Developer Interview: Fluke's Dmitry Kichenko
Dmitry Kichenko is a 21 year old developer living in Toronto. He’s the developer of Fluke, the FLAC toolkit for iTunes. MacHive’s Ryan Pfleghaar had a chance to catch up with Dmitry to talk about Fluke and life.
On Macs
- Ryan:
- How long have you been a Mac user?
- Dmitry:
- I have been a Mac user for about 2 years now, but had wanted a Mac ever since OS X was released. Apple’s switch to Intel finally did it for me, as I did not want to be tied to OS X only as would be the case with PowerPC. Ironically, OS X is all I use now days. I only boot into Windows to check my sites under IE6.
On Fluke
- Ryan:
- You mention at Fluke’s site that you are more of a designer than a developer. Besides Fluke, do you have any other applications that you’ve developed?
- Dmitry:
- No, I don’t. Fluke’s my first effort, and I’m quite glad it’s been getting a lot of positive feedback so far. It’s been more of a response to the community—I had noticed a lot of visits and comments to my blog post on importing FLACs into iTunes and decided to learn a bit of AppleScript. It’s been a very enjoyable ride so far, as Apple literally provides you with everything to make your own application: from an awesome IDE to extensive docs to a way to package it all up and provide the user with a .dmg file, it all comes as part of Xcode and is free. Awesome!
- Ryan:
- I haven’t had a chance to poke around the AppleScript, but do you know of any modifications made to Fluke by your users?
- Dmitry:
- None I know of so far, no. I did have a few suggestions which I scribbled down to possibly implement later. Will do my best to do so in the free time, if there will ever be any :).
- Ryan:
- Any plans on further updating Fluke and maybe going into shareware?
- Dmitry:
- Further updating? For certain. Going shareware? No. Donationware maybe, to pay off the costs of hosting if they were to increase. Otherwise, I think all software should be free—with an option of donating if you so desire. A bit of a utopian view but hey, what is OS X itself based on if not BSD?
- Ryan:
- I noticed Fluke seamlessly imports my FLAC files into iTunes but I hit a snag while trying to burn those files directly from iTunes. Any ideas or plans in the works to make it work natively?
- Dmitry:
- Perhaps. At this point it’s just me putting together those different components developed by other people to let users import FLACs into iTunes easily. Now, if only we all collaborated…
On Audio
- Ryan:
- What percentage of your library is FLAC and how large is it?
- Dmitry:
- My library isn’t huge at the moment, about 70 Gb, mostly because I like to refresh it every once in a while and get rid of music I know I won’t listen to anymore. As for FLACs, I use iTunes all the time, so all the CDs I buy get imported using Apple Lossless. I also have an iPod, and since, at the moment, there is no way to listen to FLACs on an iPod, I just convert everything to Apple Lossless to begin with.
- Ryan:
- What is your favorite style of music?
- Dmitry:
- Ooh. I can get very talkative on this one, but to keep the answer short I would say dance-punk (Blondie, LCD Soundsystem, New Young Pony Club—that kind of stuff), progressive and electro house, and of course, lots of 60’s and brit pop.
- Ryan:
- I enjoyed listening to the songs you created and posted to your website. Are there any plans for a full album?
- Dmitry:
- That would be nice. :) The stuff I compose lately is mostly electronic though, and in the world of dance music, LPs aren’t all that popular. DJs prefer to purchase EPs or, in case of stores like Beatport, single tracks in MP3 or WAV, so a collection of EP’s is probably the better way to go. There is a big deficit of free time here anyway, so releasing tracks on their own would be more efficient to boot.
Back at Ryan
- Ryan:
- Thank you for your time and, in closing, do you have any questions for me?
- Dmitry:
- What is YOUR favorite style of music? Whenever I read an interview there is never anything about the interviewer. :)
- Ryan’s Response:
- Defining my favorite style of music can be a bit difficult. I don’t like to get into genres but I like music from Post-Hardcore (Thursday) to Classic Rock (Led Zeppelin, Van Halen) to Industrial (NIN). Lately, my niche has been movie soundtracks by the likes of Hans Zimmer, Steve Jablonsk and Harry Gregson-WIlliams.
—RP
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