As I hinted in my previous post, Birdfeed’s development was highly stressful. I originally conceived the project with my brother Robert, but ended up losing him and all the early design work he had done on the app due to a conflict with his employer at the time. I let my perfectionism and technical megalomania take me down insane engineering rabbit holes (Why not develop my own object-relational mapping system and rich text rendering?). And the momentum my years of Mac development experience and thought about Twitter’s evolution had given me in the iPhone Twitter arms race rapidly eroded as several strong competitors seized the market and iterated at what seemed, to my perfectionistic mind, like a maniacal rate. Before I had even managed to release a 1.0, I found myself in a pitched feature war with some very determined and productive rival developers, fighting to keep up.

Fortunately, I managed to find a collaborator who kept me sane during those difficult days: Neven Mrgan. He graciously stepped in as Birdfeed’s designer after Robert’s exit, and, despite his full-time job with a much admired Portland software company, rapidly became an inspirational force in the project. His creativity and, importantly, his sense of fun gave me the second wind necessary to finally ship an app that I worried might never see the light of day.

One great example of the kind of lighthearted whimsy Neven brought to the beleaguered project is an idea we came up with for an easter egg based on an odd footnote in Apple history: Mr. Macintosh.

Mr Macintosh, as described in Folklore.org’s story on the subject, was an impish character Steve Jobs conceived and ordered the original Macintosh team to build into the Mac OS. The idea was that the instruction manual for the new computer would refer to the “legend of Mr. Macintosh,” a little man who lived inside the computer, and he would mysteriously pop up on screen occasionally during the course of normal use. Apparently the time-pressed Mac team never got around to actually implementing the easter egg, although Jobs did get as far as hiring the Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon to create an illustration of the character.

Neven and I had originally heard about Mr. Macintosh from Cabel Sasser, and always laughed at the idea of a young Steve Jobs demanding that his frazzled team implement such a silly feature. Needless to say, when we started talking about building easter eggs into Birdfeed, the notion of giving Jobs’ creation a second lease on life came up pretty quickly.

The idea was that in some unusual circumstance—possibly after mentioning or searching for @mistermacintosh on Twitter (we were sure to claim the actual Twitter account), possibly every thousand tweets or so, or possibly just completely randomly—the user would see a tweet from Mister Macintosh in the timeline. Neven designed a monochrome Mac OS-style bubble for said tweet, as well a similarly styled tweet detail view. It was a fun exercise in recasting iPhone conventions in a classic Mac visual style, and, in addition to being a bit of a morale booster, I was hoping it might get the app some viral attention on the web.

Sadly, in the final push to 1.0, implementation of our little easter egg was pushed off, and eventually more urgent feature development kept it off my development agenda indefinitely. A shame, I suppose, but in a way it’s only fitting that our Mr. Macintosh remained legendary, just like his predecessor 27 years earlier.