Truer Words - A Journal

Macworld 2007 Recap

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 01:27:14 GMT

My intent at the start of my travels for MacWorld 2007 was to provide daily updates on my goings-on and derring-dos. Hah. With all the hours in the show hall, and Dinners (with a capital D) every night, I quickly learned that there was almost no time for writing.

This entry will attempt to provide those details which I can recall…

My previous entry finished on Monday morning, and mentioned my plans for the day. This is where we'll pick it up.

Monday

Booth Setup

Bare Bones rented a 2-meter booth in the "overflow hall". There was room there for two presentation stations, or one station and stacks of literature, window stickers, and CD's. They chose the latter.

When I arrived (30 minutes early), nobody and nothing was at the booth. No boxes, no computer, no literature, nobody from Bare Bones. Nobody. So, I spent some time chatting with the guys from provue (makers of Panorama), and then went back to my hotel room.

Back to the booth again at 2:30. The "media rental" guy was there, and was annoyed that we hadn't received anything yet, so he made a call and five minutes later the computer (Dual G5 tower) and the display (30" Apple Cinema) were delivered.

The mac had the wrong display card for that display (only 64 MB of vRam), so it was only able to drive it at 1200x800. I thought that was actually a *good thing*, as it was for presentations, not "daily use." Eventually everybody agreed (or at least agreed to give it a shot), and I'm glad: the display looked great if you were standing back a few feet. We often had large crowds watching our demos, and the low-resolution display made it possible for them to see everything we were doing.

Brian Arrives

Brian arrived in the area a bit early, but I couldn't leave until 3 so he found a parking space over on Mission St. and then walked over.

We met up outside, and I took him downstairs to the show entrance. Couldn't take him past the doors for the lack of an Exhibitor badge, and the 90 year old security guard was clearly prepared to Take Him Out.

Eventually Rich came out, they met, we all chatted for a minute, and then Brian and I found his car so we could go…

Touring Fisherman's Wharf

Oh the tourist-trappiness. It was nearly overwhelming. Every shop offered kitsch at off-season discounts.

In the mid-nineties, while traveling all over the country at the behest of RR Donnelley's sales people, I'd been to San Francisco with Dirk Samuelson (an RRD employee). We found a shop, somewhere, with some very high quality sweatshirts and I bought a couple for my girlfriend, Corinne. Only recently did those sweatshirts wear out enough to require dumping, so I picked up a couple more. I couldn't find anything quite as nice as the old ones (isn't that always the way?), but I did my best by looking at the offerings of every single store.

Brian picked up some chocolate for his girlfriend (whose name happens to meet Macrobyte's standards, even though he hasn't worked at Macrobyte in many years ;-). Then we dropped our packages at his car and returned to Pier 39 for some pictures of the sea lions and us in front of Alcatraz.

After the pictures, he drove me back to the Marriott and then headed back out of the city.

Brian worked for me at Macrobyte for over a year, and we've been friends for over a decade, but that was only the second time I've met him!

Working the Booth

One of the benefits of working the Bare Bones booth is that everybody already knows about the flagship product, BBEdit. In fact, a lot of the people who come to the booth just want a new t-shirt, want to talk about how they use it every day, or they just want to thank someone for creating it. Very cool. Some were very enthused, and that's putting it mildly. (The one day I wore the shirt all the way back to my room, I was twice accosted by BBEdit fans.)

Bare Bones wasn't there for the accolades. It makes for great PR, but the real point was to demo their newest product, Yojimbo.

Truth be told, I was a bit skeptical about Yojimbo before the show. I'd been a beta tester, and then I'd used 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 a little. I installed version 1.3 but didn't do much with it. My problem was that I was too conscious of what it didn't do, so I never really gave it a chance.

That first day, I completely avoided doing demos of Yojimbo, and instead focused on answering questions and doing anything else I could think of that would save me from having to demo an app I wasn't really sure about. I watched Ciaran and Patrick, though, and some ideas started to gestate.

Wednesday morning, first thing, someone asked me to give them a demo of Yojimbo. Overnight I had thought about it enough to know how to tackle it, so I gave my first version of what would become "Seth's Yojimbo demo." It was effective, and I showed most of the app's features in about seven minutes.

Over the next three days I gave that demo many dozens of times, and kept refining it down to the point where I could literally demonstrate every feature of the application in under five minutes, while at the same time I told a simple story about using the software.

With practice I became more effective, and learned what to say. For example, I could show someone how to encrypt something in the application with a single click, but that always resulted in glazed eyes or the question, "Why would I want that?" However, as part of the story I mentioned that the receipt for the gift I've just purchased is right there for my wife to see, but I can hide it from her by just clicking that encrypt button: immediate comprehension.

