Hire
Michael Dautermann
to be your

Experienced Contract Macintosh & iPhone Programmer

While I have a resume page for full time work listed, I'm very interested (and available) for doing Macintosh and iPhone Contract Programming. Take advantage of my 18+ years of experience in both large corporations (including stints at Adobe & Apple) and small teams & start-ups to make your next Macintosh application intuitive, popular, and profitable!
Feel free to contact me with your ideas and I'll respond right away. Working with you, I honestly estimate deadlines and attempt to keep schedules and tasks on track (which in turn keeps costs to a minimum). If required, I have a team of programming friends I can bring onboard to get tasks done quickly. I also have experience in writing both technical specifications and easy-to-read user level documentation.

Here is a list of typical frequently asked questions (also known as F.A.Q.'s; click on the triangle to expand):
Q: Show me a list of projects you've worked on.
Q: Why hire any contractor?

a: Contractors are used by corporations and small businesses when they want to get software written but don't have the ability (or budget) to allocate a full time employee to do the task. Individuals might also hire a contractor if they have 1) a really great idea they want to develop and take to market or 2) they want to make modifications to software that already exists.

Q: Are contractors expensive?

a: They don't have to be. It all depends on the tasks & scope of the work to be done and the time that is estimated to do the task. Contractors do have to pay their rent & daily living expenses, plus contractors have to bear the cost of extra taxes (self employment tax, for example) and the cost of buying their medical insurance.

Q: Should I hire a contractor who isn't Michael Dautermann?

a: Only at your own risk. I have three different types of competitors.
1) High schoolers & college students. My experience has been that immature programmers don't typically don't have the discipline to tackle large projects, adequately architecht software from bottom to top, and especially don't have the follow through to shepherd a task to completion. For example, I have been called in to take over for college students in the past, and I subsequently completed the software package and shipped multiple versions of it.
2) Outsourcers and overseas people. The biggest frustration I've heard about outsourcing firms is that one shouldn't be expected to have to explain how a software product should behave multiple times. I work in (or relatively close to) your time zone and will actually pick up the phone and return your e-mails and voice mail messages. One of my projects had me taking over for a Ukranian software house and I subsequently resolved a long list of bugs and added in the ability for the software to support a plug-in architecture.
3) My peers. These are my toughest competitors, because the Apple developer community is smaller and (my impression is that) we all tend to rely on and interact with each other often. I sometimes hire fellow engineers to help me get something done, but I only do that with the approval of whoever is contracting me.

Q: What programming language / style is used?

a: While it ultimately depends on you (and the task to be done), I try to stick to styles and languages that will allow me to get the best, quality job done as quickly as possible for you. In most cases, I try to program using the language Objective C (Cocoa). This allows me to leverage a lot (and the latest technologies) of what the operating system provides. In terms of style, I have worked under different formal (at Apple) and informal (between myself and other engineers) styles. I have not done anything ISO 900X related since 1993 or so, but whatever style you wish me to program in I will do my best.

Here is a partial list of projects worked on:

Modernized a very large Enterprise app for powerplant & green energy field technicians (Feb-17). More Technical Details
Language used: Swift; Other technologies: Couchbase

A farm & crop planning application which I modified to allow unit conversion and localization for multiple languages, allowing the app to be sold all over the world and not just in the U.S. app store (Nov-16). More Technical Details
Language used: Swift & Objective-C; Other technologies: CocoaPods, Jenkins, Unit Conversion

A macOS disk drive administration & controller app used to set-up and format different sized, high capacity drive arrays with multiple branding (Sept-16). More Technical Details
Language used: Swift; Other technologies: CoreData, CocoaPods

An enterprise app which allows brokers to present potential properties or floors of buildings for lease to investors, done for a very large, well known multinational commercial real estate management firm (Jan-16). More Technical Details
Language used: Swift; Other technologies: GoogleMaps SDK, CoreData, CocoaPods

Added targeted, personalized push notification capabilities, analytics & A/B testing functionality to a music/event/venue tracking app for a famous ticket reselling company(Jan-16). More Technical Details
Language used: Objective-C; Other technologies: Parse, iTunes Library scan & match

Updated older cable modem management software (last built in 2009) to be codesigned and running under MacOS 10.10 & newer. Used by thousands of consumers at Charter Cable, Time Warner Cable, among other providers. (Jan-15). More Technical Details
Language used: C++, Objective C; Other technologies: Boost

A strategy game where players chooses to take one or two marbles off a playing field. The last player to take the last marble loses the game (revised: Feb-16; Original: Jan-11). More Technical Details
Language used: Objective C; Other technologies: Core Animation, Localization

A free "Shake Insult" type iOS app which displayed an animated Shakespeare mouthing some of his most famous insults (Nov-10). More Technical Details
Language used: Objective C; Other technologies: iAd, AdMob

An "errands" iPhone app which uses the built-in GPS to let the customer know when they're getting close to a location where an errand or task can be completed (May-09). More Technical Details
Language used: Objective C; Other technologies: Core Location

Mobile Art Galleries for iPhone and iPod Touch -- from a single project I built a dozen different gallery applications for my art gallery client, e-book like applications containing art from very well known contemporary artists such as Shepard Fairey or Sugarluxe. Embedded graphics could be saved to the iPhone as "wallpaper" and galleries could be displayed in a continuous "slideshow" format (March-09). More Technical Details
Language used: Objective C; Other technologies: Core Animation

Worked on an iTunes plugin that added extra menus and graphics in iTunes to allow users to quickly link to & share favorite podcasts (Feb-09). More Technical Details
Language used: Objective C, Carbon; Other technologies: Adobe Flash (built into plugin)

Completed a food quantity & calorie counting application for the Macintosh (Jan-09). More Technical Details
Language used: Objective C; Other technologies: Core Data (for a SQL-based database)

Assembled "Pocket Finder" location app to allow iPhone users to report their locations to a central server in addition to being able to route themselves to other devices (Oct-08). More Technical Details
Language used: Objective C; Other technologies: Core Location

Designed "Migration Assistant" to allow iPhone customers to save and sync their data from other Smart phones and PDAs (Dec-07). More Technical Details
Language used: Objective C; Other technologies: Apple Events, custom NIB files

Adding Kerberos/GSSAPI SSL (security & authentication) support to Mozilla for different mail protocols and the LDAP directory protocol (May-07). More Technical Details
Language used: C++

An iTunes playlist sharing application for a social networking website (May-07). More Technical Details
Language used: Objective C

A simple popup menu-based application which asychchronously ftp'd movies & music videos down from a website and burns DVDs (May-07). More Technical Details
Language used: C & Objective C

A credit card processing daemon using WebServices & SOAP to interact between servers (June-06). More Technical Details
Language used: Objective C

An image browser (Gallery) application using Quartz to display and export photos to other apps which use a USB hardware based electronic pen (May-06). More Technical Details
Language used: C++ & Objective C

Teleprompting software using OpenGL to smoothly scroll text, used by television newsreaders, conferences and concerts (April-06). More Technical Details
Language used: C++

Network kernel extension (driver) to encrypt traffic within a WiFi/Ethernet network with OpenSSL (Feb-06). More Technical Details
Language used: C++

Voice over IP (VoIP) client utilizing an open source library as the engine (Feb-05). More Technical Details
Language used: Objective C

Daemon that observes WWW browsers, looking for activity on websites where points, rebates and charitable contributions could be earned (Dec-04). More Technical Details
Languages used: Objective C

Client and precise product names cheerfully provided upon request.