iNexus : About : History

This is a hopefully interesting take on how the years have shaped our little software firm. Enjoy!

A chilly beginning

Infinite Nexus began humbly, as most things in life do, as a daydream I (Brian Ganninger) had while spending yet another cold winter afternoon inside my apartment at Saint Louis University, working on a self-study project for my degree.  I'd never really programmed before my coursework in Java so I decided that if I wanted to program on a Mac (and for a Mac), I should use the most native language - Objective-C, which meant I'd have to teach myself as no one on campus had heard of it outside myself and a few Mac-using friends. If I was going to truly apply my learning though I knew I had to figure out some project to work on as I learned.

Click here for the complete Tale of DriveGauge...

What's with the name?

When DriveGauge was finally complete and ready to face the world I knew I'd need a name. More than just a name though I needed a presence into which I could instill my highest goals for designing software, and then strive to reach these, hopefully creating a few useful things along the way.

I had actually came up with the term "infinite nexus" several years back when I was studying the spirituality of various cultures and religions and for some reason this particular amalgam of words just seemed to resonate with me, a natural fit as it were. Later on this came back to me, because it summed up how I have come to regard designing software: as a central goal to strive towards with an ever-expanding ring of expections, talents, and new tricks. With these abilities coming together it allows one to better create not only a usable but an enjoyable product that does its best to be forgotten by staying out of your way and allowing you to do what you want and get what you expect from it, be it how full your drives are or what the difference is between two folders.

When I got ready to publicly distribute DriveGauge Infinite Nexus Software needed a logo of some kind, and last I checked, I was a programmer not an artist. Down the street however was my good friend, talented graphics artist, and consummate professional, Wes Clayton, now President & CEO of Interapptive, Inc., a leading Windows-based shipping software provider for online merchants - Yahoo! Stores, eBay, and Miva Merchant. I sketched out a stick figure equivalent of what I had in mind and 20 minutes later he wowed me with the very design that still adorns the top left of every page in this site.

Travel & Transcend

In late March of 2003, as DriveGauge progressed, I was both shocked and honored to receive a Student Scholarship from Apple Computer to their WorldWide Developers Conference (WWDC.) By June of 2003 I had graduated from Saint Louis University and found myself traveling even as I reached a personal crossroads.

Thus I traveled to San Francisco to spend a week learning of the newest techniques and technologies from the experts and designers at Apple. It was intense, it was hair-splitting (for what few I had left) and it was incredibly fun. I was shot by Phil Schiller a dozen times in Unreal Tournament 2003 and stood on the campus of the company, Apple Computer, Inc. As I stood at the famous 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA, I realized that I was exactly where I wanted to be - developing for the best platform out there with the best ideas I could, building on DriveGauge and continuing on with new projects.

After that week of working with some of the most interesting people from around the world I came home with two new ideas: Shoebox, a folder-based image organizer, and Compare Folders, a folder comparison utility. 

The entire start of Compare Folders is in fact quite funny - I was sorting a few of my folders and listening to iTunes (as we all do) and "What's The Difference" by Dr. Dre (from his 2001 album) came on and a virtual lightbulb went off and I said, "perfect, a way to tell the difference without scanning these lists a 1000 times myself."

I sketched out the idea in my handy notebook and went back to work on DriveGauge 3, which still under continued development through the summer. Once it was released with much fanfare in October 2003, adding powerful customization via the Options Drawer and automatic updating for gauges, I could get back to working on new projects.

Change in Focus

Since many of the planned (and partially implemented) features of Shoebox were eclipsed by Apple's January 2004 iLife announcements I made the sad decision to stop development on Shoebox. Compare Folders, however, represented a unique product that had no true analogy on Mac OS X and I was excited by the prospect of designing it. Once DriveGauge 3.0 had been released, development of Compare Folders had ramped up. This gained more steam after the termination of Shoebox and the first version was released in February 2004 [after many many cases of Mountain Dew], with glowing reviews for its simplicity, power, customizability, and elegant interface.

As I was working on Compare Folders I stumbled once again onto an IM client I'd used back in my 10.1 days - Adium (a.k.a The Duck.) It is an open-source, which is a powerful movement in and of itself, multiple protocol instant messaging client with a rich community. I soon found myself not only enjoying my time in the forums but also in the Adium codebase.  Thus I began donating as many spare moments as I can find to working on this incredible client, Adium X, which is freely available and awaiting your discovery with open wings.

Setting a new pace

Compare Folders' interface has been rewritten, alongside several components, and integrated with many of Apple's core technologies to bring a robust set of features to bear when comparing folders and continues marching forward with new features on the horizon and increasing precision and speed to enhance its powerful yet pleasing interface.

While working on the revisions such as that in the spring of 2004 I finished an article entitled "VUIs: Where the Rubber Hits the Road" for the ACM SIGCHI's publication, Interactions, a prestigious international journal discussing human computer interaction. This article discussed the future integration of in-car systems and devices such as the iPod and actually preceeded the release of the BMW/Apple iPod integration by several weeks.

For the past few months the focus has been, and continues to be, Compare Folders 2, the most significant product revision for us to date. A DriveGauge update with revisions to its interface and functionality also snuck up when an incredible new project headed by a friend caught my attention. Growl, a unique new notification system, was functional, easy to implement, and represented an incredible boon for DriveGauge users: a real, in your face, notification that your drive(s) are getting full, not just something available from glancing at the gauges.

Amid all this we've somehow found the time to launch a new product: dotMac Menu!

This nifty little product came out of the blue basically when a Windows-using friend suggested some form of launcher for Infinite Nexus products. The more I thought about it, the more I thought 'menu extra'. As I thought about menu extras Apple announced the .Mac upgrades and I had a eureka moment, "let's put .Mac all in one place, a menu!" With help from the uber-talented Evan Shoenberg (of Adium X fame) for savvy network connectivity the menu extra was released with thousands of downloads and 9 five-star reviews in the first week alone!

... and Time marches on!

The best part of this 'history' though is that its dynamic and you're a part of it - your support, your  suggestions, your feedback - drives us, provides our inspiration and forms the community we believe in and work for. I look forward every day that I wake up to being able to write some line of code that makes Compare Folders or one of our other products that much better or to sketching out a new idea and then hammering that idea out into a tangible reality, ready for use by all instead of just vision on paper.

As I started years ago, I still do today, striving to make software beyond limits

All ideas expressed herein are property of Infinite Nexus Software
DriveGauge, Compare Folders, dotMac Menu and Infinite Nexus are trademarks of Infinite Nexus Software
.Mac, Mac and the Mac logo are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.

{ © 2002 - 2007 }