People like stories.

Tuesday

Breakfast at the Garden Terrace again, this time with Patrick Woolsey (Rich Siegel's partner at Bare Bones) and Ciaran Benson (who worked the booth with us all week).

After eating, Patrick and I went down to the hotel's Shipping & Receiving dept. to pick up the t-shirts and schlep them over to the hall. Ciarnan went to the printer to pick up data sheets of BB's products.

Once we were all at the booth, we only had two things to do: collate all the data sheets and media kits, and fold a couple hundred t-shirts. Ciarnan worked on the paper while I folded.

Eventually, I figured out how to fold the shirts so that the Bare Bones logo was centered on the front. I showed Patrick and a volunteer from another booth how to fold them. With three folders we made short work of the pile.

Then I helped Ciarnan finish with the media kits and data sheets, just as hundreds of visitors swarmed the show floor.

Rules of the booth: drink a lot of water, use the Purel (hand sanitizer), and ask everybody if they have a question. Most will say "no," immediately before asking a question.

Rich's Friends

A bunch of Rich's friends came to the booth toward the end of the day, expecting that Rich would join them for dinner. He had other plans already (see below), but they still hung out at the booth for at least an hour. The bantering was fun.

Someone fussed that BBEdit doesn't support a certain, very simple file type used by Mac programmers. So that night I started throwing a module together, hoping to finish it by the end of the show. Didn't quite get there, but I did have it fully functional by Sunday night. (In fact, it's already in that gentleman's hands and is being beta tested.)

Dinner with the New Rock Stars

Brent had written to a small group on Monday night about having dinner on Tuesday. In his words, "A post-keynote, post-first-day dinner with a few smart folks sounds like just the thing." Apparently, a typo resulted in my receiving the invitation also, but rather than point it out I simply accepted. ;-)

So, Tuesday night we met at the top of the escalators before walking to the restaurant. Attendees included Brent Simmons, Buzz Andersen, Gus Mueller (his page mentions meeting me, in a funny way), John Gruber, Niall Kennedy, Patrick Woolsey, Paul Kafasis, Rich Siegel, Ted Leung, myself, and possibly one or two others whose names I can't remember (sorry!).

Update: Here is Ted's picture of the dinner.

I don't remember what I ordered, but it was terrible. Yuck. Niall — sitting right next to me — made me very jealous with his gigantic, juicy hamburger. Wah.

After the introductions, we mostly talked about the death of Apple Computer, Inc. (the pundits were right all along!), the new Apple TV, and the iPhone. Most notably, the lack of 3rd party app support on the iPhone, which bit everybody in that group right in the tuckus.

Oh, and I told my...

Funny John Gruber Story

What John Gruber story? OK, here:

BBEdit 8.6 added support for the Markdown language. (Markdown is like HTML shorthand, basically.)

Writing the Markdown support for BBEdit was very challenging. This is a language that's designed to be processed once, to convert the markdown to HTML. Speed of processing was not a consideration. However, I (that is, BBEdit's Markdown module) need to process at least part of the Markdown content with every keypress, so as to figure out what to color and how to color it.

While John was beta testing the module for us, he had a bunch of very particular bug reports and feature requests. He wanted everything to be just so. It was tiring, but I appreciated it because we needed a lot of testing very quickly.

Then he submitted one last bug report. Apparently, inline links can have titles (which I knew), and those titles are delimited by quotes. Here's an example:

This is some [linked text](<link_url> "link title").

The syntax docs on John's site said that inline link's titles were delimited by double quotes. Markdown.pl, John's implementation of Markdown in perl — the canonical Markdown interpreter — used double quotes to delimit link titles.

John's bug? He pointed out that even though it's not documented, and the interpreter doesn't actually support it, it's (somehow) a bug that BBEdit did not support 'single-quote delimiters' around the link titles.

(I still think it's funny, but I guess I can see why nobody else would.)

Wednesday

I don't remember much about Wednesday except the MacSB dinner, which was a couple blocks from the show.

After walking down there, I almost went into the wrong place. The restaurant I could see had a sign that said "Chaam Cafe," so I assumed I'd been given the wrong name. However, as I drew near I saw another restaurant next door, and the part of the sign I could read said, "t Cafe". I found out Thursday that others actually went into Chaam Cafe, and two of those with whom I spoke enjoyed a Mac-related party with a bunch of people they didn't know, and got a free meal out of it!

I ate with Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba, Jerry Kayne, and Willian Van Hecke from The Omni Group. However, the restaurant was very crowded and I was tired, so I left as soon as I was done eating.

