Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

So, it would appear that the del.icio.us API URL has changed recently, and that it’s causing problems with Cocoalicious. I was able to solve the problem simply by opening Cocoalicious, going to Preferences, changing the API URL to:

https://api.del.icio.us/v1

…and then restarting. Let me know how that works for you (if it doesn’t, I’ll have to look into the problem a bit more).

(Update: Question for those who say it isn’t working. Are you restarting the app after changing the URL?)

(Update 2: Have you tried unchecking “automatically log in” in the preferences, then restarting and logging in?)

(Update 3: OK, I’m aware people are having problems–although it’s working OK for me–but I do not have the time to deal with this right now.  Sorry–I’ll look at it when I can.)

Ah, summer! Even if all of the pre-WWDC activity at work wasn’t enough to remind me that my favorite hot weather nerd confab is rapidly approaching, I would definitely not have forgotten because of the many emails and personal queries I’ve been getting from you all about my yearly WWDC party. To all who have been asking: thank you–I sincerely appreciate your keen interest!

As I mentioned before, this year I had far more ambitious plans for the party than in previous years, so the planning has been much more logistically challenging. Fortunately, all the ducks are now in a row, so I can finally fill you all in on the details.

The first thing I should mention is that this year we have a generous benefactor whose contributions have made my crazy scheme feasible: Brent Simmons and the good people of NewsGator Technologies (Denver represent). Thanks to their sponsorship, this year’s party will be bigger and better than ever. And what does that mean, you ask?

Well, first, we have a beautiful venue: 111 Minna (a bar/club/art gallery only a short walk from the Moscone Center). Second, we will have some free drink tickets (come early is my advice). Third, Brent will be giving a preview of NetNewsWire 3.0. And, fourth, we will have music galore, including:

• An experimental A/V set by Apple engineer and DJ Chris Moulios (a.k.a. Suboctave), who some may remember as the creator of ACID.
• A live performance and DJ set by San Francisco’s Broker/Dealer (who, it should be pointed out, have an awesome video featuring tons of vintage Apple equipment–including Lisas!)

There may also be a few other surprises (like that San Francisco legend I hinted at in my previous post), depending on what I can line up…

So, there you have it: not only is the party on, it’s way on! If you’re planning to attend, or even if you just think you might be, I would very helpful to me if you could register your interest on the event’s Upcoming.org page so I can get an idea of what we’re looking at for attendance:

http://upcoming.org/event/93479/

Even if you’re not a member of Upcoming yet, the signup process is really minimal, they won’t spam you, they’re good people, they’ve got nice RSS and iCal integration, blah, blah, blah, etc.

See you all in San Francisco!

I’ve kind of been asleep at the Cocoalicious wheel for awhile now, which is a shame because not only have there been some well known problems, I also left the CVS repository in a bad enough state to prevent anyone besides me from fixing said problems. What can I say: it’s summertime, and the living is easy.

Fortunately, I have finally managed to scrape together enough time to get the two biggest problems (a crasher, and a bug that would allow the post cache on disk to be overwritten by blank data in some conditions) fixed. Check out Cocoalicious 1.0b43 for the fixes.

In case anyone’s wondering, the crashing problem that I got so many complaints about had to do with URLs containing literal percent signs, such as the following:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%s

Basically, the issue was that if you pass NSURL’s URLWithString: method a URL like that, it will simply return nil instead of a new NSURL, because it tries to interpret the “%s” as an escape code, and it’s not a valid escape code. I wasn’t checking for nil before I tried to insert the new URL into an NSArray, which is what would actually cause the crash. The solution would seem simple: just escape the percent sign before you turn the string into a URL object, so you end up with:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%25s

And this does indeed work, until you submit the URL to del.icio.us and then re-download it. When you get this URL back in the del.icio.us post XML, what you end up with is:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%2525s

In other words, del.icio.us escaped the percent sign again (”%25″ is the escape code for the percent sign), which means if you edit that post in Cocoalicious and re-submit it, you’ll end up with an incorrect URL.

I’m not sure whether I can consider this a bug or not (it seems to me that del.icio.us shouldn’t naively re-escape the percent signs at the beginning of valid escape sequences), but until I figure out what to do about it, this is going to be a known issue in Cocoalicious.

Lately a lot of people have been asking me questions about whether or not I’m going to be putting on a dinner or party in conjunction with WWDC. The answer is: yes, of course! The problem is, this year my plans for the shindig are a bit more ambitious, and I simply haven’t had a lot of time to investigate the logistics yet.

