Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

Before I post in detail about last night’s dinner (long story short: it kicked so much ass), I just wanted to take a moment to congratulate Dan Wood and Terrence Talbot on announcing their new app, Sandvox, yesterday at WWDC. Dan demoed it almost non-stop during the dinner last night, and I think everyone was pretty impressed.

Sandvox was intriguing to me because, while at first glance it appeared to be merely a very stylish WYSIWYG HTML editor, Dan’s demo quickly made it clear that a lot of its features (Blogger-style templates and automatic RSS generation, for example) are aimed squarely at the personal publishing/weblogging space (even its name hints at the goal of giving people a voice). I was also very impressed at the lengths Dan & company have gone to to hide the complexity of web publishing from the average user, ensuring that someone like my Mom would never have to deal with FTP (but without requiring her to sign up for a specific hosting service like .Mac). I won’t go into detail about it, but suffice to say their solution to the problem seems very clever.

Also, as everyone who was present last night probably heard me say at least five times, I do have a personal interest in Sandvox, since my little brother Bobby designed its lovely app icon. Now that his work with Dan has calmed down a bit (at least for now) Bobby has finally had time to put up his own weblog, and an interesting post discussing the evolution of Sandvox’s icon.

Attention Weblogger Dinner attendees: I screwed up when I set up the new DropCash campaign. Instead of making the donations go to an email address that PayPal recognizes as mine, I had it go to the email address on my TypeKey account (this happened pretty much automatically since you log into DropCash using your TypeKey account). Because there is no PayPal account set up for that address, people have been having trouble contributing, and I’m not really sure what state the money is in.

I apologize for the screw-up and will get it corrected as soon as I can. Thanks for your patience!

P.S.: Next year, we will not be using PayPal or DropCash for this. Live and learn, I guess.

(Update: I think I’ve got it sorted out now. Phew.)

(Update: Just to clarify, the money that has been sent so far did get to me, but the progress bar isn’t updating until my bank account on my second PayPal account is confirmed. What a fiasco!)

Last week, with WWDC rapidly approaching and the Thirsty Bear asking for a final guest count, I decided to shut down registration for the WWDC dinner. However, I’ve still been getting a lot of last minute emails from people who want to come, and I’ve started to get indications that some people are just planning to crash the party.

This is tough for me, because the last thing I want to do is be exclusive, but at the same time I need to give the venue a definite guest list for menu purposes. Also, the head count has more than doubled since I instituted the original (and now completed) DropCash campaign, and with it the cost of the food.

To compound my party planning anxieties, I’ve also discovered that the original per-person amount I quoted really only really covered appetizers, not a proper dinner, and that the actual cost will be more like $25/person. This, combined with the number of people who have yet to pay (I estimate only about a third of the people who expressed interest have actually contributed), leaves me worried that I’m going to end up personally footing a large part of a huge (and still growing) bill.

Since the goal on the old DropCash campaign (which was based on about half the people and a lower food cost) was met, I’ve set up another one to attempt to collect as much of the rest of the money as possible. If you are planning to attend, haven’t contributed yet, and don’t have some sort of problem with PayPal, now would be a fine time to donate. By the same token, if your name is on the list and you don’t plan to come, now would be a great time to let me know.

With all of that unpleasantness out of the way, I can say that I’m looking forward to the event immensely. I’m very proud of our interesting mix of attendees, which should include people from all over Apple, smaller “indie” Mac developers, large company Mac developers, web developers (both indie and large company), students, and all-around interesting characters (Merlin Mann alone is usually worth the price of admission). Hopefully with that many bright and interesting people in one place, we can get some fantastic conversations going!

Many thanks to everyone for their interest. I look forward to seeing you all next Monday in San Francisco!