Widget Press what, who?
Somewhat jovial, the name is actually rather easy to figure out. The 'Widget' of Widget Press is played upon the standard widget term in economics to indicate a hypothetical product, and the 'Press' is played upon the printing press for publishing items. So there you have it, a company that produces stuff so you can buy a couple million copies and it is called Widget Press.
Founded in 2001, as a small software company for web and consulting services, Widget Press focused on developing & selling its pre-packaged web frameworks, including the popular Widget Property and Widget Podcast. With the emerging of new techniques, mobile content delivery and web technologies (Ajax & Ruby on Rails) beginning around 2005, the company began to focus on consolidating all its web products into a unified foundation framework.
With the web trends moving towards these techniques, Widget Press recognized that development was becoming ever more challenging. After two years of development, the company stopped consolidating its web frameworks, and in January 2008, began prototyping a development tool on the Mac. Widget Press needed to have a tool that could build web applications rapidly, build them with best engineering practices and make them extensible & reusable for new web projects.
In the second half of 2008, realizing that other small businesses and web developers might be needing something similar to solve their challenges, Widget Press considered marketing this tool. The decision was to have Widget Press reinvent itself as a Mac software vendor. Its first Mac software product, ModelBaker, a development tool for building web and mobile applications with no programming, was released on January 5th at the 2009 Macworld Expo in San Francisco, California.
Chief Widget Maker
Jonathan Freeman, Founder of Widget Press and the main dude. Jonathan grew up programming on the Commodore 64 Educator and at age 12, probably created the first C64 dual display by hijacking signals off of the RF Modulator on the motherboard and soldering RCA components for TV inputs. And yes, he still has it and of course it still works, Boulderdash on HD is never better!
A cartoonist, turned graphic designer, turned Army Sergeant, turned entrepreneur, turned human factors engineer, turned web developer and now turned Mac developer for web developers, Jonathan attended the Savannah College of Art & Design, majoring in Graphic Design and Illustration, where he fell in love with Amigas and Macs. He also obtained a BS in Graphics Management from Georgia Southern University. His role at Widget Press is to have new ideas, write the software, do support and to make the website sing. Jonathan is committed to making the best and most exceptional products possible.
Support Staff
Jennifer Kjellgren, Jennifer is mainly the support person to Jonathan. Her duties including being a personal assistant, administration, getting Metro Fresh for lunch, giving Jonathan heartburn when he's reading the credit card statements and taking care of three cats.
Addison Freeman, At age 2, the youngest of all three employees, her main two roles are to pluck the keys off of her father's MacBook Pro keyboard and to laugh wildly while pulling Sage's (the cat) tail.
Press Images
For all the high resolution photos from below, download our Widget Press Press Kit (5MB) or simply click on the thumbnails for the higher resolution PDF, JPEG or PNG file.