Thursday

Breakfast

As with every other day on the show floor, we had breakfast at the Marriott. Rich joined us this time, and Agnes (one of the Omelette chefs) recognized him immediately and asked where he's been all week!

"The Fetch guys" sat with us.

MacBrainiac Challenge

Rich was the captain of the developers team for this year's edition of the Macworld game show, which pit the developers against the reporters with trivia questions. Chris Breen was the host.

At the last question — which was actually a challenge, not a question — the teams were tied. The challenge was to send Chris an electronic birthday greeting from their computer (one computer per team), without using email and with the understanding that his laptop was completely off the air.

The solution was to send an SMS message to his cell phone, from iChat. The contact info had been pre-loaded onto both machines, but you had to know how to use iChat with SMS. The reporters tried to use text-to-speech to have their mac deliver the message to Chris vocally, but that answer wasn't accepted. (This really annoyed Andy Inhatko.) Frankly, I think the only reason it wasn't accepted is that it's not the answer they expected. The question should have specified that the solution had to work whether Chris was in the room or 1,000 miles away.

Anyway, the developers won.

Show Floor

My Yojimbo demo was in full swing by this point.

The last couple days of the show mostly blurred together, but I think this is the day that Merlin Mann interviewed Patrick at the booth for about fifteen minutes. You can watch the video, here.

Patrick is about 6' 4" (Update: that said 6' 1" originally. Sorry Patrick. All you little guys look the same!) and weighs a good and very solid 280-290 pounds. Throw in the dark hair, the beard, and the low, rumbly voice and you'll see why I call him Paul Bunyan. :-) Put a knit cap on his head, a plaid, flannel shirt on his shoulders, and an axe in his hand...

Rich wasn't around for most of the day. He spent all day meeting with press people, being interviewed about BBEdit and Yojimbo.

Dinner

Rich made dinner reservations for us at a Chinese restaurant, Brandy Ho's. I walked all the way (a couple miles) in, which felt great. Man, what a city for people-watching. (Corinne wouldn't have enjoyed the walk quite so much, but as I walked I thought about how much she would have loved seeing all the people.)

In attendance at dinner: Rich, Patrick, Naomi (BB's PR person), Sandy (former BB marketer), Sal Sahogian.

Yeah, that's right. I had dinner with Saul, who you all know. :-D

He told a very funny and very memorable story about his days as a nightclub manager in NYC. No room to retell it here, but the best line was, "Sal, I'm starting to get upset," said in a very quiet voice.

After dinner, Rich joined me for the walk back and we mostly talked shop until we had to split for our separate hotels.

Friday

Friday was a blur of exhaustion, sore throats, and Yojimbo-demo-burnout. ;-)

The show ended at 4 PM on Friday instead of 6 like the rest of the week, and most of the hall was rolled up by 4:30!

I couldn't find anybody at the show who was actually selling iPods (how crazy is that?), so after the show I walked to the Apple store to buy one for Corinne. Picked up a 30 GB black (which she seemed to really like when I gave it to her Saturday).

Apollo

Update: I met Apollo on Friday, for the first time ever. Not sure how I forgot this when I first wrote it up, except that I was tired of writing!

(Apollo is a cyclist from the bay area, who has made some very generous donations to my PMC fundraising efforts in the last couple of years. He also had a horrendous bike accident that nearly ended his cycling for good.)

He works right down the street from the Moscone Center, so he took an extra-long lunch break to meet me and see the show. Rich and I were out wandering the show floor (after a friendly, thirty minute chat with the tm boys). We had stopped to talk to a known BBEdit user who happened to be 6' 6" tall (Rich said he felt like a hyphen between us), when this stranger walked up and said, "You must be Seth Dillingham!" He figured it out based solely on the fact that there were two guys there wearing BBEdit t-shirts, and I was really tall!

The most notable moment for Apollo, though, was clearly when the cute Australian boothbabe stepped in front of him and offered him some information about some product. Let's just say she could have sold him any software... ;-)

Apollo went back to the BB booth with me, experienced The Yojimbo Demo, took a couple pictures, and went back to work. Nice to meet you finally, Apollo!

Bare Bones took us out for a huge steak dinner at Harris' Restaurant. A little too far to walk (I was told), but totally worth whatever it takes to get there. Wow. Second best steak dinner I've ever had, and certainly the best ever at a restaurant. This was a celebratory "family dinner," with Rich and Patrick, Naomi, Ciaran, and myself.

Saturday

Saturday morning I packed my suitcase and caught a cab. There were five people in line ahead of me for the cab, but they all got on a shuttle.

Took the taxi to Rich's hotel to pick him up, and then to the airport. So far, it was all smooth...

