![]() MacPaw is no longer a startup and - according to Julia Petryk, MacPaw's PR manager - it doesn't want to be regarded that way. By 2012, there were 30 employees in a larger space, and now there are over 80. In 2009 the MacPaw offices housed five people working in a room of 23 square meters (about 250 square feet) furnished with old second hand desks and chairs. In an interview for the Russian language site, Oleksandr recalled that at the end of the week they were eating the leftovers that they could find in the refrigerator, and only his sense of humor kept him going. The company was selling quite a lot of software at that time, but it wasn't profitable yet. On January 6, 2009, sales of CleanMyMac and MacHider launched on the website. Oleksandr was helped by Ivan Ablamski, who later founded Coppertino, the development firm known for its popular OS X and iOS music player app Vox. ![]() It refers directly to Macintosh, but the second part of the name - Paw - refers to the big cats after which Apple named each major version of the operating system between Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah and Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.Īt that time in Kiev, a Mac developer community started to form. Oleksandr admits that the company name - MacPaw - was chosen while he was checking out available web domains. There were customers there was also a company and website. I was dreaming about my own company, about a company like OmniGroup or CulturedCode. He developed the apps mostly for himself, but when beta versions became available via download sites, users who wanted to buy a final version quickly appeared. During that time Oleksandr created his first apps - CleanMyMac and MacHider (currently known as Hider 2). Thanks to that work, he got to know Mac OS X architecture pretty well. Setting up Mac OS X on a PC required a lot of work, so Oleksandr began writing drivers and fine-tuning Mac OS X to make it work better on his own PC. Once again, Oleksandr found himself short of money to buy a new Mac, so he turned to building a Hackintosh.Īt the time, these customized PCs were gaining popularity among students who couldn't afford a Mac. Then Apple announced the move of the Mac line to Intel processors and the two-year-old PowerBook soon found a new owner. ![]() While working on the PowerBook, he started to dig into the details of Mac OS X. Oleksandr's diploma work was done on the Mac - a neural network app using image recognition to register the state of water meters. He remembers that lecturers were glowering at him, since he was the only student who was taking notes not on paper, but on his laptop. At that time he was probably the only student at Kiev Polytechnic who was working on a Mac. Thanks to their support and his own savings, Oleksandr bought a PowerBook. Oleksandr's father and brother - like many Ukrainians - emigrated to the West, to Paris. In one of computer shops in Kiev he was attracted by the desk-lamp-like iMac G4, but figured that he could only afford the Apple keyboard that went with it. In the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, earning only 200 hryvnas (about 20 dollars) a month, he couldn't afford much. Oleksandr has been an Apple fan since he was a student. From Passionate Student To Successful Entrepreneur
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