Nolobe: “Nolobe Pty Ltd today announced the acquisition of Stairways Software’s flagship program, Interarchy. In what amounts to an employee buyout, lead developer Matthew Drayton has formed Nolobe Pty Ltd and acquired all rights to Interarchy, the award winning file transfer and web maintenance client.”
Steven Frank: "@words = ( 'hey', 'mama', 'said', 'the', 'way', 'you', 'move', 'gonna', 'make', 'sweat', 'groove' );"
Here in the lab: Black Dog achieved in 31 ZepMarks.
Manton Reece: “Anyone who has been programming for the web for a few years knows that after a while, everything starts to look like RSS.”
Infinite Loop: “This was the first fairly major update to the software since August of last year and contains one of the most requested features to date: tabs. Oh, glorious tabs.”
Valleywag: “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, a spoof chronicle of the narcissistic Apple chief exec’s inner life, is to close down after unspecified legal threats.”
Niall Kennedy: “Earlier tonight I attended a Windows Vista launch event in San Francisco and was surprised to find not a single person in line to buy the software less than an hour before launch.”
I saw on the local news last night that people were lining up at a local store—but it appeared that mainly they were there to meet Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander.
Rogue Amoeba: “Today we’ll look at many of the decisions you’ll need to make when exhibiting. Some of this was covered in brief previously, but we’ll go into more depth here.”
Flareman: “I wrote it to be able to turn lines / paragraphs of text in lists, both ordered and unordered in blog posts to Blogger, using the <ul/ol><li>...</li>...lt;/ul/ol> tag that Blogger’s own HTML WYSIWYG editor uses.”
Flareman: “I wrote it to be able to add color to text in blog posts to Blogger, using the <span style="color:(r,g,b);"></span> tag that Blogger’s own HTML WYSIWYG editor uses. It will only work with an open post window and some text selected in it. Once activated, the script will launch Mac OS X’s color picker, allowing you full freedom while choosing the color you want applied to your selection.”
Justin Williams: “...we are now accepting third-party writers to contribute articles. We are still striving to deliver feature-length articles and tutorials just like before, but we need a little bit of help to keep the site going on a consistent basis.”
Theocacao: “The Mac’s imminent demise has been predicted approximately 1.21 million times, yet people just keep doing it, despite coming off the best year ever for Mac sales.”
plasq: “Everyday we all share images, ideas and have fun with friends online—this should be easy... right!?”
The Omni Group “is seeking people to program eye-popping applications on the Macintosh. We’re looking for people who want to leap right in and work on our new and shipping products, who code for fun, and who love the Mac OS X platform.”
Rogue Amoeba: “If you’ve ever been to Macworld or any other trade show as an attendee, you know the basics. Vendors set up and peddle their wares to (hopefully) interested potential customers. It’s somewhat like a bazaar with more vaporware and less haggling. So if you’ve gotten over the hurdle of costs discussed last week, what’s next?”
Manton Reece released Wii Transfer 2.0, an app for copying data to your Wii.
(I’ve known Manton for years. If I had a Wii, I’d have already bought Wii Transfer. ;)
Jens Alfke: “The APIs are too clumsy to code to, and compared to any decent Mac app, the results look like a Soviet tractor built on a Monday.”
David Chartier: “I think of Twitter as the ultimate status message for everyone, everywhere. In fact, I really see the deceptively simple service as one of those ‘it’ ideas that fills a technological gap that’s been left wide open for far too long.”
Wolf: “NSZombieEnabled screams when NSTreeController walks into the room.”
Sugar Maple Software: “I thought I’d share a couple of thoughts that may be of interest to those macsb folks in a similar situation. First, I decided that NewsHawker would be my first app because it met two criteria previously mentioned on this list: one, it is an app that does something I personally want (which provides motivation) and, two, its implementation isn’t too complicated (which results in a greater chance of actually releasing).”
(Via Gus, who also links to an interesting postmortem on MacGourmet 2.)
John Siracusa: “To tide you over until I actually get around to writing about the iPhone, I offer the fruit of a few misspent nights at the keyboard. Some would say that this is evidence of too much free time, but sometimes I just need a change of pace.”
