People behind Cocoatech

Cocoatech is a family run software company. We're small and we like it that way!
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Everything began in my apartment in Los Angeles after the dot-com crash of 1999. I was working at a startup that ran low on funding and I was laid off. No one was hiring, and there weren't going to be any jobs for months. Luckily it was a great time to get laid off. Apple's macOS X was recently announced and the first beta version (Rhapsody) had just been released.

I was a mac programmer before, but I was really getting tired of classic macOS. Having to reboot your mac everytime your app crashed was really annoying and I was ready for something new.

After a few days of unemployment I made the decision to use this time off to master macOS and the new Cocoa APIs. This is origin of Cocoatech name. The next day I woke up early and went to the local computer store, MacConnection in Santa Monica. I pulled out a credit card and bought the latest blue G3 tower, an Apple LCD monitor, and a copy of Rhapsody on CD-ROM. I think I remember paying $499 for that CD-ROM and it was only a beta version! It was painful, but I was on a mission. With a maxed out credit card, I drove home, set up the computer and installed Rhapsody and booted it up.

For the next few months I spent 100% of my time, 7 days a week learning Cocoa, and I was having a great time exploring the new and wonderful world of macOS X. I was also trying to decide what app to write. I eventually settled on writing a file manager, and Path Finder was born.

When Path Finder was first written it was released as "shareware". That term has gone out of popularity, but the spirit of shareware lives on. We still believe in giving the user a chance to "try before you buy" and that's one reason we were never on the App Store. We still believe software should be sold on independent company websites without a middle man. That was why the internet was created! We like being close to our customers so we can quicly respond to feature requests and bug fixes.
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Since that time we added a sales person in Germany, a coder in the Netherlands, a marketing person in Tennessee and a tech support team in the Ukraine, and I moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
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I would like to thank everyone who purchased Path Finder. We could not have lasted this long without your support. We will continue to update and support Path Finder as long as we can and I would like to mention that we would never violate your privacy, sell your info, or do anything sneaky. Our mission is to provide you with a great app that will help you be more productive.

Thank you,
Steve Gehrman