software

In the event that you haven't already seen the banner on my site or heard about Indie Relief through other channels, I wanted to put up a post to get the word out. Fellow Cocoa dev Justin Williams had the idea last week to put together a one-day event amongst Mac and iPhone developers to donate a day's sales to organizations doing work in response to the devastating earthquake earlier this month in Haiti.

I'm happy to report that Code Sorcery Workshop will be participating. One-hundred percent of the sales tomorrow for Pukka and Meerkat will be going to Portland-based Mercy Corps. Here's what Mercy Corps is doing in Haiti.

Over 150 developers have signed on to this event, so I hope that you'll check it out and consider buying some software to support these causes helping with this terrible tragedy.

Followup: Justin Williams reports that Indie Relief raised over $140,000 yesterday. Amazing. Read more here. A big thank you to everyone who chipped in!

I'm pleased to announce a major release to Pukka, our flagship Delicious bookmarking application. Among many user experience improvements, the major new features are fast bookmark search and full AppleScript access to all of your bookmarks.

Search is something I've been wanting to do for a long time. But Pukka is such a lightweight app that I thought long and hard about how to best introduce the feature while keeping Pukka seeming fast and unobtrusive as people have come to expect. The easy route would have been another window or sidebar, but I feel that the new search bar really keeps the application tight and focused. As one beta tester said, "The response and animation on the search menu is very slick. It feels very light and nimble. Well done."

Pukka's other main new feature is especially useful for developers -- full AppleScript access to bookmarks. Pukka has long since supported posting through AppleScript, which has spawned all kinds of neat workflows such as Yojimbo integration.

But now, any developer can integrate Pukka into their application. You can rely on Pukka having all the bookmarks ready and can query them by a word in any of the fields, by their tags, or by their accounts.

To round out the new features, you can now drag and drop to reorder your accounts, allowing you to setup a preferred account for when Pukka launches. I've added a Quick Reference Guide diagramming out all of Pukka's major knobs and buttons, menu items, and keyboard shortcuts. And the main window is now resizable, autoflowing your tags and description as necessary for the smoothest look and minimal space.

Lastly, on the technical front, this release takes a couple of steps forward, too. Sparkle has been upgraded to 1.5, allowing for more secure upgrades and better collection of anonymous statistics so that I best know which platforms and features to support. And Pukka is now code signed so that you can be sure that what you download is exactly what I intended for you to run.

I hope you enjoy these updates to Pukka. I've got many more planned additions up my sleeve, so stay tuned!

Today is the eighth birthday of Drupal, the PHP website platform that I'm most involved with. In Drupal creator Dries Buytaert's own words from the news release:

When I started work on Drupal as a graduate student, Drupal was just a little hobby project grown out of my own interest in the web. As you can tell from the original release notes, being the only programmer certainly had its charms. ;-)

Fast forward 8 years, and we're a global project with hundreds of thousands of users, thousands of active contributors and a healthy ecosystem. Along the way, I've always tried to listen to the community, and to trust my own instincts and moral compass. We built an amazing community together, and because of that, working on Drupal continues to be a labor of love. Even after eight years.

A big project can't always do what a small project can; there is more legacy and overhead, but nonetheless, I think what is important is that we stayed true to our initial values: innovation, collaboration and a healthy desire to keep the code as small and simple as possible.

I'm very much looking forward to where the next eight years takes Drupal and the web at large!

If you are interested in finding out more about Drupal, have a look at groups.drupal.org to see if there is a group near you or head to DC in March for Drupalcon. I just attended my first Portland Drupal meeting last night and hope to be more involved with the community here going forward.

Viva la Drupal!

At last, I'm happy to announce the Code Sorcery Workshop support forums! These forums will gradually become the official support channel for our Mac products Meerkat and Pukka, as well as a place to discuss what's on your mind with regard to our website, potential future products, our services, or happenings in the Mac & Drupal communities.

The forums have been open for a week or two in unannounced form, but have quite expectedly not garnered much activity, so consider this the official "word". Feel free to go to it!

Feature Run-Down

We are using Drupal for the forum solution, which is what is used for the rest of the website as well. I'd like to take a moment to go over some of the features that this provides. In the near future, I also hope to make another post about the more technical details, such as which modules were used, what kind of custom solutions were implemented, and what administrative features are provided on the backend.

Main Page

The main page gives an at-a-glance view of the latest topics, much like any forum software. Posts are organized into containers, such as Mac OS X Products, and below that, forums addressing a particular product or group of topics, such as Pukka. When new topics are posted under a forum, they bubble up to the top.

Forums main page (click to enlarge)

Your Account

To participate in the forums, you must register for an account. With this account, you can maintain a unique identity across all of the posts. You can include as much or as little information as you like, currently including real name, photo or avatar, physical location, and website. This information is only available to other forum users -- only your username is available publicly.