Takaaki Kato updated the Samurai Coder NetNewsWire style: it’s more compact and includes ad-blocking code.
eWeek: “MacFUSE, Singh said, makes it easy for even casual programmers to write their own file systems, which they can build into Mac OS X user programs. With MacFUSE, users will be able to treat remote computer drives and even Web-based services as mountable drives on a local computer, he said.”
Daniel Steinberg: “O.K., so maybe Flash, definitely JavaScript, and ‘Java’s not worth building in.’ Jobs says it’s heavyweight and nobody uses it anymore.”
Macworld: “...this AirPort Extreme update is anything but minor—it’s a long overdue refresh of Apple’s wireless hardware.”
Late Night Cocoa: “In this episode we take a high level look at getting started in Cocoa with an interview with Chris Forsythe the project manager for Adium, project lead for Growl and the co-founder of Saltatory Software.”
TUAW Podcast #18: “For just over 20 minutes we discussed Macworld, the iPhone, the state of Mac OS X, being a developer, whether competition or web services are slowing them down and a whole lot more.”
Backup Brain: “Apple, you need a JavaScript/Widget/Client-side Web Evangelist. And I’m the person to do it.”
She is the person to do it.
SansFiltre: “Since the beginning, Markdown was developed to be used as a text filter for various text editors. I thought that it was probably possible to do the same with wiki2xhtml, the ‘engine’ driving the wiki syntax of Dotclear.”
RAILhead Design: “TwitterPost is a simple, stand-alone interface to Twitter.com, one of the web’s newest online communities.”
Wil Shipley on advertising: “And, you’re probably going to forget to bring teh funny in your effort to look all professional, so you’ll just end up alienating your core market of crazy independent thinkers with your attempts to look all sophistomicated. (Remember this is a community where the most remembered ads are a lady smashing a T.V. and ‘It sucks less.’)”
ollieman.net: “Lucida Complete does two things: it presents the reader with absolutely nothing but text in a drastically-simple, attractive format; and shows the complete breadth of information available from NetNewsWire (feed info).”
Hivelogic: “...there are really three issues that stand out to me right away: the importance of the user interface, the implications of the iPhone for Apple as a company, and the significance (or lack thereof) about the fact that it runs OS X (some people are making a big deal out of this last one, but for all the wrong reasons).”
Iconfactory: “Twitterrific is a fun little application that lets you both read and publish posts or ‘tweets’ to the Twitter community website.”
eWeek: “Saying ‘enough is enough,’ many IT pros are turning to RSS technology for relief from e-mail malaise.”
Reinvented Software: “Feeder is an application for creating, editing and publishing RSS feeds on Mac OS X. Whether it’s a news feed for your site or a podcast, Feeder makes it simple.”
Rogue Amoeba: “Macworld San Francisco 2007 just ended, and I’ve recently heard the same question many times: ‘Should I exhibit at Macworld?’ The answer is simple and concrete. That answer is, of course, ‘Weeeeell, it all depends.’”
Macworld: “I would imagine that we won’t get any details about how Apple plans to address iPhone development until this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference at the earliest.”
We don’t have booths—but we’re there. You can meet me, Gus Mueller of Flying Meat, and Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba. Here’s the scoop:
4 p.m. today (Thursday)
In the underground hallway between the main halls, near the sign language interpreter booth (across from Underground Espresso)
Apple Developer Connection: “Created to meet the needs of widget developers, Dashcode combines powerful visual layout tools with a code editor, debugger, and comprehensive package management into a world-class integrated development environment.”
Daring Fireball: “The Aqua theme is now 6 years old, which is a longer lifespan than that of the Platinum theme from Mac OS 8 and 9. I expect to see big changes, not the sort of refinements we’ve seen in previous major Mac OS X updates.”
Here are Macworld Expo photos on Flickr. (Via Backup Brain.)
TidBITS: “PreFab UI Browser is a scripter’s tool. You don’t need it unless you need it, but if you need it, it’s exactly what you need.”
Scott Stenvenson: “The Pomcast podcast is doing a series of interviews during Macworld week, and I was asked to do a video interview on Wednesday. The topics range from learning Cocoa, how I got started, what’s coming up in Leopard, living in the valley, and even a bit of Ruby on Rails.”
