Pukka

Last week, the Vienna development team accepted my patch to improve Vienna's support for Pukka. Now, when you pass an RSS item from Pukka to Vienna, any highlighted text in the body of the item is passed as the description for Pukka.

I believe that this is still a prerelease version of Vienna, as the main website still has an older version, but updates have appeared on the MacUpdate profile page. You can grab the latest Vienna there and give it a spin!

Just a note that Seth Dillingham (whom I blogged about before) has begun his actual software auctions on eBay. These are bundles of quality Mac software (including Pukka) valued at over $1,000 each but currently bidding at under $200. All proceeds benefit the Pan-Mass Challenge and the auctions end in the next few days, so check them out!

I've just released a minor bugfix to Pukka, version 1.6.1. This version fixes a bug that would prevent the Vienna RSS reader from passing items properly. Grab it now!

As a side note, the behavior among Pukka's supported RSS readers is slightly different when it comes to the RSS item text passed as Pukka's description:

• NetNewsWire passes any selected body text as the description. If nothing is selected, the whole body is passed (subject to automatic truncating down to the del.icio.us maximum of 255 characters, which you can read more about in this post).
• NewsFire passes the whole item body every time, regardless of selection (subject to the same truncation).
• Vienna passes an empty body every time, regardless of selection.

I will be contacting the authors of NewsFire and Vienna to see if they can possibly work with the text selection for a more consistent experience, but for now, that's the story!

Enjoy!

Update: I've just submitted a patch to the Vienna development mailing list that should fix the above behavior and pass along any selected article text as Pukka's description. If you're impatient and you happen to build and run the latest Vienna from source, this patch will get you that behavior now!

I'm pleased to announce the release and immediate availability of Pukka 1.6. Pukka now features a new, optional menu in the status bar for quick access to your accounts, tags, and bookmarks, as well as full Spotlight support.

The status bar item contains a menu similar to Pukka's dock menu:

Pukka's new status bar item

What's more, both this menu and the dock menu have been optimized so that even users with thousands of tags and bookmarks will have speedy access to them without delay.

Pukka also now features Spotlight support for fast searching of your bookmarks from your desktop. All fields are indexed, including URL, title, description, tags, author, and post date. Opening a bookmark opens it in your favorite browser, just like any other bookmarks on your Mac.

Spotlight support (click to zoom)

There are also a few tweaks, namely improved Leopard support, verification of account deletions, and correction of some minor user interface issues.

So what are you waiting for? Go get Pukka now and take it for a spin!

Code Sorcery Workshop is proud to help support Seth Dillingham of Mystic, CT, in his participation in the Pan-Mass Challenge. Seth will be cycling 192 miles across Massachusetts (not to mention an extra 100 miles the day before to get to the starting line, just for fun) to raise money for cancer research and treatment for the Jimmy Fund. The ride will take place August 3-5 and Seth will be holding software auctions of popular, donated Mac titles in order to meet his goal of raising $6,600. We're donating five licenses for Pukka to help out.

You can read more about the auctions, which are scheduled to start today, on Seth's blog. You can check out the full list of donated software as well.

Good luck Seth!

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.

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.

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!

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!

Once again I'm very much looking forward to attending SXSW Interactive this year in Austin. Last year was an absolute blast (the Bonjour functionality in Pukka debuted there) and this year, since I've gone solo, I'm attending as 100% Code Sorcery Workshop. I'll be arriving this Friday and staying in Austin until Tuesday evening. If you're going, be sure to drop me a comment here or look me up in the online registry! And when running Pukka, be sure to turn on Bonjour (it's on by default, use Command-B to see the drawer) so that we can all watch each others' bookmarks while the conference is happening.

I don't even know what I'm looking forward to most yet. SXSW is just such a full-on sensory overload that I'm confident I'll have a great time just taking it as it comes. Last year's panels ranged from business to blogging to design to creativity and the nightlife was just as, ahem, educational. That's the one thing about SXSW that differentiates if from other conferences -- start with awesome nightlife in Austin, add thousands of geeks plus a bit of spirits, and lots of fun is guaranteed to result.

In other news, looks like Austin's getting an Apple Store this weekend and I'm also geared up about the food.

Man, I'm tired already!