Airports Schmairport

My itinerary said United Airlines, but when I tried to check in with United they told me I was supposed to go to US Air. GRRRRRRRRR. That's in another terminal about 500 miles away. So I said goodbye to Rich and hurried over there (though I had plenty of time).

Check-in took forever because my bag was overweight. This also cost me $50. It took them 20 minutes to print the receipt for that $50. This meant that by the time I got to the security line, I was already pretty frustrated.

Beep! That's me, trying to go through the metal detector.

"Sir, you'd better take off your watch and your belt. If you beep a second time, we have to do a personal inspection." That sounded ominous.

Beep! That's me, trying to go through the same metal detector with a tiny, forgotten pillbox in my pocket. I had to strip down to just shorts and t-shirt and stand in a phone booth which is rigged to detect eplosive residue. After that, the "personal inspection." I had to stand with my arms out the sides, palms up, while they wanded me from head to toe. This is all done right out in the open, of course. For your protection.

I checked my anger. Humiliation is the order of the day when you fly, now. It's the next best thing to security!

On the flight to Philly, I sat next to a Java programmer who was very jealous of how fast my MacBook Pro could wake from sleep (he had a Dell), and an old consultant to the printing industry who knew all about the startup of the RR Donnelley Lancaster West plant (which is where I met Corinne). He even thought he recognized her picture.

Philly to Providence was just a 40 minute flight, and I sat next to a couple who cuddled and made out the entire time. Touched down in Providence just a few minutes early, and walked straight to the baggage claim...

... and right past Corinne, who stood there looking amused. I realized what I'd done just a second too late. ;-) (In my defense, I was expecting her to be waiting for me outside, and I was trying to read the signs to see where my bags would come in.)

Thank you, Bare Bones, for letting me help out at the booth. It was a great week! (And it's even better to be home!)

Happy New Year, One and All

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 16:22:11 GMT

2006 was a good year for me and mine, in many ways.

To all of my family near and far, to my ecclesia here and worldwide, to all of my friends new and old, close or distant:

Happy
New Year!

Hoping 2007 will be even better, for all of us...

NetNewsWire 2.1

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 10 May 2006 22:58:24 GMT

Brent has announced the release of NetNewsWire 2.1

NetNewsWire 2.1 has been released!

This release of NetNewsWire includes new features such as NewsGator syncing, posting to del.icio.us, sending articles via email, printing, and sorting subscriptions by attention. It’s also a universal binary and includes lots of performance enhancements and bug fixes.

This is the first new release since NewsGator bought Brent's company, Ranchero Software, last year. I've been beta testing 2.1 all along, but I haven't been participating on the list because I've been so busy! (Which is a good thing, considering.)

As you'd expect from Brent, this is a solid update. The synchro with NewsGator is smooth as butter, which is truly an impressive feature you have to see to believe. Read your feeds on your Mac at work, then when you get home you find that the items you already read at work are marked "already read" there, too. Away from your computer, but need your news fix? NewsGator's online service is *also* kept in sync with your copies of NetNewsWire.

Very cool. It's nice to have an intel-native build, too. ;-)

A Better History of Apple

seth@macrobyte.net — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 02:37:32 GMT

This is the best and most amazing history of Apple I've ever read.

You could tell, just from looking at him, what the strain of trying to tame that beast for Steve had cost him. Others took up the challenge, but the RDF just wasn't the same, or as reliable.

And, of course, you know what that meant to Apple, and to Steve.

But a few years ago, I was working with Guy Kawasaki on...

Thanks for the link, Brent!

NewsGator Buys NetNewsWire from Ranchero, Gets Brent Too

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 22:39:24 GMT

I first saw a story about this on Jim's Have Browser, Will Travel, and was quite surprised. Ranchero Software (Brent and Sheila Simmons) has sold NetNewsWire to NewsGator (one of the 'big dogs' in the RSS world).

The Q & A at NewsGator's site answers a lot of the questions I saw (or thought of) when I started looking around for more information, but here's the answer to my own question:

Q: Brent, I thought you loved being an independent developer. How could you work for another company?

Brent: I did love being an independent developer, absolutely. But I also love the idea of being able to take NetNewsWire to the next level and work with a bunch of smart folks who share the vision of RSS everywhere.

While there is still so much we my wife Sheila and I, Ranchero Software could do as a small independent company, we couldnt possibly do everything NewsGator is doing. We couldnt, on our own, deliver syncing across all these devices and platforms, even though our customers were asking for it.

