Although I use the plural everywhere when I talk about it, actually Zik Software is the sole proprietorship of Angelo Scicolone, a 28 years old software developer with a Master's degree in Computer Science who has been writing applications for nearly 20 years (yep, you did the math right).
Our goal is to design and develop amazingly usable, rock-solid software for our clients and us. We put a particular concentration on Mac and cross-platform solutions.
Specialties
Expertise in development of: Mac OS X / Windows / Linux custom software, multi-platform applications, GUI design and implementation, desktop publishing systems, digital publishing, graphics and multimedia software, database and data warehousing systems, scalable and distributed server architectures, system utilities.
Expertise in workflow automation of: Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat Professional, Quark XPress, Microsoft Office, Apple apps (iLife, iWork, built-in OS X Apps). More Info.
Technologies
REAL Studio, Xcode, Objective-C, Java, C, Visual Basic, AppleScript, VBScript, JavaScript, SQL, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, XML, HTML, CSS, JSP, PHP, UNIX, PBS, Mac OS X, iOS, Windows, Linux, Solaris.
Partnerships
We are Apple Developer Connection members since 2002.
Honors
REALbasic Cubie Award 2002: PrefsOverload is Best Utility of the Year.Press
AliasMultiplier 2.6 Review - by REALbasic Developer magazine [Apr '03, English]
PrefsOverload 5 Mission - MacPeople [2003, Japanese]
LA SICILIA 13/10/2002 - Article about me on the Sicily newspaper [Oct '02, Italian]
"Genio Italiano" - About the Cubie Award 2002 [Sep '02, Italian]
AliasMultiplier 2.5 Review - by Cuk.ch [Apr '02, French]
"Piccoli, Grandi Programmatori Mac" - My Interview on MacProf [Dec '01, Italian]
AliasMultiplier 2 Review - by Tevac.com [Dec '01, Italian]
"Italians do It better" - Article about me on Applicando.com [July '01, Italian]Bio
Angelo Scicolone was born on the 31th of July, 1983 in Gela, Italy.
Developing software for personal computers has always been his passion. He started this passion as a self-taught when he was 9 years old and it later became his profession through hard studying and plenty of working experiences collected over time.
Starting 2000, he designed, developed and marketed many different applications for the Mac OS and the Mac OS X operating systems under the “Zik Software” pseudonym, obtaining good reviews from various international magazines like MacWorld, MacUser, MacAddict, MacLIFE and others.
In 2001 he started a ten years long collaboration with Applicando, the #1 Italian Macintosh magazine published by Il Sole 24 Ore Business Media, for which he wrote several technical tutorials and reviews.
In 2002 he won the REALbasic Cubie Award, an international prize for the best applications made with REALbasic, for the development of PrefsOverload, which was rated first in the "Best Utility" category.
The same year he moved to Torino and started Emerasoft, a software company specialized in desktop publishing systems. The company's premiere product, called LPS, was mostly developed by himself.
In 2005, with the arrival of new associates, Emerasoft S.r.l. became a limited company and extended its market as a third party software distributor also. Since that moment he was Vice President for Research & Development for a year, after which he quit the company. During the almost 4 years of work in Emerasoft, he collected many experiences as enterprise level developer and system integrator, working for big italian and foreign companies like SEAT Pagine Gialle S.p.A. and Polarion Software GmbH.
In 2006 he graduated in Computer Science at University of Turin, with a thesis about Grid Computing which included the full development of an install CD-ROM to easily create or expand a computational grid based on PBS Professional and SLAX (Linux) operating system.
Since 2007, he has been involved mainly with custom software design and development as a freelance, focusing on desktop publishing, digital publishing, graphics and multimedia apps as well as scalable and distributed client/server publishing systems solutions.
In 2011 he earned a Master's degree in Computer Science: his thesis covered SprintPress, a custom developed, distributed publishing system based on Adobe InDesign, Mac OS X Server and MySQL, that was completely designed and developed by himself for a sports newspaper.