Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

If you’ve tried to use Cocoal.icio.us this morning, you’ve probably noticed that it no longer works properly—specifically, it no longer loads more than 100 posts. The reason for this is a recent, sudden API change on the del.icio.us side. Unfortunately, I’m probably not going to have time to fix this in the next 24 hours, since I’m moving to San Francisco this evening. Apologies to anyone who is incovenienced by this—life can be a bit unpredictable in “pre-pre-alpha” land.

In related news, I plan to open source Cocoal.icio.us as soon as I can clean up the project a bit.

I’ve posted a new version of Cocoal.icio.us (b21) with only one small change: the application’s bundle now has a creator code, which allows it to interoperate properly with Freshly Squeezed Software’s PulpFiction aggregator through the same protocol as NetNewsWire.

If you use PulpFiction, simply open the Preferences window, select “Choose” from the “External Blog Editor” popup, and find the Cocoal.icio.us application. Then, when you choose “Blog This” from either the contextual or “Article” menus, the currently selected item’s information will be sent to Cocoal.icio.us.

Three cheers for interoperability and collegiality!

As most people undoubtedly know by now, Brent Simmons took the wraps off the long-awaited public beta of NetNewsWire 2 a few days ago. I participated in the private beta process, and I can’t emphasize enough how impressed I am by his continuing responsiveness to the NNW user community long after most developers would have started filing feature requests under “yeah, right.” As someone who has had his share of experience with demanding users (through both PodWorks, Cocoal.icio.us, and my day job), I know how easy it can be to get jaded, but Brent seems to have a lot of patience and regard for his users, and that is why I think he will continue to be successful in an increasingly competitive Mac aggregator space.

As Brent mentions in another post about NNW and external weblog editors, my own Cocoal.icio.us app is on board as one of the first clients of NetNewsWire 2’s external editor interface. To set Cocoal.icio.us up as your weblog editor in NNW 2, simply open the Preferences window, select “Other” from the popup, and choose Cocoal.icio.us in the file browser. Then, whenever you select a feed item in NNW and hit the “Post to Weblog” button from the toolbar or select it from the contextual menu, Cocoal.icio.us will bring up its posting interface prepopulated with the item’s information (it even tries to populate tags based on item’s subject). I think it makes for a pretty slick workflow—so slick that I’ve even thought of implementing the protocol in reverse (so that you could send links from Cocoal.icio.us to Brent’s MarsEdit weblog editor or the other editors that support it).

What really intrigues me about the aggregator marketplace right now is how different each of the major Mac players is. NetNewsWire has become a highly flexible Swiss Army Knife of an application to please the most demanding users (I heard someone compare it to BBEdit, and I think that’s apt), Safari RSS uses a fairly minimalist “RSS as browser bookmarks” design, PulpFiction adopts an email-like interface, NewsFire takes its UI cues from iChat, and Shrook models itself on iTunes. Clearly we’re still in the early stages of figuring out what the best ways to do syndication are, and the next few years, as more and more neophytes discover syndication and weblogs, should be very interesting indeed.

If you use Cocoal.icio.us and haven’t looked at its changelog recently, you may be interested to know that I’ve actually released several updates I never quite got around to mentioning on my weblog. Here are some of the more interesting changes I put in between version 14 and 17 (which went up this afternoon):

• Added support for NetNewsWire 2’s External Weblog Editor Interface. This was a feature I probably wouldn’t have thought of myself, but I put it in at Fraser Speirs’ suggestion, and now that it’s in I find it really useful. I think Brent Simmons has really done the whole Mac RSS/weblog developer community a favor by establishing a standard for that sort of interchange.
• Added the ability to edit existing posts (something I found myself sorely missing in my day-to-day use of Cocoal.icio.us). With this addition, I think Cocoal.icio.us becomes significantly more usable as an alternative interface to del.icio.us.
• Added a preference and keyboard modifier to cause links to be opened in the default browser in the background. Now, if you hold down option while double clicking on a post table row, or pressing the right arrow key while the post table has focus, the post’s URL will be opened in the default browser but the browser will not become the active application. The opposite is true if you hold down option while the “Open links in browser in background” preference is enabled.
• Worked on making the app more usable from the keyboard (thanks to reader xTina for getting me to think in this direction). Changed the initially focused control of the main window to the search field. Changed the tab order so that the web preview pane is skipped (tabbing order is now: search field, tag list, post list, then back to search field). Also made the selection of the initially focused control in the posting interface smarter (the description field is now focused initially if a URL is found on the pasteboard).
• Changed the date display so that the date format as specified in the International preference pane is honored (thanks to Jonas Rabbe for feedback on this).
• Fixed lots of bugs, including a particularly embarassing one that prevented the last tag from being displayed in the tag list (thanks to reader Zach for pointing this out) and a bunch of problems with URL encoding (thanks to George Temple and Cliff Mees for help on those).

Admittedly, progress has slowed a bit lately, and will probably continue to be somewhat slow for awhile. If I haven’t addressed your favorite annoyance about Cocoal.icio.us yet, feel free to remind me in the comments (I use the same “hipster bug tracking system” Joshua mentions in the comments on 43 Folders’ “Hipster PDA” post). I still plan to tackle some of the larger plans I have for Cocoal.icio.us (full text search, etc.), but for now I’m probably going to have to content myself with doing opportunistic little fixes as time allows (my next priority, by popular demand, will be to add the ability to hide the preview pane).

Well, gentle readers, you can stop holding your collective breath now: my tortured San Francisco apartment search seems to finally be at an end. No longer must I roam the streets of the city, like a lost soul shuffling dejectedly from open house to open house. This past weekend I put a deposit down on a one bedroom in a handsome, 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival building high above the city, in a neighborhood usually referred to as Corona Heights (or, occasionally, among older residents, Mount Olympus).

Though the Spanish Colonial style certainly has its detractors (Steve Jobs, for example, has referred to his historic Woodside mansion as an “abomination”), I kind of like it. Perhaps I’m just a sucker for its sheer “Sunset Boulevard-ness,” but I can’t help but feel a touch of old California romance when I see the place. I think it certainly beats the decrepit Victorians that dominate the San Francisco real estate market, anyway.

The neighborhood isn’t bad either. It’s positioned on top of a lightly traveled hill, so the views are fantastic and the parking is shockingly easy, yet it is still within fairly easy walking distance of three major San Francisco neighborhoods (the Haight, Cole Valley, and the Castro). As it happens, I’ll also be living adjacent to one of my immediate coworkers, which opens up carpool possibilities.

Interestingly, a Google search reveals that the neighborhood even has some cult literary cred, having rated a particularly foreboding description in H.P. Lovecraft disciple Fritz Leiber’s “Our Lady of Darkness”:

The solitary, steep hill called Corona Heights was black as pitch and very silent, like the heart of the unknown. It looked steadily downward and northeast away at the nervous, bright lights of Downtown San Francisco as if it were a great predatory beast of night surveying its territory in patient search of prey.

Hmm—I knew there had to be some sort of downside. No matter, though—living near a source of nameless supernatural dread is a small price to pay for easy parking.