Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

Remember almost a year and a half ago, when, in an utterly unrelated post about a torturous flight to London, I mentioned that I was writing an EXIF photo metadata parser in Perl (it’s OK if you don’t—I think Matt Gemmell was the only one who actually read my site back then)? Alright, now remember about a month ago when I said I had decided to abandon that project and use Flickr instead? Well, today I’m happy to announce that I thought better of casting aside so much tedious Perl packing and upacking work and decided to finish what I had started.

So, without further ado, here is a “beta” version (1.0+3i, following Rael’s imaginary version numbering scheme for Bloxom betas) of my new minimalist, Zen-compliant, Blosxom photo gallery plugin.

- Pixom (32k)

I’m very pleased with the way this project turned out, and I have a good deal I want to write about it (including an explanation of the important features, some setup documentation, and a gratuitous but epic history of my struggle to develop a minimalist-yet-powerful photo sharing solution), but unfortunately I just don’t have the energy at present. For now, just enjoy the demonstration of Pixom in action below, and stay tuned for more information.

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I have to admit, I was always a little nervous about how the WWDC Weblogger Dinner would come together (never having planned such an “event” before), but I’m proud to report that not only did last night’s festivities go off without a hitch, they were actually successful beyond my expectations. I’m not exactly sure how many people ended up attending, but it was certainly over 30, and I think we had a great mix of truly interesting people (both Apple and indie developers) having conversations that ranged from Safari’s RSS integration to medieval Welsh!

For me, the most interesting thing about the dinner was actually meeting so many people I’d previously known only through web pages. It was as if my NetNewsWire subscription list had suddenly sprung to life, and it was fascinating to see how peoples’ actual appearances and personalities differed from my impressions. Michael McCracken, for example, was a lot younger than I expected, while Wolf Rentzsch was more friendly and outgoing.

My only real regret is that our space didn’t accomodate mingling very well. I tried my best to make it to every table and have a meaningful conversation with everyone, but I still ended up feeling that I hadn’t really talked to people as much as I would have liked. I think this is one respect in which the Thirsty Bear would have been a far better venue (the other respect would definitely have been food). Now that I’m a little more experienced, I will plan ahead for next year’s dinner and beat O’Reilly and the rest of the WWDC party scene to the punch on reservations.

I want to sincerely thank everyone who attended. I think it’s a testament to the awesome social networking power of weblogs that someone like me can have so many interesting acquaintances, and I appreciate you letting me hang out with you. All of this, of course, makes me sad that I can’t attend ADHOC, but, hey, there’s always next year…

In the meantime, here are a few photos documenting the occasion (apologies if I missed you—I rejected a lot of my shots as unflattering due to eating or what have you).

(Update: It has come to my attention that some people felt excluded. My apologies, although I’m not sure what I should have done to promote the dinner more effectively—demand that more widely read webloggers mention it? I guess I assumed that Brent’s post on the subject would have been seen by most of the Mac developer/weblogger community.)

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I managed to make it up to San Francisco for WWDC yesterday, just in time to see what surely must have been the coolest day of the conference so far. Even though I was aware of the existence of technologies like the Core Data and Spotlight frameworks well in advance of the conference, and therefore had become somewhat blasé toward them, hearing specific details from their developers really got me fired up about them all over again. I think Dominic Giampaolo’s Spotlight demo, in particular, did a much better job than the keynote of conveying the possibilities of Tiger’s new extensible metadata file system. It’s too bad more people couldn’t have seen it.

In addition to the WWDC sessions, I also decided to take a quick trip across the street to JavaOne to talk to Dan Wood about his work with Sun on Project Alameda. I’m a fan of Watson (I use it essentially every time I want to know what’s on TV or in theaters), so naturally I was a little disappointed to hear it would be discontinued in its current, Mac-native incarnation. Still, I’m glad to hear that Dan got some investment in his technology and Sun got a nice example of Java on the desktop out of the deal.

The day finished with Fraser Speirs’ excellent RSS/Syndication birds-of-a-feather session, which saw Safari RSS developers Jens Alfke and Sarah Wilkin finally meeting their public—not to mention a cadre of third-party RSS application developers (including Brent Simmons, Fraser himself, Andrei Tapolow, PulpFiction representative Scott Stevenson, and Joe Pezzillo).

The conversation was fairly open-ended, and ranged from bewildered outsider queries about why people read weblogs in the first place to ruminations on the possibility of enclosing multimedia binary data in RSS feeds. For me, though, the biggest lesson of the evening was that, due to its relative simplicity, RSS is a fairly universal syndication format that can be lots of different things to different people, and that no single RSS app can satisfy everybody. Because of this, I personally believe that apps like NetNewsWire, PulpFiction, and Shrook, with their divergent approaches to syndication, all still have important roles to play on the Mac platform in the post-Safari RSS era. I look forward to seeing small, agile developers continue to surprise us with innovation in the RSS space.

