I’m Frank Reiff, the developer behind publicspace.net. I’ve been writing Mac software since 1994 and selling it since 1996, which makes this one of the older one-person software companies on the platform. If you’ve ever renamed a few thousand photos in one go on a Mac, there’s a fair chance my code did the work.
The Lancaster years
I studied Computer Science at Lancaster University in the UK, graduating with first class honours in 1994. I stayed on as a research assistant in the Computing Department, working on European Union ESPRIT and UK Department of Trade and Industry research projects while completing a PhD in software engineering and computer-supported collaborative work — the thesis was titled The PublicSpace Paradigm for Collaborative Work, and yes, that name should sound familiar. The research brought me into industrial projects with Sollac (part of Usinor, the French steel group), Matra Marconi Space in Toulouse, National Westminster Bank and PricewaterhouseCoopers, among other academic and industry partners.
The company name comes from that period. My first product, PublicSpace, was a shared-workspace groupware system built at Lancaster’s Cooperative Systems Engineering Group — I presented it at the ECSCW’97 conference. I released it as freeware, was promptly buried under support requests, and faced a choice: charge for it or take it off the web. I put up a price, and accidentally became a shareware author.
A Better Finder Rename followed in 1996, back then a humble contextual-menu plugin for the classic Mac OS Finder. It has been in continuous development ever since.
The banking years
In 2000 three things happened in quick succession: I completed the PhD, married my wife Gillian, and moved back home to Luxembourg, where I was born. (Growing up there leaves you with Luxembourgish, German, French and English — which is why the guides on this site come in three languages.) There I spent the next six years as a senior software architect in the Software Architecture & Security department of BGL bank, then part of the Fortis Group — building Java enterprise frameworks, running technology evaluations and acting as the group’s correspondent to Gartner. Through all of it, publicspace.net kept running on evenings and weekends, as it had since my student days.
Full-time indie
When my son Aiden was born in 2006, something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be the family or the software. I left the bank and have been a full-time independent Mac developer ever since. My daughter Cailin arrived in 2008 and the company is still, deliberately, just me: I write the code, answer the support emails and maintain this website. When you report a renaming problem, the person who reads it is the person who can fix it — which is how unusual renaming problems have a way of becoming product features.
The software
Thirty years on, publicspace.net is a family of Mac productivity and file-management tools:
- A Better Finder Rename — batch file renaming, in development since 1996
- A Better Finder Attributes — change file dates and metadata
- Vitamin-R — time slices and focused work for creative professionals
- The Big Mean Folder Machine — split and merge huge folder hierarchies
- Nifty File Lists — turn folders into file lists and spreadsheets
- Burst Notes — frictionless note capture
- MacBreakZ and RestTime — ergonomics and break reminders
- Noise Machine and Boring Old Menu Bar — small tools that scratch specific itches
I also write the guides on this site about renaming files, fixing file dates and taming photo collections — the same problems my customers have been bringing me since the nineties.
Elsewhere
You can find me on Mastodon, X and LinkedIn, or see the publicspace.net apps on the Mac App Store. For anything else, get in touch — I answer my own email.