Since us buying NewsGator wasnt completely realistic, we decided to join NewsGator. ;)

What he doesn't say, of course, is just how many Millions and Millions of Dollars he got from this deal, so I guess we'll just have to speculate. ;-) I hope he did very well, and that his deal's value doesn't depend *entirely* on NewsGator's future stock value. (I think they'll do quite nicely, but that's beside the point.)

Actually, this move doesn't surprise me all that much. I do remember wondering if something like this would happen, back when NewsGator acquired FeedDemon and it's creator, Nick Bradbury (who officially welcomes Brent to NewsGator here).

The Q&A also mentions MarsEdit, which is now looking for a home. I'm surprised about that... NewsGator took on TopStyle, Nick's HTML editor, but not MarsEdit, a weblog editor. Would MarsEdit seem to be at least as 'in sync' with their other product offerings? Strange.

Safari and WebKit Support WYSIWYG Editing (contentEditable)

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 15:22:29 GMT

Good news! Dave Hyatt reports that they've added support for 'contentEditable' and 'designMode' to Safari version 1.3 (which was released with the update to Mac OS X 10.3.9) and Tiger's forthcoming version 2.0. (It's in WebKit, too, which is the rendering engine used by Safari and shared by many other apps.)

HTML Editing
Safari 1.3 supports HTML editing, both at the Objective-C WebKit API level and using contenteditable and designMode in a Web page. The new Mail app in Tiger uses WebKit for message composition. You can write apps that make use of WebKit's editing technology and deploy them on Panther and Tiger.

I had understood that Safari wouldn't have support for WYSIWYG HTML editing until 2.0 (as I've mentioned before).

This means, of course, that now we have to update Conversant's WYSIWYG plugin, which is based on a beta version of HTMLArea 3. HTMLArea doesn't yet support Safari (and I'm not sure if they're still updating it or not), so it looks like we're on our own here. It also means that WYSIWYG editing is supported by all three of the major browsers: IE, Mozilla/Firefox, and Safari.

I've kicked around the idea of updating our plugin to the latest beta of HTMLArea, but it's just too darn big! Some people might like all the extra features -- and some of them are very nice -- but 100 Kb?!

Anyway, this update to Safari and WebKit should also allow |Brent| to add support for WYSIWYG editing to MarsEdit, without requiring his users to upgrade to Tiger right away.

Lots of other nice features in there, too. Full support for DOM 2, wicked fast JavaScript, XSLT (perhaps the only feature Brian A. will care about!). I'm both impressed and surprised, I was really sure they were going to make us wait for Safari 2 for most of this.

They Really, Really (Really, Really) Like NetNewsWire

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 16 Apr 2005 02:04:42 GMT

OK, NetNewsWire is good. I don't dispute that. It's definitely the best aggregator out there.

However, it's not a "God." Nor are Brent or Sheila deities of any type (I'm pretty sure about this), in spite of what some people have said.

Wow. And they have a perfect 5/5 score on all points after 36 reviews!

That's awesome, Brent. Congratulations!

Happy Birthday to Brent, Josh, and Nicholas

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 20:34:10 GMT

Happy Birthday to Brent (who needs no introduction, since he has his own channel!), and NIcholas (who I don't know well, but do know from the Frontier community), and Josh Lucas (who years ago helped Macrobyte get its biggest customer ever, Compaq Computer).

What is "Unfrozen Caveman?"

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 19:49:06 GMT

Flip, Jim, Greg, Steve, and Brent (update: and Apollo, Daniel, and Terry) have each linked to the story about the Firefox book. I really appreciate it... this is a very big deal for me, as most of you know.

Brent said that my description of the SOAP hack made him feel like "Unfrozen Caveman." If anybody has a clue stick, I need a beating. (Did it make him feel a bit behind the times? Out of touch with the tech? Really old? Maybe it thickened his brow and made him a good shot with a spear?)

Cool Interview with Sheila and Brent

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 17:41:18 GMT

"On the support side, the biggest challenge for me has been learning about all the weblog systems that work with MarsEdit."

That's Sheila Simmons, Brent's wife and half of Ranchero Software, in DrunkenBlog: Inside Ranchero with Brent and Sheila Simmons. Very cool interview with both both Brent and Sheila.

Sheila, in that quote, was articulating the client side of the problem I first described here, and which Simon Fell referred to as slightly uniform interfaces. (Eventually we'll get to the point that everybody has to special-case something into every feature for everybody else's bugs, or we just code to the spec and "damn the torpedoes.")

Most of the interview has nothing to do with this subject, but I had to quote something...

Format Nazi!? Good Grief, No Wonder the Empires are Taking Over

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 12:52:23 GMT

Dave writes that he thinks RSS formats should be merging instead of diversifying right now, because the aggregator developers are under attack by the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo. (They see a market and have started to consume it.) This is probably in reference to the fact that an RFC for RSS 1.1 was recently published, and is not backwards-compatible with RSS 1.0 or any of the other RSS formats.

