASIC programming book that sat on the shelf. I didn't own a computer in 1978 (who did?) so I wrote my first programs on note paper, running them in my head.

bill, ted, and friends In the early years I used my Atari 400 to make programs to do my long division homework and wrote games to amuse myself and the neighborhood kids. I tried going pro as a games developer in the 80's, producing the Amiga games Dino Wars and Bill 'n' Ted's Excellent Adventure before abandoning the game scene in 1990 and moving to Boston to pursue a life of Bohemian splendor, taking up new interests like writing, music, and philosophy.

I returned to programming in 1996 with the aim of joining my programming experience with my artistic interests. After a couple of months getting my chops together on a secondhand 386 computer, I bought my first Power Macintosh and got to work. In 1998 I released FretPet for Mac OS 7. FretPet won an award from the Institute of Electroacoustic Music at Bourges and got some good reviews, but alas it was not the key to shareware success that I had hoped.

In 1998 I moved to Northampton, MA where I did a contract job for Cyberlore Studios writing the Windows installer for one of their popular games. I also worked as a web developer with Tortus Tek in nearby Holyoke, MA. That was fun and interesting, but I was restless.

CPS I relocated to Portland, Oregon in 2001, taking a position as web developer for the Mac-friendly Critical Path Software. Among other things I co-developed the Native Seed Network website for the Institute for Applied Ecology of Corvallis, Oregon.

In mid-2003 I decided it was time to be a full-time freelancer. Around that time I began a collaboration with former Looking Glass game designer Chris Laskowski. We founded Botfly Games in 2004, and began working on our first titles: a darkly humorous outer-space strategy game called Deep Space: Outpost 0 and a pulse-pounding arcade game called Zorbles!. Though we never finished those games enough to publish them, we gained valuable experience and insights into the process of game development.

botfly In late 2004 I took a break from the Botfly projects to work on TabletMagic and the enhanced Mac OS X port of FretPet. After many months of intensive late-night programming FretPet X was released in June of 2005.

In late 2005 I moved back to Western Massachusetts. There I joined up with Vegan Radio as a co-host and worked on enhancing the Vegan Radio and Veganica web sites while doing freelance web design to pay the rent.

Freelance work was good, but it was a drag to make sites in PHP until Wordpress and Drupal came along. Somewhere around 2007 the whole Web 2.0 thing really started to take off, and I discovered that if I really wanted to keep up with the trends and make websites up to today's standards it would be essential to start learning some website frameworks. As luck would have it, I was hired to do my first Drupal website, and I found it to be the best website development experience ever. I've been a Drupal devotee ever since, and little by little I've been trying to get more involved with the community and contribute to the project. But time is hard to find!

In 2008 I got an iPod Touch and began programming my first Cocoa Touch application, a music tool called ChordCalc. I had a good start, but circumstances were pretty unsteady during 2009, so it wasn't until late October that I finally completed and submitted ChordCalc to the iTunes App Store, where it has begun to show some real promise in spite of its rocky start.

Today I'm fully devoted to my 3 favorite platforms: Mac OS X, iPhone OS, and Drupal. I've worked with some other technologies along the way, such as CodeIgniter and JQuery, and I continue to stay open to the emerging standards that allow all our net-enabled devices to do their magic. My hope is that I'll keep doing iPhone apps primarily, with tie-ins to websites and crossover to Mac OS X. In addition to that, I want to keep working on my design and writing skills so that I can create more beautiful things to put into all these frames.