Never one to forget my duty as an obsessive documentarian, I did manage to snap a few photos of this historic meeting of the RSS minds, and here they are…

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You know how The New Yorker does a big, fat “Summer Fiction Issue” every June, and then disappears from your mailbox for a few weeks while the magazine’s staff enjoys a well-earned holiday? Well, that’s pretty much how you should think about my recent weblogging hiatus. I haven’t lost interest in weblogging at all, and, in fact, I’ve actually got a rather large backlog of post ideas tucked away in VoodooPad. But, taking a cue from George Costanza, I made a decision earlier in the year that this was going to be the Summer of Buzz (a “…time to taste the fruits and let the juices drip down my chin,” to quote the man himself), and, unfortunately, my irrepressible lust for life and resolve to really get out there and explore California just hasn’t left a lot of time for cranking out copy.

I plan to get around to posting regularly again soon (I still regret that I never managed to write a WWDC wrapup, considering what a great time I had), but until then, I’m posting a recap (and a bunch of photos) of my recent activites for journaling purposes.

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Steve Ruble, who is described in his bio as an evangelist for “the application of Weblogs and RSS in traditional public relations campaigns,” penned a weblog entry yesterday morning that has taken off in the way so many boldly stated but half-baked weblog essays seem to these days (witness the “Rhapsody in Yellow” phenomenon for another example). His core assertion is that Apple’s failure to jump on the corporate blogging bandwagon the way Microsoft and others have will ultimately doom the company.

Whether he’s right about that or not certainly remains to be seen (his pessimism regarding Apple’s financial prospects seems a bit misguided given yesterday’s excellent quarterly report). My personal opinion (mine and mine alone, I should remind everyone) is that developer weblogs can indeed be a valuable channel of communication, particularly where outside developers are concerned, and that they can go a long way toward giving an entity like Microsoft or Apple a human face. I have tried to use my own weblog as a way to share interesting things I’ve learned with other developers, and to, in my own small way, foster a sense of community (it may sound a bit corny coming from someone as low on the totem pole as me, but I really did have that in mind when I organized the WWDC Dinner).

All of that said, there are a number of reasons I think weblogging at Apple should remain the way it is today: informal and non-institutionalized:

• I personally think that every official corporate weblog I’ve ever seen (from Microsoft’s Channel 9 to the Google Blog) has come across as rather contrived and trendy (Why does Channel 9 have a moblog for crying out loud!). As The Corporation reminds us, corporations may be considered “persons” under the law, but it can be a bit grating watching them try to act the part.

• I think Ruble’s notion that “corporate transparency can’t [and, by implication, shouldn’t] be stopped” is not entirely correct. While I do agree that Apple might do better to communicate a little more verbosely in some areas, my feelings about this assertion are mostly summed up by a comment Chris Gervais made on Chuq Von Rospach’s post about Ruble’s article: “While Redmond blogs, Cupertino codes.”

  (Update: I’m not completely sure, but it appears that this bon mot should be properly attributed to that perennial weblog detractor Andrew Orlowski of The Register. It appeared at the end of his Tiger Preview piece.)

  At least since Jobs’ return, Apple has made a practice of underpromising, overdelivering, and never pre-announcing. And, as much as I would have loved to have talked about some of the cool stuff in the works for Tiger before WWDC, I have to say I agree with this approach, both because it allows Apple more freedom to experiment and change strategies without public embarassments like the Longhorn setbacks and changes in scale, and because it prevents competitors from beating Apple to market with inferior knockoffs (witness, for example, how quickly the BuyMusic.com store followed Apple’s announcement of the iTunes Music Store).

• While I agree that feedback is a good thing, I’ve seen what’s happened to David Hyatt’s weblog in the past (remember why he disabled comments?), and I, for one, would not want to see my weblog turned into a bug tracking database. In the past, I’ve considered posting occasional interesting tidbits about OS X updates, but my fear has always been that if I was to do so, my site would quickly become a repository for information about problems people experienced with the update. And I can barely keep up with my email, let alone track bugs through my weblog comments. Large-scale software development requires industrial strength bug tracking like Radar, and a weblog comments system just isn’t up to the task.

In a lot of ways, weblogs (at least developer weblogs) are just a new form of something that’s been around in the form of Usenet or listservs for a long time—the only difference is that now, as Mark Pilgrim has wryly observed, the technical discussion arrives interspersed with cat pictures. This informality is, to me, what makes weblogs so fun and what ultimately makes them kind of an awkward fit for corporate entities. I agree that it would be great for more Apple employees to be webloggers (though far more than Ruble imagines already are) and discuss what they can about Apple, but i agree with Chuq’s conclusion that it’s probably better for everyone if they don’t do so from behind their badges.