Mike Zornek: “Billable, my first ever commercial software project has been out on the market for roughly 100 days as of this week. I thought I’d take some time to share some numbers and my insights on how it’s going so far.”
eWeek: “Developers of applications for Apple’s Mac OS X have been watching the Month of Apple Bugs project closely, and are generally in favor of the project’s goal of uncovering OS flaws.
“But they, and security companies, have questions about the MOAB group’s method, which involves making their findings public immediately, instead of first alerting Apple Computer.”
Chris Forsythe: “For Cocoa I’ve been working on things called ‘stupid apps.’ Basically these are a set of applications that perform 1-2 tasks, help me learn a new thing, and allows me to continue evolving with Cocoa.”
Chris is posting one of these apps a week, and invites anyone learning Cocoa to re-implement the app. When he posts the next app, he’ll post his source code for the previous app.
Pretty cool idea. Here’s the summary page for the project.
DailyTechTalk: “This will be a private party held at the Swig penthouse suite on the 2nd level. Expect to meet the mac celebrities, bloggers and faithful in rare form dancing the night away...”
Dan Benjamin: “Yup, it’s true, I’ve finally gone ahead and recorded my first podcast. I talked with my friend, the famous John Gruber of Daring Fireball, about Macworld 2007 and what we might expect to see there.”
Niall Kennedy: “Next week’s dinner extends the tradition of MacSB meetings held during each year’s Macworld and WWDC conferences in San Francisco, bringing together small software businesses within the Mac developer ecosystem to meet face-to-face, reflect on Apple announcements, and share tips and war stories.”
RSVP via Niall’s weblog or on upcoming.org.
There are two keynote bingos—here’s Peter Hosey’s: “This is a randomly-generated bingo card for the Macworld SF 2007 keynote address...”
#macnytt @ Freenode: “And now, after the roaring success of WWDC Bingo 06, our fearless Swedish Viking Keynote Bingo Team got together again to produce the even more ultimate experience: MWSF Bingo 07!” (Via Alex King.)
Ted Leung: “And boy does it update now. It seems like everytime I start iTerm (which isn’t that often because it’s gotten pretty stable), there’s a new update.”
I’ll have to check it out. I’ve wanted a tabbed terminal (that’s also reasonably fast). I wonder if it has a fullscreen mode.
Guardian Unlimited Technology: “Will Apple’s chief executive unveil a tablet Mac or an ‘iPhone’ at Macworld next week? Former sales boss David Sobotta describes the meeting which explained key thinking.”
Macworld: “Here’s a summary of a 10 things that you see shaking down in ’07...”
Theocacao: “Picture yourself going to see Flying Meat or Delicious Monster perform live (weird how those actually work as band names).”
Apple Developer Connection: “With Dashcode you will have your widget running in minutes, even if you’ve never written a line of code.”
The new HyperCard?
NewsGator Enterprise Server 1.4 won a 2007 Technology of the Year Award from InfoWorld, in the Data Management category, as Best Enterprise RSS Manager.
Congratulations to the folks working on the enterprise product! Very cool.
Niall Kennedy: “The new blog and wiki software will certainly sell more Xserve hardware due to the simplicity of the bundled GUI administration tools, but I expect Apple may also open source the software itself.”
Dan Wood: “I wanted to put out some feelers to see if there is somebody who would be interesting in help out Karelia by doing first-line technical support for Sandvox: reading incoming inquiries, responding if needed, helping users troubleshoot or find the answers in the online help, assigning as bug reports if needed, and so forth.”
Olivier Gutknecht: “S3 browser is a Mac OS X administration tool for the Amazon S3 data storage service. My goal is to build a small application useful in itself for developers or users subscribed to the S3 service, but also to provide example code showing how to access S3 through the REST API in a OS X Objective-C client application, on top of OS X technologies (Keychain, URL loading system, ...).” (Via Kevin Purcell on the Seattle Xcoders list.)
Cocoa & Medicine: “Thus, it wasn’t long before I decided to see if I could at least add mogenerator to Xcode’s script menu. It turned out to be a little more involved than I expected...”
Gus Mueller: “There is a lot of hard work that goes into making things easy and obvious (which is totally appropriate). However, I think sometimes developers can get caught in a trap of trying to make things too ‘perfect.’”
Theocacao: “There’s never been a better time to make Mac software, and who knows when an opportunity like this will come along again.”