So what happens? He allows comments on his post, and it explodes into name calling and the blame game... all without Dave saying another word. They even referred to him as a "format nazi." I can't even figure out what that means! (I assume you're keeping score, Mark.)

I happen to agree with Dave (believe it or not), that the aggregator developers are in serious trouble because Yahoo and Microsoft are building aggregators into their web site services. At the same time there's the problem of RSS-related features showing up in browsers like Firefox and Safari (under Tiger).

If you read that thread, does it really leave any doubt as to why the big guys think they can take over the show, why they can consume this emerging market? The programmers just want to fight about the technology. Dave's point is that the technology is there now, it's already implemented. RSS (or whatever syndication format you prefer) is already available everywhere. While we're contemplating our navels (thinking about how to re-write the technology to do the same stuff in a different way) and fighting with each other, the other guys are quietly packing all of the users in a big bus and driving away.

There's a lot more in this thread on Brent's site. I posted some more of my own thoughts there (quoted below), and am surprised to find that Dave twice told people to go back and read what I wrote.

I think what Phil (and Dave, actually) are saying is that we're debating a technical issue in a bubble while business decisions are being made (and markets are being consumed) around us.

We need to [find and/or go with] the solution that the biggest producers of RSS feeds will be willing to use but which doesn't leave desktop aggregators out in the cold.

Brent Seems to be Having a Rough Week

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 19:33:06 GMT

First Brent has to deal with the whole Mary Hodder fiasco. Everybody seemed to have an opinion on that. I didn't know what to say. Frankly, I think the big deal people are making about it being beta software is a cop-out. Bugs happen. Does the software come with a guarantee that it won't lose any data? No, and that's not just because it's beta, it's because software (all of it) sucks and we're all lazy.

From what I've read, they both learned lessons from this. Brent's going to do more to make sure people know when they're working with a beta version. (What will he do the first time a a golden release crashes and takes some user's data out with it? Don't tell me it won't happen. All software sucks, and developers who say otherwise are just trying to keep you from looking too closely at our house of cards.) Mary apparently learned to take beta warnings a little more seriously, she learned not to admit to not doing regular backups like the rest of us ;-), and she learned not to harshly criticize one of the most popular individual mac developers on the web.

I wish good luck and a really well built bomb shelter to the creator of the next "production quality" software that crashes and takes out some of Mary's data. It'll be a lot more difficult to convince her of the truth, that all software sucks, the second time around.

(This fact isn't an excuse, but it is reality. It might be cool and fun and very useful, but it all sucks.)

Once that issue finally started to quiet down, Greg at Airbag Industries complained loudly that you have to join a mailing list to get technical support for MarsEdit. That would be ridiculous if it were true, but it's not: just send an email to their support address (as listed on Ranchero's site).

Brent's being pro-active, he actually posted the answer to Greg's question in the comments on the site, but he won't be able to do that for everyone.

MarsEdit 1.0 (Oops!)

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 11:18:48 GMT

I've been so busy lately that I neglected to mention the release of MarsEdit 1.0 from Ranchero Software (aka Brent and Sheila).

MarsEdit is a desktop weblog editor. It's a bit like an email program, or an NNTP client, and it supports just about every weblog server platform out there. Let's you post to your weblog (on a server) without running a browser. It's certainly faster than most browser-based interfaces. (It only has to transmit and receive commands and weblog posting data, rather than all the extra stuff that's included with a web page.)

I have to apologize to Brent for not pointing this out sooner. He put in some work making sure that the UI (for posting to a Conversant "Weblog II" page) was nicely tweaked with some of our extra features. I really appreciate that. (Example user: Jim now posts to his weblog with MarsEdit.)

For some inexplicable reason, I'm still not using Conversant's newer weblog page here on my own site. That means I can't really take advantage of MarsEdit for [tw]. I'm so backwards! I started doing an upgrade a few months ago, but got distracted by actually working on the software instead of my site.

More About Morality in the Election

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 11:26:43 GMT

I'm seeing a lot of comments around the web about the morality issue in the election. Most of the comments are from Democrats... which is not really a surprise, since I'm seeing the comments on the web. ;-)

What's bothering me about some of these comments is the idea that the Republicans used fear and proclamations of good and evil to convince the electorate that they were the more moral choice.

Consider Brent's comments:

Now, I voted for Kerry for moral reasons as well as practical. Freedom and civil rights are moral issues. The differences between Kerrys and Bushs foreign and economic policies are, in many cases, moral differences.

