Jim Dovey

Veteran Software Engineer

Jim is a British software engineer living & working in the San Francisco Bay area. He has been writing software since 1998, for platforms including Windows, macOS, iOS, Linux, and PalmOS. He’s specialized in Apple platforms since 2000, and has a lot of experience working with deep parts of the Mac OS. As a result, he was hired by Apple in 2013 to be part of the team that launched the Apple Watch the following year. While he’s mostly worked in software programming, Jim has a pair of books to his name, and has spoken at conferences on several topics, including engineering and electronic publishing.

Location
CA 95628, Sacramento, California, United States
Email
Website
https://alanquatermain.me
Twitter
alanQuatermain
LinkedIn
jimdovey
Stack Overflow
jim-dovey
GitHub
AlanQuatermain

Experience

present

Senior Software Engineer/ICT4 at Apple, Inc.

Apple is the worldwide leader in consumer computing devices.

Highlights

  • Worked on display features and app management for tvOS.
  • Built eARC feature set for Apple TV.
  • Led development of the tvOS SharePlay implementation.
  • Worked on HDR10+ and QMS support for the latest Apple TV 4K, released in November 2022.

Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn

Founded in 2003, LinkedIn connects the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. With more than 645+ million members worldwide, including executives from every Fortune 500 company, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the Internet. The company has a diversified business model with revenue coming from Talent Solutions, Marketing Solutions, and Premium Subscriptions products. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, LinkedIn has offices across the globe.

Highlights

  • Worked on build system integration between Bazel and Xcode.
  • Designed and implemented infrastructure APIs on the backend and for iOS clients.

present

Co-Founder at XPlatform Consulting

XPlatform Consulting is a Los Angeles-based digital asset management consulting group and systems integrator for media and production workflows.

Highlights

  • Designed and built a digital video appliance based on the original AppleTV.
  • Implemented bespoke software to manage large amounts of media metadata and convert between different storage formats.

Senior Software Engineer/ICT4 at Apple Inc.

Apple is the worldwide leader in consumer computing devices.

Highlights

  • Implemented the list/table UI components for the Apple Watch.
  • Designed and build a system for data transfer and synchronization between iOS and watchOS devices.
  • Optimized performance and implemented communications and UI for the Camera Remote app on the Apple Watch (US Patent US-20160065831-A1 — https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160065831A1/en).

Board Member at Readium Foundation

The Readium Foundation is an Open Source Foundation collaboratively developing technology to accelerate the adoption of EPUB 3 and the Open Web Platform by the Digital Publishing Industry.

Highlights

  • Created the original C++ Readium SDK, an ePub3 engine now used and redistributed by many companies, including Adobe as part of their Digital Editions platform.
  • Served as technical advisor to the Readium board during its first year of existence.

Senior Software Engineer; Digital Content Standards Evangelist at Rakuten Kobo

Kobo is the premier eBook retailer in every country except the US. They provide a comprehensive eBook store, publishing tools, and reading apps and devices, all in many different languages and markets.

Highlights

  • Led the team that built the Kobo eReader app for the iPad and iPhone.
  • Headed the company's efforts with regard to the ePub3 standard.
  • Official company liaison with the IDPF, and took part in the XML-SEC and CSS working groups at the W3C.

Lead Developer at Morfunk, LLC

Morfunk, based in Philadelphia, was formed to create iPhone applications, initially based around the web services of developer 37signals. Our first product, Outpost, was released in December 2008, providing native on- and off-line management of Basecamp projects.

Highlights

  • Served as sole developer of the company's applications.
  • Open-sourced a number of very popular libraries and components created during this time.

iPhone Developer at pinch/zoom

pinch/zoom was a mobile design and development consultancy.

Highlights

  • Implemented a few white-box applications for the iPhone.

Senior Software Engineer; Software Development Manager at Hi Resolution Systems Ltd.

Hi Resolution provided network management software for the Apple Macintosh, supporting everything from System 6.5 to Mac OS X 10.6.

Highlights

  • Built out a custom Apple File Protocol client framework for Mac OS X.
  • Hooked into the Mac OS X directory services implementation and the login/security flow.
  • Implemented and later open sourced (https://github.com/AlanQuatermain/DynamicPatch) a runtime process extension and function patching implementation for OS X.

Senior Software Engineer at Informal Ltd.

Informal developed software designed to enable gesture-based interfaces for desktop computers, using the available commodity touchscreen handheld devices of the day—the Palm Pilot and Handspring PDAs.

Highlights

  • Learned C and C++ on the job, working on Palm and Windows.
  • Designed and implemented an OLE-based automation system to communicate with and control Microsoft Office applications.
  • Worked on the UI and operating system of a bespoke hardware gesture-based tablet device, nine years before the launch of the iPad.

Publications

Beginning Objective-C by Apress

A technical book introducing the Objective-C programming language and the Foundation APIs for the Mac and iPhone/iPad.

Unreleased SwiftUI Book by TBA

A book teaching the ins & outs of using SwiftUI, the new declarative UI framework from Apple.

Languages

English
Fluency: Native speaker
Polish
Fluency: Limited working proficiency

Skills

Software Engineer
Level: Master
Keywords:
  • C
  • C++
  • Objective-C
  • Swift
  • Java
  • Javascript
  • Scala
  • Ruby
  • Rust
Operating Systems
Level: Master
Keywords:
  • macOS
  • iOS
  • Linux
  • BSD

Interests

Music
Keywords:
  • Piano
  • Guitar

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