Because I have yet to finalize any of my grand plans, and I don’t want to disappoint people if they don’t work out, I’ve been intentionally tightlipped so far, but I do realize people want to make plans, so I’ll provide a few details now:

• This year I plan to transition completely away from a dinner held in a restaurant and toward a proper party in a dedicated venue. I do still hope to have some refreshments provided by a local San Francisco legend (more on this later if it actually works out).
• The party will be held, as always, on the first day of WWDC–which this year means August 7th.
• If everything works out as planned, this year’s will feature some additional attractions beyond the party itself.
• There’s a good chance that the venue will be 21+, which, sadly, means many students will be unable to attend. I’m going to try to work around this, but if not, my apologies to our undergrad friends.
• I eventually plan to gauge attendance by posting an event on Upcoming.org, but it would be interesting to see through the comments here what peoples’ reactions to the above are.

Thanks everyone for your patience as I figure this out, and I look forward to seeing you August 7th!

I’m off to Las Vegas tomorrow evening for the National Association of Broadcasters show. If you happen to be attending the show and feel like saying hello, I’ll be demoing Soundtrack Pro in the Apple booth Wednesday and Thursday afternoon. See you there!

Thanks to some gentle prodding from Ted Leung, I finally got around to producing a Cocoalicious Universal Binary release (b41) this week. This version also has support for del.icio.us’ long awaited private bookmarking feature (if you check the “private” box while posting, Cocoalicious marks the post in its own local cache as private and flags it as private when uploading to del.icio.us). Finally, I also incorporated the latest version of the Sparkle Software Update framework (which just keeps getting better and better, by the way). Enjoy!

A little while ago I introduced a field on my weblog’s comments form asking users to simply enter my first name. I did this, following Andrew Wooster’s suggestion, as a simple but amazingly effective anti-spam measure. Unfortunately, I think it’s been a little too effective: since I introduced it I’ve gotten noticeably fewer comments, as well as some confused emails. With this in mind, I just wanted to take a moment to clarify that this field is not meant to be some sort of riddle or exclusivity test: when it asks “What is Buzz’s first name?” it’s looking for “Buzz.”

Since this does seem to be a consistent source of confusion, however (and I can see how it would be, since “Buzz” is actually a nickname), I’m definitely going to change the wording to something clearer. Apologies for the ambiguity.

Buzz visits Odeo
Originally uploaded by dom.net.

Last week, I had another opportunity to visit my friends at Odeo, at the invitation of their crack QA guru Dominic Sagolla. As many of you may recall, I have always had a bit of a soft spot for the good people of Odeo because of my interest in audio-oriented social software. I’ve always had a feeling that the Odeo people will be the ones to eventually hit on the formula that makes audio social software compelling in a way that, say, Last.fm just isn’t, and the previews that Dom showed me of Odeo’s future continue to make me optimistic.

One feature that is of particular interest to me is the newly unveiled “Link to Audio” functionality. As many of you may recall, until recently I ran an “ad-hoc” podcast created simply by linking to MP3s on my server using del.icio.us and taking advantage of the del.icio.us media support. Now Odeo users can do essentially the same thing, with a big difference: instead of publishing the file to the world, they can choose to merely send it to the inbox of one or more contacts in their social network. Since the contacts can then send the same file to the inbox of their own contacts, this feature is a bit reminiscent of the recombinant podcasting idea I’ve mentioned in the past. And, let’s face it, since the sharing stays within the social network, there’s no need for “the man” to ruin the fun.

Based on this and a few other things I saw, I think Odeo is doing an admirable job of reinventing itself in the face of iTunes’ entrance into the podcasting world. I look forward to seeing how some of the other things they’re working on are received by the public.

(Update: P.S.: If you were a fan of my old podcast, feel free to add me as a contact on Odeo.

As many of you probably know, I’ve become notoriously bad about things like updating my weblog and answering my email. Well, I’ve decided to make a clean break and start trying to manage my email the Merlin Mann way.

As part of my great email reset, however, I essentially took my daunting pile of existing inbox messages (stretching back to 2004) and dumped them all to a folder called “Archived Messages.” The only problem with this is that I feel guilty about all the email in that pile with questions for me, favors to ask, crashes to fix, and the like that I won’t be getting to. Therefore I’m now issuing a blanket invitation/request: if you’ve emailed me in the past few months and not gotten a response, please feel free to email me again and get into my newly (and probably temporarily) manageable queue.

Thanks, and now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

(Update: I always forget my email is nowhere on this page. You can email me at buzz at this domain.)

It’s 2 AM, and I should be going to bed after a hard day’s night, but I just discovered something in NetNewsWire that I have to share (even though it’s probably old news by now): my friend Peter Ammon finally got to release his long-awaited hex editor for OS X, Hex Fiend.

Peter started working on Hex Fiend back when he and I worked together in OS X QA, and he approached the project of filling the OS X hex editor gap (a gap I definitely can vouch for, having worked extensively with frustrating hex editors to develop PodWorks) with the kind of megalomania readers of his weblog have come to expect. Not content to simply develop a nice tool for the job, Peter set about creating an editor that allows users to edit arbitrarily large files and do so using an NSTextView. An impressive feat by any standard.

Here’s hoping some of Peter’s work here eventually finds its way into the Cocoa text system!