(And I think that winning an election by scaring people with gays is immoral. Its cynical, manipulative, panderingand its highly effective.)

Brent considers freedom, civil rights, and Federal fiscal policy to be moral issues. Generally, though, I think people consider those to be, well, civil issues.

Lots of people still believe in the "old fashioned" sense of right and wrong. Bad fiscal policy is stupid, but it's not "sinful." The Patriot Act is disturbing and restrictive and overarching, but it's not shameful or scandalous.

This knee-jerk reaction that the Republicans only got the "morality vote" because they scared people is just plain wrong, and is preventing people from seeing what may have actually happened here. That is, the "left" and the "right" seem to have developed entirely different senses of right and wrong.

Years ago we had a long discussion about right and wrong, morality, and atheism. The current issue goes right back to what I was trying to understand (and the point I was trying to make) back then: what is your source of morality? What is your moral compass?

On one side of this election, the compass was apparently one's own sense of what does or does not harm another (humanism, generally, and I only use that term because that's what others have used). On the other side of the election, the compass seems to be based more on a learned morality, mostly from the Bible but probably also from a shared sense of what it says (especially as there is no way that all those voters are actually "religious").

Perhaps it would be better to try to understand why Bush would win the moral vote, why people might see him as the more moral of the two, without chalking it up to stupidyt, fear, or intimidation, and without attempting to psycho-analyze millions of people.

(Please note that I didn't vote, and I was bound to be disappointed no matter who won. I personally don't think either choice was a particularly moral character. This post is about understanding what happened, not promoting either viewpoint.)

Choose Your High Ground

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 18:23:49 GMT

A complaint I often see about "the right," especially the "religious right," is that they always try to take the moral high ground.

But doesn't the left tend to claim the "intellectual high ground" as their territory? Today Brent made numerous references to the Democrats being the result of America's roots in Enlightenment, and basing everything on Reason. Since this was in contrast to the "other side," doesn't that imply that they are both unreasonable and unenlightened?

Brian Carnell made the point quite well in a reply to the message that started this topic. He said:

... the problem is that the media portrays opponents of gay marraige as a bunch of redneck bigots and the current strategy for instituting gay marriage is to bypass legislatures and go to the courts. Nobody should be surprised that when you tell a sizable part of the population that they're a bunch of bigoted morons whose opinion won't matter...

The "left" seems to believe that the "right" just needs more education, as though the reason they disagree is simply that one side doesn't understand the issues clearly enough, and those "educated few" on the right who still disagree are either bigoted (obviously that doesn't apply to all the issues), naturally unintelligent, or have some personal stake in or history with the issue which prevents them from seeing clearly.

The "right," however, tends to act like the "left" are a bunch of evil, baby-killing, gay heathen who have lost their way. With no built-in moral guidance of their own, laws are needed to protect them from theselves and to prevent them from corrupting America.

What a mess. Were this a negotiation of some sort, both sides would need a cooling off period.

Personally, I think the US is at its best when it's swimming the channel between the two banks, recognizing that individual rights and freedoms are wonderful and essential things, and tempering that recognition with an understanding that some things really do Matter, that some things can be Right or Wrong based on nothing more than principle.

Friendly Competition Between MarsEdit and Ecto

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 07:34:16 GMT

It's been fun to watch the friendly competition between MarsEdit and Ecto.

This morning, Brent wrote about crash protection in MarsEdit. Adriaan responded (in the comments) with confirmation that Ecto does that too.

Right now the two apps seem to be very similar. Hopefully the next generation will show some real envelope-pushing, experimentation, and unique features. Choosing which one to use now is as much about which developer you know or like better as it is about the application itself.

What I'd really like to see, of course, is a cross-platform editor that supports all the extra stuff in Conversant, including (especially) multiple categorization and keyword fields, and the ability to publish a post to any URL on the site. Unfortunately, I don't expect either editor to grow a bunch of Conversant-only features unless a lot of users requested them.

Brent on MarsEdit and WYSIWYG Editors for Weblogs

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 13:52:56 GMT

Referring to his company's new "external weblog editor," MarsEdit, Brent Simmons mentions that adding a WYSIWYG HTML editor would be a black hole because so many people would want different features. He feels that he would have ended up writing a full-featured html parser and editor. If there weren't one coming soon from "another company," he might have tried it, but there is one coming.

His coy references to "some other company" are amusing, since it's already been announced -- at least unofficially -- by one of the most vocal of that company's developers.

