About
I’m Fred Potter and I’m a programmer living in Seattle. I’m currently working on a Mac app in the personal finance space — more on that later.
Past
RealArtists, late co-founder — I joined friends James and Nick to work on a product called Ship, a native Mac interface to GitHub Issues. (Not available any longer)
Facebook: Lots of work on developer tooling for iOS; some work on ads.
Created xctool, a fancy build and test runner for iOS and Mac projects that was well received in the community. I wrote the earliest versions, but many other contributors joined to add more features. (Less relevant today than in the Xcode 4 and Xcode 5 days.)
Worked on a continuation of Pieceable Viewer (i.e mobile simulators in the browser) inside of Facebook with a team of folks. It was integrated into the code review system so that a reviewer could instantly test your mobile app changes directly from the web.
Worked on mobile app install ads in the iOS app.
Pieceable Viewer (Run Apps In Your Browser), co-founder — Pieceable Viewer was a SaaS product I built that let you run iOS apps in a web browser. Through a bunch of reverse engineering and magic, we made it appear as if you were using an iOS app in your web browser while it was really running on a far away Mac Mini. Became a useful tool for testing, sales, and customer support teams. Team was acqui-hired by Facebook.
Pieceable (App Builder), co-founder — In the first iteration of this company, I spent a year building an app creation service for non-technical folks. There’s an old demo video showing how the web-based design tool would update the on-device preview in real-time. Never shipped as Apple kept rejecting the iOS preview tool which was key to it all. This led to Pieceable Viewer, a way to run iOS apps in your web browser, thus bypassing App Store review.
BerryStore, founder — BerryStore was an App Store for BlackBerry devices I made after being frustrated that my other BlackBerry app saw little adoption. Product was acquired / handed-off, but didn’t live for long as BlackBerry released their own app store.
Loopt, employee — I wrote the iOS side of Loopt Mix (a social / dating app) and helped with other native apps for our friend finder service on Android, BlackBerry, and J2ME phones.
Microsoft, intern — Worked in Windows Mobile on the Contacts app.
Intel Research, intern — Worked on a couple software platforms for localization on laptops and phones using only WiFi + GSM signals. Brand new at the time; predating iPhone and WiFi localization in Google Maps. Research done using the software was published in several journal papers.