Code Sorcery Workshop

Just a quick note that I've released Pukka 1.5.2 with two small enhancements. You can get it now from the download page or read on for more details.

The first improvement is that Pukka now truncates descriptions passed from RSS readers or the bookmarklet to 255 characters by default. After Pukka 1.5.1 introduced the proper passing of highlighted descriptions from RSS readers, many users noticed that not highlighting anything would pass the entire news feed item body as the description, often with thousands of characters. This is because the posting protocol doesn't distinguish between highlighting the whole body and not highlighting anything. While I've been in contact with Brent Simmons, the developer of NetNewsWire and creator of the External Weblog Editor Interface, in order to overcome this, I hope that this addition will provide a reasonable default in the meantime.

This default can be overridden by performing the following command in Terminal:

defaults write net.codesorcery.Pukka AcceptLongDescription -bool true

The second improvement is that Pukka is now ready for Leopard! While I'm not aware of any incompatibilities at this point, I ask that if you use Pukka and you have access to Leopard, please let me know of any problems that you might find. Leopard is still a moving target, but this build of Pukka has been tested with the WWDC 2007 beta of Leopard (build 9A466).

That's all for now... more improvements are still in store for Pukka and I've also got another application or two in the works, but it's best I leave it at that for now. As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions or concerns.

Though I'm not at WWDC right now (wish I could be, but it wasn't in the cards), like everyone else I had my predictions about what Steve would roll out on Monday. Of course, just because I didn't post them publicly but only in email exchanges with friends doesn't mean I can't go back over them now. I've covered them in the order I had them listed on my scorecard. It's the Mac developer WWDC prediction honor system!

ZFS filesystem I put this at the top of my list, not because of desire, need, or relevance, but because Sun's CEO Jonathan "May The Schwartz Be With You" Schwartz said so. Upon further investigation, as well as a complete smackdown from Apple, this doesn't make much sense right now anyway. Sounds like ZFS is more of an enterprise filesystem anyway. It might make sense to include read-only support for it, like NTFS, for compatibility, but little else. Score: 0 for 1

Finder redone in Cocoa I had said "[b]ig improvements in the remote filesystem mounting area, including clean sleep and wake. Google's MacFuse integrated for things like r/w FTP mounts and SSHfs. Core Animation used all over the place, including innovative things like piles." Piles (now "Stacks") has been on the radar for a few years following some patent applications, so I pretty much expected them. I didn't see Cover Flow coming, though. Score: 1 for 2

.Mac now backed by Google I still think this might be coming. Steve's even gone on record (though I can't find it right now) as saying .Mac needs a kick in the pants. My predictions were mac.com email, now with GBs of storage, geo-redundant, S3-like HTTPS WebDAV iDisk, and Google Calendars integration with Leopard Server. Score: 1 for 3

iPhone opened up for widget development I based this on the leaked iPhone sales material. Steve came pretty close, though I didn't see Safari on Windows coming. It all makes sense, though. Though I can sympathize with the general frustration with the way they were presented, being a hybrid Cocoa/web app developer/sysadmin, it fits right into where I'd like to be. Though, I'd sure want to see my app in action on an iPhone rather than just in a web browser, just for peace of mind. Although I'm sure Apple wouldn't have a problem with this, I know my wife does. Score: 2 of 4

Boot Camp allows OS-in-window and app-in-window compatibility Not quite, though it was nice to see Steve give props to both VMware and Parallels for doing this. I do like the nice touch of Boot Camp being able to safe sleep both OSs to allow quicker rebooting and restoration of alternating systems. Though I, like John Gruber, noticed that they removed the mention of this for now. Score: 2 of 5

Hardware: something will be coming Guess not. My guess was use of a large iMac as a TV. I think I was drunk when I thought of this, though, as that makes little sense with Apple TV. I was grasping at straws. Score: 2 of 6

Central, signed software updates Perhaps this was my wishful thinking after getting to know Software Update Server on Tiger Server a bit better lately. I was expecting a way to tie into this for developers, but that it would be a bit slow and cumbersome to get your company involved and only really appeal to large firms like Adobe or Microsoft. Dear God would it be nice to be free of Microsoft AutoUpdate! But alas, even a crappy rumor appears to be untrue as well. Score: 2 of 7

On top of all of these, I was a little disappointed at the list of new Leopard features. While they are cool, I think Steve should have followed the advice "actions speak louder than words". After hyping some major secret features back in January, then delaying Leopard, then rehashing about half of last year's already-revealed features (albeit with noticeable improvement), I'm kind of glad I didn't pay to see it in person this week.

