NovaStorm Software is a small software company whose goal is to produce affordable, quality Mac and iPhone applications. As the developer, I am committed to supporting my products to the best of my ability.

The company was started in February 2009 with the launch of EasyGPA iPhone. At that time, AquaPrompt was unfinished. Since then, AquaPrompt has expanded to become a competent TelePrompTer fit for use in professional applications.

Click on the headings below to read the stories behind our applications!

EasyGPA iPhone was NovaStorm Software's first application, with development beginning in late 2008 and the finished product released February 2009. EasyGPA's roots go back to 2006, where it began as a Microsoft Visual Basic application for Windows with a partially completed TI-83 version and plans for a Windows Mobile version. Unfortunately, I couldn't afford the full version of Visual Studio. When I switched to the Mac in late 2007, I quickly began to rewrite the application as a Mac app. As the application progressed, I abandoned Windows development and decided to expand it to the iPhone. After putting in some time over the summer of 2008 studying Cocoa and Objective-C, I wrote the iPhone version. The rest is history.

AquaPrompt development began a few months before EasyGPA iPhone. It was inspired by our high school's TV studio, which needed a TelePrompTer. I wrote the first version of AquaPrompt (initially called QuickPrompt) and began using it for our daily announcements. Sometime after EasyGPA was released, I put AquaPrompt on the internet, hoping others would benefit from it as our studio had. Version 0.2 was submitted to MacUpdate and the Apple download site. After it became an Apple Staff Pick and I received several comments and suggestions, the decision was made to continue development and to release the improved version as a commercial product.

Euchre was the result of an A.P. Computer Science project. Our task was to write a game in the Java programming language. I had several ideas, but I liked Euchre and decided it would be fun to program. Early in the process I realized that Java had no easy way (like Core Animation) to do smooth animations, so I wrote my own animation framework - NSAnimationContext - which is available as open-source code. The program is the only NovaStorm product available for Windows because it is written in Java.

Twee! began after I first started using Twitter. I wasn't satisfied with the web interface for posting a quick tweet, and the desktop clients I used were, to put it simply, distracting. So I set out to build a fast, easy, non-distracting Twitter client. The result is a simple, lightweight app that launches in an instant and closes when it's done, so you aren't distracted by a constantly-running client. If you start a tweet and want to come back to it later, the app can save your progress. It's the ultimate in Twitter simplicity.

Twee! used to be $4.99 but we decided to make it free after our (woefully inadequate) marketing efforts failed. Completely. Ah, well.

Proof began with a problem. Many document exporters have woefully inadequate or lacking previews. I was working in the outstanding Ulysses and had a small class project that I needed to fit to a single page, and I didn't like continually exporting, finding the file, and opening it in Preview, just to adjust the document and do it all over again. I emailed the company to see if they had a previewer in the works. Since they didn't have it planned for at least the foreseeable future, I went ahead and wrote my own. It's fast and simple, designed to easily preview exported documents like this. Since the app itself is pretty simple at the core, I decided to just make it entirely free so more people could benefit from it.