Jens Alfke

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Jens Alfke is a software developer, who has been employed by Apple Computer since 1991. He is best known for creating the Stickies software application for Mac OS and the iChat application for Mac OS X. He has most recently worked on the Safari RSS team.

1 Projects
2 References
3 External links

[edit] Projects

[edit] AppleScript

Jens started working at Apple as part of the team that developed AppleScript (1991-1993), specifically he helped to design the Open Scripting Architecture and created the Script Editor. He used to provide a much sought after set of routines for manipulating AppleEvents, called AEGizmo. Apple subsequently rolled this API into the operating system, but introduced bugs that have never been fixed.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Stickies

While working at Apple, he developed a note-taking application in his spare time called Antler Notes. As his employer at the time, Apple took his application and added it to System 7.5 as Stickies. Although he wasn't paid for his application, he did receive a bonus at the time.

[edit] OpenDoc/Java

Between August 1993 and March 1997, he worked on the OpenDoc development framework. For the first release he developed the memory manager, exception handler and imaging classes. He also worked on optimising the size and speed of the framework, work that continued with the 1.1 and 1.2 releases. The last year of his time on the OpenDoc team, was spent designing and developing a Java prototype of the OpenDoc framework.

A month after the OpenDoc project was killed in March 1997, Jens left Apple and spent four months working at a company called Novita Communications as their sixteenth employee, helping to develop a Java email client. Deciding that he would prefer to work at a larger company he left Novita and started working in Sun Microsystems' JavaSoft division, on an embedded version of the HotJava browser. However still dissatisfied with his working environment he returned to Apple in April 1998.

Between 1998 and 2000 he was part of the Java team within Apple. First as the tech lead responsible for developing a new implementation of the AWT framework for Mac OS and then as part of the team that developed an implementation of Java2 for Mac OS X based on the Carbon libraries.

[edit] Radio Station

During this time he developed a streaming MP3 server for Mac OS similar to Nullsoft's SHOUTcast, called Radio Station. However in a similar situation to Antler Notes, he found that Apple would not allow him to release Radio Station, with them instead posting the source code as a developer sample on their Apple Developer Connection site.

[edit] iChat

In September 2000, he answered a job opening within Apple to develop an instant messaging client and started working to develop iChat for Mac OS X. The initial prototypes used libfaim, an open source implementation of AOL's instant messenger protocol, and then the open source Jabber protocol.^[1] After a year of development, an agreement was reached between Apple and AOL, allowing the use of AOL's implementation of their instant messenger protocol. Jens was joined by a number of other developers, who helped adding the AOL code, fix bugs, and prepare iChat for a 2002 release with Mac OS X v10.2. Once iChat shipped, the team then went on to work on the next version, adding features such as audio/video capabilities, resulting in the release of iChat AV a year later.

[edit] Safari RSS

In late 2003, unhappy with the direction that iChat was heading in, Jens transferred to the Social Software team to work on adding RSS/Atom feed aggregators to Safari, a feature that shipped with the latest version of Mac OS X, 10.4.