The Thinkyhead Story

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 the Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

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.

1978: A Geek Is Born

1978 was the year I got hooked on programming. I was 11 years old, a boy growing up on Cape Cod in a working-class neighborhood. I loved the beaches, I loved nature, and I loved to build models, write, draw, and paint. One afternoon out with my father I observed a salesman giving a demo of a TRS-80 computer at the Radio Shack next to the arcade. One moment there was a blocky picture on the screen - the profile of a Panzer tank - and with the press of a key the image scrolled upward, replaced by a screenful of green code - the mysterious instructions that had generated the image. Right away I saw how it worked. It was an epiphany that changed my life. I begged my dad to buy me the BASIC programming book on the shelf. I didn't own a computer in 1978 (who did?) so I would go into my lair (I had a lair like Dexter in those days) and write programs on note paper, imagining how they should run.

During the summer of 1979 I took a course in BASIC using the Apple II, the best home computer around at the time. We also did some LOGO. I would ride my bike a few miles every day to attend the classes, which went over a couple of weeks. It was a very encouraging environment. I've completely forgotten all the material we covered, but BASIC at that time was a language you could master pretty fast. I was able to program a simple dot chasing dot game by the end of the course.

1980-1981: Sinclair / Apple

The first cheap take-home computer was released in 1980 at the amazing price of only $200. The Sinclair ZX80 was the size of a small book, weighing only a pound. It connected to the TV for its b/w text display and you could save programs to cassette with any tape recorder. It was programmable in BASIC and contained a whopping 1K of RAM. It was very slow and you couldn't do a whole lot with it. It had no color and no graphics other than a variety of blocks in the character set, so you could draw pictures by printing these characters in the text display. Of course one of the first things I did was use try drawing a tank as an homage.

My dad connected me with a local radio shop that had a couple of Apple II computers in the back, and I would spend afternoons typing in code from SoftSide and Compute! magazines, or messing around with my own programs. I don't know why we never got an Apple II, considering how much cheaper it was compared to a semester of college, and I was eager to progress. But on Cape Cod at the time there wasn't much of a hacker culture.

1982-1985: All for fun

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 had figured out a lot of programming tricks and had outgrown AtariBASIC. I was starting to write routines and even whole programs in 6502 Assembly Language, which was the best option at the time. I created a program called Tracer for editing, diagnosing, and repairing Atari floppy disks. The final version, which is gone forever, contained a 6502 disassembler and even had its own programming language for automating the program.

The kids who liked computers tended to find each other at my High School, and we would get together at one another's houses to work on programming projects, try ideas out, and play computer games like M.U.L.E. together. Eventually a computer club formed out of a dozen or so enthusiasts, and we would get together at a sewing machine repair shop in Dennis.

My main interest was always the technical and artful challenge of programming games and simulations, and I loved having a dojo to share what we were learning. Things stayed for a little while at that level, but the computer club focus quickly shifted away from programming to the cracking and sharing of software, dues were instituted, and so I spent less and less time there.

1986-1990: Amiga Games

I tried going pro as a games developer in the 80's, working as a contractor for Odyssey Software, Digitek, Michtron, and Capstone. During this time I composed music for the games Byteman and Space War, programmed the original Amiga game Dino Wars, and wrote the Amiga version of Bill 'n' Ted's Excellent Adventure working with Off the Wall Productions.

This was a curious period of my life. I had neither financial support nor much in the way of mentors looking out for me, so I floundered around without direction, reading books, doing a little coding here and there. But there wasn't a niche for casual game developers then, publishers were stingy and developers like me had no idea of their real value. So none of the programming I did ever yielded very much money, and it took a really long time. I was frequently unable to make ends meet and occasionally homeless. Disillusionment was imminent.

1990-1995: Nowhere, man

I decided to abandon Cape Cod and the game programming scene in 1990 so that I could move to Boston to pursue a life of Bohemian splendor, as is the existential imperative of every 20-something. I took up new interests like writing, music, and philosophy. I became so involved in other pursuits that I spent 5 years without even touching a computer and completely overlooked the Mac revolution.

1996: Geek Rebirth

I returned to programming in 1996 with the aim of joining my programming experience with my interests in music, art, and psychology. After a couple of months getting my chops together on a secondhand 386 computer, I bought my first Power Macintosh and began working on a simple fretboard reference utility. The concept grew into a full-fledged music sequencer, and 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.

1998-2000: Happy Valley Prequel

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, and I learned a lot, but I was restless and in need of a scene change.

2001-2003: Critical Path

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.

2003-2004: Close to the Metal

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!. Our funds ran out before we could finish them, but we gained valuable experience and insights into the process of OpenGL game development.

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.

2006: Prodigiousness Abounds

In early 2006 I moved back to Western Massachusetts. There I joined up with Vegan Radio as a co-host. Web design and programming became the focus of my freelance work, and I spent a lot of time updating the Vegan Radio and Veganica web sites during this period.

2007: Web 2.0 and Drupal

It used to be a real drag to make websites in PHP before site frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal came along. In 2007 the Web 2.0 phenomenon really started to take off with the advent of Facebook and Twitter, and I discovered that in order to make websites that meet today's standards, it would be essential to start using website frameworks. As luck would have it, I was hired to do my first Drupal website, Educational Video Center. The learning curve was slightly steep, but during a trip to Brighton, England I shut myself in with a copy of Pro Drupal Development and a bottomless cup of Earl Grey until I got the gist. In the process I fell in love with Drupal, and I've been a devotee ever since.

2008-2009: The iTouch Revolution

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 was finally ready to submit ChordCalc to the iTunes App Store. ChordCalc Lite was posted a month later.

In Fall 2008 I was hired as a web developer by Gravity Switch, a web design company in Northampton, Massachusetts. There I did work for some great local clients like UMass and Veterans Housing Assistance Fund. During my tenure there I continued to evangelize Drupal and began getting more in-depth with Flash and ActionScript. Full-time work wasn't really paying me any better than freelance work, and I was unaccustomed to having go-betweens with my clients, so in mid-2009 I went back to full-time freelancing.

It turned out the be the right choice to plunge back into the freelance life, but initially it was a struggle to rebuild my client base and get some momentum. Unable to keep up with the rent I did a homeless stint for a month, couch surfing and working from my laptop. Fortunately I found Freelancer Dot Com and was hired to do some Drupal work for a curious company called 3dO Medical in Toronto.

2010: Reinvention

In February of 2010 I moved to Holyoke, MA and did some work for Positronic Design, a web development and SEO company. My arrival was fortuitous, because 911 Blogger was looking to upgrade their Drupal 4 site to Drupal 6. It was a relatively simple site, but the upgrade required lots of careful planning and many trial runs. In the end the upgrade went very smoothly, thus firmly establishing my reputation as a miracle worker.

The Present

Today I'm 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 continue to work on my design and writing skills so that I can create more beautiful things to put into all these boxes.