While I'm missing the hanging out with my fellow developers, the parties, and the hands-on workshops, WWDC just didn't strike the right amount of value with me this year. I think I would have been pretty pissed sitting there, watching Steve and Phil talk over iChat with backgrounds, even if it was kind of funny.

Anyone else who didn't go not too upset? And anyone who's there feeling let down?

Congratulations to the MacTech 25, which honors the most influential people in the Macintosh community! This list was announced last week and I just wanted to take a moment to congratulate the recipients.

One of the best things about the Mac community is the fact that as a relative newcomer (I've been on the Mac for five years and developing for about half of that time), I was able to meet some of these folks and at least rub elbows, if not get to know them, last year at C4. Whether it was saying hi to Aaron Hillegass and catching him with his hat off, meeting Brent Simmons and Gus Mueller briefly and thanking them, respectively, for giving Pukka an early prop and setting a model for going indie, ingesting deliciously questionable late night Greek food with Chris Forsythe, getting to know Daniel Jalkut on the long L rides, or being able to thank Wolf in person for accommodating my attempt to secure my C4 spot from my honeymoon in Istanbul, I'm always impressed by how approachable these folks have been. I think this speaks to both why they are in the MacTech 25 as well as how great an opportunity C4 is.

Congratulations!

Last night was the semi-regular monthly DC Drupal MeetUp and I got the chance to show what I've been working on lately. Since I take a keen interest in the systems side of web applications, two of the projects that I've been working on have been a perfect fit and made for great demos last night.

The first project is with MakaluMedia, whom you may have heard of from the winning Slashdot redesign. I have been involved in some research into the Drupal/XMPP space. XMPP is the protocol behind Jabber, the open source instant messaging protocol, and Drupal is a robust open source content management system that I've been involved with for a few years. Right now, things are only in the research stages, but eventually we will be developing a whole host of functionality in this area. I've put up some screenshots of what I showed last night on my Flickr account.

The other item that I showed was something that already existed in some form, but that I enhanced a bit. I've been working with DC's very own Environmental Working Group on their upcoming transition to a Drupal-based site and believe it or not, Drupal does not have any built-in functionality for doing external redirects (i.e. redirecting something like /blog to an external URL like http://blog.domain.com). While Jon over at professionalnerd.com had put together the http_redirect module, it was not compatible with Drupal 5.x and needed some slight UI adjustments to be useful for us. I recently made those changes and as per the GPL, am releasing them back out to the world. The new version is not yet available in Drupal CVS, but you can grab a tarball locally right here on my new Drupal contributions page.

In Cocoa news, I've got some things in the works that I'll hopefully post more about soon. Stay tuned!

I've just released Pukka 1.5.1 -- go grab it now or auto-update from within the program. This is a minor tweak release with two additions: better NetNewsWire posting and the re-addition of tooltips in the preferences since their visual overhaul in 1.5.

On the NetNewsWire front, I have a bit of a mea culpa. If you use Pukka's bookmarklet to post from your browser, you've probably noticed the handy feature where any text that you've highlighted on the web page is automatically inserted into Pukka as the post description.

However, if you use NetNewsWire, you have probably noticed that this doesn't work the same way there. I have long though that it was not possible, but upon sitting down to write NetNewsWire's author Brent an email about it, I realized that the problem was not his fault, but mine. I should have known better -- there's a reason NetNewsWire is so popular! ;-)

NetNewsWire has always had the ability to pass highlighted text, but I never noticed it on the programming side. I'm happy to announce that this feature now works as expected. Just open a news item in NetNewsWire, highlight some text, hit ^⌘', and the URL, title, and, now, the description are all passed along as expected and Pukka is ready for you to tag.

As of yesterday, I've been selling Pukka as shareware for one year. From the very, very beginning, before Pukka was even public, I made the NetNewsWire integration available because, like Brent, I have always felt that apps should work together. Again, I apologize for taking so long to realize that I wasn't working together with NetNewsWire to its full potential.

Today, as the tax deadline looms, my thoughts have turned nostalgic with flashbacks of my first programming experiences. For as Scott Stevenson points out, today is the thirtieth anniversary of the Apple II.

As several folks have been pointing out lately, Apple has really defied the odds with not one (Apple II), not two (the Mac), but three (Mac OS X) amazing, revolutionary products in their lifetime. But the Apple II started it all -- for Apple and for me.