Account page (click to enlarge)

In addition, you get a box in the right sidebar with easy access to My forum posts (posts created by you) and My forum votes (posts you've voted on).

User box

Search

Just like the blog archives and all of the pages on the site, forum topics are searchable. And these searches are able to be bookmarked, so you can easily check back frequently for updates related to a topic you are interested in.

Topic Voting

Aside from easy access to any forum topics that you may have created yourself, you can also vote on anyone else's topics using a zero- to five-star rating system. Perhaps the best use for this feature is that you can use this to flag topics that you are interested in periodically checking back on. Another use might be a tip that you really want others to see or a feature request that you'd like to weigh in on.

The popular topics get aggregated to a special page called top forum topics where they can be easily tracked. I'm hoping that this can be a useful way to chart the future direction of our applications, as well as to more easily resolve important issues affecting many customers.

Topic voting

Feeds, Feeds, Feeds

One of the strongest features of the forums is easy and plentiful RSS feeds. Currently, you can access feeds for:

• All forum topic activity: codesorcery.net/forums/feed
• Container activity: For example, all posts about Pukka. Just add /feed to the end of any container URL.
• Topic activity: If you make a post, you subscribe to all comments on the post by clicking the link on the topic page or adding /feed to the URL.

Forum feeds (click to enlarge)

Conclusion

In conclusion, I'm happy to launch the forums and I hope that they will be of benefit to users of our products, Mac, iPhone, and Drupal enthusiasts, and folks interested in our services, for starters. Please, if you have any suggestions or feedback, consider using the General Discussion forum topic.

Enjoy the forums!

For the second year in a row, I'm proud to help Seth Dillingham in his efforts to raise money for the Jimmy Fund to fight cancer. His personal goal this year is $10,000, both by sponsorship of his cycling and (this is where I come in) his bundle auctions of Mac software.

If you'd like to help out, you can check out the info, where both Pukka and Meerkat are featured, build a bundle of the software that you want, and make Seth an offer for it.

There's a lot of great software on there -- apps that I use already include 1Password, DropDMG, MarsEdit, PlistEdit Pro, rooSwitch, Sound Studio, SuperDuper!, yFlicks, and YummySoup!, among others.

So go check it out!

Yesterday I stumbled across a month old blog post advocating a hack to the excellent Twitterrific application, a client for the free Twitter service. The hack (Update: supposedly, but the point remains) removes the rather unobtrusive ads that the software developers introduced as a way to offset free use of the application. If you didn't want to see them, you could just register the application and they go away. The app didn't start out having them, but after it took off in popularity, the authors (you know, the people who put their time into the application's development and support) decided that this was a better model.

I should take a moment to point out here that as a whole, advertising in general strikes me in a negative light, but I didn't mind the ads in Twitterrific as it was great software and a fair tradeoff for my fifteen bucks.

Anyway, this hack and its associated "arguments" interested me particularly because my application Pukka is also a lightweight client for a free online service, so I left a comment. My initial argument was:

Just like a web browser, RSS reader, email client, FTP program, Aperture, iChat, blog editor… man, the nerve of those people trying to charge for a tool for receiving and delivering content created by others!

Also, I’m a Twitterrific user and I like the ads. Eventually I may pay for the app, but for now, they’re alright.

Try writing a program for which you charge little or nothing, getting a couple thousand users, then see what you do.

Since then, the discussion has gotten rather heated, as well as ludicrous in some cases, as acknowledgement and support of both software piracy and website attacking has been discussed. Seth Dillingham, whom I first got to know (at least virtually) last summer when I supported his bike ride for charity, posted a response and a challenge to users of Twitterrific: put your money where your mouth is. So I took him up and I registered Twitterrific. Money well spent!

If for no other reason (and there are plenty of other reasons), software piracy hurts developers from the support angle. Many users running an app means more support, particularly when a chunk of them are running a cracked version that could develop unforeseen problems. Users report stability issues on the popular software sites or, in the case of larger companies, call the support lines and demand resolution to their issues. I think John Gruber said it best when he wrote about the jailbroken iPhone phenomenon:

The mindset manifests in many forms, but what it boils down to is this: a sense of entitlement that users should be able to do unsupported things and yet still be supported. That it makes no sense to expect support after taking unsupported actions is why I’ve found it baffling.

Phooey. Get your copy of Twitterrific right here. And support software developers if you enjoy their products, but don't feel that you have the right to rip them off if you don't like how they do things. In fact, grab Apple's free development tools and write your own and let's see how it stands up.

Update: Craig at Iconfactory, the author of Twitterrific, weighs in with his take on the whole matter.