I understand why Brent decided to wait until Safari's/WebKit's wysiwyg editor comes out -- sometime next year -- but I also agree with Adriaan's approach in ecto (see the comments at the bottom of Brent's page). Doing something basic that removes the need for most users to type html tags (bold, italics, links, images, and headlines) seems like a really good idea, because it opens up your software to users who want to create weblogs but don't want to learn HTML. Those people exist, believe me, and there are going to be more and more of them as weblogs continue to hit the mainstream.

A "basic" editor isn't truly wysiwyg, and you'd have to state right up front that this version of the editor is only going to support a very limited subset of HTML, and it's only there to "get you by" until Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) comes out and includes the features he needs for the full-featured version. He'd also need to have a "mode switch" for those who want to edit the tags directly (which would simply switch the user to the current editor). Still, none of this would be "throw away code," as he could keep this version of the editor in there as a fall-back for anybody who doesn't immediately upgrade to Tiger.

(Note: since he was being coy, perhaps Brent wasn't referring to Tiger's wysiwyg editor. That's extremely unlikely, though.)

None of this is meant as a criticism of MarsEdit or Brent, though. He put in some real work to make sure that MarsEdit works perfectly with Conversant and it's Weblog II plugin, and for the foreseeable future every other weblog editor will have to use it as their benchmark in that regard. I really appreciate that effort, believe me. (I know two other developers are finally considering similar support.)

I Needed That

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 03 Jan 2004 15:51:31 GMT

Thanks, Brent. I'm ok now. :-)

Happy Birthday RSD

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 18 Dec 2003 13:11:33 GMT

Really Simple Discovery, or RSD, turns one year old today. RSD is little more than a specification for an XML document that lets editors auto-configure themselves for editing data on your website (like posting to your weblog). Also includes a link tag format for the head area of the page to be configured, which tells the editor where to look for the RSD file.

One example use: if you use NetNewsWire to post to a Conversant, Manila, or Radio weblog, you just have to tell NNW three things: the URL of the weblog's home page, and your username and password. The RSD file tells it what protocol to use for posting, and what parameters to provide.

I was thinking about this auto-configuration problem over a year ago, when I looked at Daniel Berlinger's site and found that happened to be thinking about it at the same time, and was a little further down the road than I was. After a number of email and posts on our sites (and a few others, it wasn't just Daniel and I), RSD was born. Lots of web software added support for it very quickly.

Daniel gets most of the credit. Congrats, Daniel! Brent had a lot to do with it, too. I guess Stephan Schmidt did, also, though I never spoke with him. Dave Winer's primary contribution was a single (important) message, and near instantaneous support in Radio and Manila.

Ranchero Software Ships NetNewsWire 1.0

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 11 Feb 2003 17:42:02 GMT

Brent Simmons announced a few minutes ago that his company, Ranchero Software, has released NetNewsWire 1.0 (previously referred to as NetNewsWire Pro).

The free version, NetNewsWire Lite (released last year), is a RSS news aggregator. It reads RSS feeds from your favorite web sites and services, and allows you to read them "one item at a time" in a familiar, email-like interface.

NetNewsWire has all of the features of Lite, but adds some important features. The most important new feature, and the one that will certainly get the most press, is that it's a publishing tool. NNW allows you to write your own weblog posts and submit them to your weblog via one of the supported "Weblog API's."

Other new features include full scriptability, an outline-based notepad, a find command for searching through all of the items currently in the database, and a bunch of other stuff I'd list if I was pretending to be a brochure. (I'm just a satisfied user and one of Brent's friends.)

A bunch of people on the beta list paid for copies of NNW as soon as he made it possible to do so. I hope this is the beginning of NNW (and Brent) gaining the momentum and success they deserve.

Congratulations, Brent! You're a daddy!

The "Value" of My RSD Approach...

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 20 Nov 2002 12:13:42 GMT

Brent and Daniel are having a conversation about RSD on Daniel's site. Brent's planning to support something like RSD (hopefully RSD's final format) in NNW.

Brent's thoughts are that the document needs to be kept incredibly simple, but I don't understand why he's taking it so far. Our intent (or mine, anyway) is that...

Continued...

Brent Switched to Mail.app for Bayesian Filters

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 23 Oct 2002 16:47:31 GMT

Brent Simmons mentioned today that he switched to Mail.app from Eudora, because of the bayesian filters in Mail.app.

As I mentioned last week, I'm using SpamSieve with Mailsmith to get basically the same filtering algorithms, without having to switch to a mail client I like a lot less. I'm still training it, but only a couple unwanted messages are slipping through per day.

SpamSieve doesn't support Eudora yet, but the interface between the mail client and SpamSieve is entirely AppleScript-based. According to this support page, the only problem is a bug in Eudora 5.1.1. If it's fixed in the next version, support for Eudora will be included.