My first exposure to an Apple came in probably about 1982 or so, playing a game called Snooper Troops in my neighbor's basement. Several years later, I was introduced to the Logo language at school, where I got to control lines and drawings on the screen in much the same way that I direct my LEGO Mindstorms NXT today.

A few more years after that, the big one came along. While we all played Oregon Trail, I found in the back of the classroom a book on programming text adventure games in BASIC. While I had had some exposure to BASIC with an old TI-99/4A at home (how's that for a consumer product name), I never got beyond simple line drawing and single-purpose programs. But finding BASIC Fun With Adventure Games in 1988, combined with an understanding teacher who essentially let me turn in homework early and spend time typing in the 65K program by hand instead of being in class, is what gave me my first taste of text command parsing, control structures, databases of information, and the importance of saving my work frequently onto a 360K floppy.

I spent a lot of time on that Apple IIe, typing, proofreading, and saving. The program couldn't be run until fully complete, which took days -- maybe even weeks -- but I'll never forgot the thrill of creating, then using, my own application -- even if I did already know every possible outcome of being a CIA agent, breaking into Russian Ambassador Griminski's house, and trying to find enough evidence to incriminate him. Computers and spy role playing -- could it get any better?

For all of this I have Steve and Woz -- and my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Wright -- to thank. Here's to you.

We're happy to announce today the release of Pukka 1.5! This release has lots of goodies, so you can either cut to the chase and go download it or read on for more information.

Pukka 1.5 brings three classes of changes: improved performance, new features, and minor changes. I'll summarize some of them here. As always, you can get the full list within Pukka's self-updating functionality or straight from the RSS changelog.

First and foremost, we've done the near-impossible and made Pukka launch faster! Many parts of the UI are now loaded on demand so that the initial application is leaner and meaner. We think you'll like the improvement -- but after all, one bounce in the dock is still one bounce ;-)

Second in the performance department, Pukka is now much gentler on the bookmarking API. In recent weeks, del.icio.us seems to have implemented some checks that would cause background caching of bookmarks to result in errors. This was particularly true for users who posted many links quickly. We've optimized this process and now you should rarely see this issue at all.

On a related note, Pukka now features a pull-out console for the times when things are not going smoothly. Perhaps you've entered your password wrong or the API is just down. Now if you like, you can dig into the problem a bit and see if it's something you've done or if it's the service instead.

Speaking of services, Pukka now supports alternate API URLs. What this means is that if the del.icio.us API URL ever changes (info on that here) and we don't get to it first, you can keep on bookmarking. However, more importantly, Pukka can now work with services other than del.icio.us as long as they mirror the del.icio.us API. One popular service that does this is Ma.gnolia (more info here). More on Pukka and alternate API URLs a bit later.

In order to support some of these new features, Pukka's preferences have gotten a visual overhaul as well. The pictures say it all:

Old	New

I won't go into everything else that's new, but a couple other minor features that made their way in include:

• Pukka can now quit immediately after posting for the ultimate in low overhead.
• You can configure Pukka to bounce the dock icon upon successful posting. Useful if you don't use the sound effects or Growl.
• The tag suggestion delay can now be configured in the preferences between None, Short, Medium, and Long delay.
• You can now enable or disable the menus of accounts, tags, and bookmarks that appear in the dock menu.
• A new intro screencast is available from the Help menu.

Whew... ok, that's it -- now go get Pukka!

There is an interesting discussion going on right now on the macsb (Macintosh Software Business) discussion list about whether Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is worth it or not. I should say, not whether it's worth it in general, but whether it's worth it for the small, indie developer. When you factor in a $1300-1600 ticket, hotel in and flight to and from San Francisco, and all of the inevitable peripheral expenses, it can really add up for an independent developer. I know it does for me.

Like Mike Zornek, I too have recently gone indie with a combination of consulting and shareware development. And I also went to Wolf's fantastic C4 conference last October in Chicago. As my first Mac conference, I had an amazing time and came home with so much energy -- in fact, that week I made the decision to go indie. Combine that with a great time in January at the Leopard Tech Talk. It wasn't just the tech, but also the general level of enthusiasm and getting to meet lots of other developers as well. I was sure I'd be at WWDC.

On the other hand, though, saving my pennies and waiting until such time as it's easier to go -- less of a stretch -- is probably a good idea. As much as I'd like to be in the audience when The Steve takes the stage and wows us all with the next insanely great developer thing, perhaps it's not in the cards. On top of an ADC Select Membership, it's just difficult for an independent starting out.

