Hey all. My name's John Casasanta and I've been a Mac developer on and off since around 1990. During the span of time between then and now, I've both had a few of my own businesses and also worked a bunch for "da man".

I mainly consider myself the developer of iClip, but recently I've also had a couple of other things going on...I'm the development manager for My Dream App (Jason's "boss", heh) and I'm one of the founders of MacHeist.

While I have a long way to go to catch-up to Shipley, I have managed to rack-up a couple of Apple Design Awards during my Mac career (one for a game called Food Chain in '99 and this year for iClip lite). The design awards are easily the most significant achievements for me in my whole career.

I recently turned the big four-oh and I vowed never to code again once I crossed that evil threshold (i still plan to do development, but it'll be more design than anything else and I'll be able to leave the coding to the more nimble youngins). Unfortunately, with all the other recent projects I've had going on, iClip 4 still isn't done so I'm pushing to get it finished in time for the Macworld Expo in a few weeks. My revised vow was that finishing iClip 4 would be the last coding I'd take on, but Jason pulled me out of "semi-retirement" for Cocoa Duel. We'll just see how far my post-40 feeble-mindedness can take me here...

The charity I'm choosing for Cocoa Duel is the Humane Society. I was the main person responsible for choosing the charities for MacHeist and even though the Humane Society is the charity I most often support, I had to reject it as one of the MacHeist charities because it didn't fully meet the criteria I was looking for in them, unfortunately. Our goal was to have charities that had a very broad scope and a global reach, while not stepping on the toes of other charities that were included. So for an animal protection charity, I chose to go with the World Wildlife Fund over the Humane Society for MacHeist. I'm really glad that we'll have a chance to help the Humane Society through Cocoa Duel as they support many significant causes for animal welfare. So please look into them and consider sending them a donation whether you like my Cocoa Duel entry or not.

I want to send out a big thanks to Jason for setting up Cocoa Duel. I've only really known Jason for the past several months since working with him on My Dream App but in that short time he's proven to be a really stand-up guy with very admirable ethics. Cheers, Jason!