Matt Neuburg

Matt Neuburg started programming computers in 1968, when he was 14 years old, as a member of a literally underground high school club, which met once a week to do time-sharing on a bank of PDP-10s by way of primitive Teletype machines. He also occasionally used Princeton University's IBM-360/67, but gave it up in frustration when one day he dropped his punch cards. He majored in Greek at Swarthmore College and received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1981, writing his doctoral dissertation (about Aeschylus) on a mainframe. He proceeded to teach classical languages, literature, and culture at many well-known institutions of higher learning, most of which now disavow knowledge of his existence, and to publish numerous scholarly articles unlikely to interest anyone. Meanwhile he obtained an Apple IIc and became hopelessly hooked on computers again, migrating to a Macintosh in 1990. He wrote some educational and utility freeware, became an early regular contributor to the online journal TidBITS, and in 1995 left academe to edit MacTech Magazine. In August 1996 he became a freelancer, which means he has been looking for work ever since. He remains a contributing editor for TidBITS. He is the author of Programming iOS 4, AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, REALbasic: The Definitive Guide, and Frontier: The Definitive Guide, all from O'Reilly Media, Inc., and of several eBooks in the popular Take Control series. He has also written several online guides, such as his introduction to rb-appscript. He has taught in developer training programs such as the AppleScript Pro Sessions. He is the author of the online help for many prominent Mac applications, such as Script Debugger, Affrus, Opal, and MacSpeech Dictate. He has written such widely used Mac freeware as MemoryStick, NotLight, and Thucydides. He has created (and uses) his own open source Ruby-based Web site development framework, RubyFrontier. In 2007 he was voted by MacTech readers as one of the 25 most influential people in the Macintosh community. He has written several iPhone applications under his own name (search the iPhone app store under “Neuburg”), as well as the widely used TidBITS News, plus some additional applications created under contract that he isn’t allowed to talk about.