It's times like these that I'm really grateful for more affordable conferences like South By Southwest and C4. Also, I'll reiterate my ever-present offer: if you're a Mac developer in the Washington, DC area, feel free to drop me a line and we can put our brains together over a drink sometime. It's the next best thing to the big conferences in my book.

I had the pleasure of giving a "lightning talk" at the Washington DC Drupal MeetUp last night. Given the chance to talk about something vaguely Drupal-related for no more than five minutes, I gave a brief overview of taking advantage of the built-in XML-RPC capability of Drupal by showing a quick Cocoa app that I put together for file uploading with the asset module. I originally wrote asset.module over a year ago while working at EchoDitto but I recently extended it by adding XML-RPC capability (specifically for this talk, as a matter of fact). You can check out the slides, module, and app (including source, released under the BSD License) over here.

Happy uploading!

Well, my time in Austin is done (though I'm now in Houston, so Texas ain't through with me yet) and South By Southwest Interactive has definitely been a memorable experience. At some point, the amount of information learned, amazing people met, and great experiences had kind of hit a level where it was just kind of overwhelming and my ability to speak about it shut down. However, perhaps the lack of sleep, fast pace, free beer, and plentiful Tex-Mex played a part. I'll try to highlight and summarize based on my notes. I can't wait to get copies of a lot of the slides that were used.

Panels

• Consistency in User Interface Design: Think about goals, not feature lists. When you imitate or are inspired by an existing interface, don't emulate it too closely because people will complain about the slight differences. Think about types of users -- legal secretary vs. a fourth grader using WordPerfect, icon editor vs. a photographer using Photoshop.
• Tag. You're It: Kind of a "state of the folksonomy" to me and an update on where we've come in the last year and the challenges remaining. I really enjoy hearing Thomas Vander Wal speak about tags. I caught his panel last year as well and managed to find him at 8-Bit on Saturday night and chat for a while about tags, del.icio.us, and social bookmarking. Learned about new uses for tags: libraries, museums, wine and music collections, travel website archived content.
• Stop Designing Products: Find an "experience strategy". The experience is the product. Remember George Eastman and the one-button camera experience. People interact with products like they do with people. Think about how much iTunes does to make the iPod experience simpler and easier -- offload the functionality.
• Why We Should Ignore Users: Of course, this is not meant literally. The gist was how to balance user request in design. A lot of times, what users want is emotional or inexplicable. Consider activity-centered design, not user-centric. Think about environment: checking email, on a Blackberry, on the subway -- how does that impact the design?
• Scaling Your Community: Matt Mullenweg from WordPress. Very entertaining and genuine, kind speaker -- love him. Be as useful to the last 100K users as to the first 100K. Start simple, bootstrap, let go, personalize. Email is the best scaling software ever. Speed is a feature. Be transparent. Don't believe your own press. Have fun! Happiness is a continuum -- lovers on one end, haters on the other, mediocrity in the middle. Learn from the haters. Also, best reference to a Venn diagram -- "times I've had the most fun intersecting with times I was wearing pants".
• Will Wright Keynote Speech: Will created SimCity, The Sims, and is working on SPORE. Mind-blowing. "We need to re-calibrate our intuitions." Mile a minute. Can't wait to see the slides, because I don't think a video camera, let alone a photographic one, could have kept up. Very inspiring.
• Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer: John Gruber, Shaun Inman, and Nick Bradbury. Indies sell to users, not businesses. Great design speaks to you. Design is a pile of interrelated decisions. Design for yourself to scratch an itch. Build things twice -- once to learn, again to do it right. Buzz is great, but sometimes silence is golden -- nothing's broke. Again, get lovers and haters, but get in front of real people.

People

I enjoyed meeting some Yahoo! peeps, though del.icio.us representation was pretty slim -- met Jonathan on the PC side. Caught up with Blake of CocoaRadio. Met Ma.gnolia founder Larry and user Chris. Met and hung out with Manton of Wii Transfer and Buzz of Cocoalicious. Alex from Twitter was in our posse from DC (including EchoDitto folks -- check out their take their blog about it -- and new friends John, Jason, and Ben) and turns out he was at C4. Met Pukka users Paul, George, Kathryn, and re-met Brad. Also, today here in Houston, I had lunch with Chris from Saltatory, Growl, and Adium. Whew! I'm still hoarse from many, many parties, late nights, and shouting over bar music about topics such as the thread safety of various Cocoa classes.

So, enough for now. SXSW remains on my must-do list and I'm hoping to make it to WWDC this year, as well as C4[1], so I hope to see the developers among you there!