Austin Sarner is the developer of the popular application AppZapper I had time to catch up with him and talk about how AppZapper has been taken up by the public, and what’s in store for the future.

100 Az Dl Feb 06
Where did the idea of AppZapper originate?

AppZapper was originally a feature in a much larger application idea Brian Ball and I were fleshing out. Once we realized that the ability to zap apps was so cool by itself, we branched it off into its own project and AppZapper is the result. Brian had previously worked as the shareware submission manager for MacWorld, so he had to deal with downloading and trying tons of apps. To keep his system in tune he would have to perform clean installs regularly, which is why he felt something for completely removing apps was a necessary addition.

Did you think there would be a market for the application at the outset?

When you look into making a shareware app you have to consider that whatever market you are going to appeal to has to be a subset of the “shareware downloader” market, the demographic of people visiting MacUpdate and reading MacMinute. With AppZapper, we’re targeting general shareware users. That is, whether or not you are in the market for system utilities, text editors, or any other kind of shareware, AppZapper can still (we hope) appeal to you.

When did AppZapper really take off and begin to be noticed?

We wanted to catch on the MacWorld Expo buzz bandwagon, so we released right before the event. By getting dugg and posted on various news sites our initial press coverage was immensely satisfying, and we partnered up with the iClip and Menuet developers for a promotion that went on during the expo called MacGrab. Perhaps the coolest part of the whole launch was when MacGrab (which we bought a dedicated server for that week) crashed due to the level of traffic it was getting.

Appzapper1
MacZOT has also played a large part in distrubuting AppZapper. How did the first BlogZOT effect AppZapper?

BlogZOT, just like MacGrab, was certainly non traditional from any software marketing perspective, but it proved to be immensely beneficial. Our goal from the start has been to get as many people using and (hopefully) liking AppZapper as possible, and then relying on word of mouth to grow our user base. BlogZOT effectively took that model and blew it up within a day. We gave out 5,000 copies of AppZapper thanks to a community effort that resulted in nearly 1,000 blog posts about MacZOT and AppZapper.

What would your estimate be of the percentage of Mac users using AppZapper worldwide?

I would estimate that a fraction of a fraction of a percent of all Mac users are using AppZapper, and that we have a long but exciting path ahead of us to reach a more mainstream audience.

What do you have planned for AppZapper in the future?

We have a lot of great things planned for the next major AppZapper releases and we’re not quite ready to reveal too much, but we are definitely going to be rethinking nearly ever aspect of the app to make it an even more streamlined and slick experience. Bear in mind that as we continue to add new things to AppZapper, we will never “bloat” it up. Even though we’ve more than doubled the feature set since 1.0, the app still sports the same minimal drag and drop interface.

Ams Preview
Do you have any other projects you are/planing to work on aside from AppZapper?

Yes, actually. Jasper Hauser (the designer we worked with on AppZapper) has been working with us on a new software project. He has released a few previews on his blog that are certainly worth checking out. We promise to release some more concrete information about the project in the near future.

Thanks for your time! Good luck in the future

Thanks a bunch for the interview, Glenn.

We have 5 copies of AppZapper to give away. The best 5 comments on this article during the next 24 hours (Judged by Austin Sarner) will be receiving a free copy of AppZapper.