Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

Three RSS Amigos

Originally uploaded by x180.

What can I say about WWDC this year? It was, in a word, intense!

Even though the weblogger dinner seemed to be attracting a lot of RSVPs, I don’t think I ever believed that 80 people were really going to show up until the last minute. I’m not sure exactly how many ended up attending, but as you can see from James Duncan Davidson’s great photos (thanks a million Duncan!), our space upstairs at The Thirsty Bear was pretty full at times.

Overall, I’m extremely happy with the way the event went, and I’m pleased that I was able to correct some of the mistakes I felt I made with last year’s dinner. Unlike our original space at Bucca di Beppo, the open room at The Thirsty Bear allowed everyone to circulate and talk to a variety of people, which I think made a huge difference. The food was also orders of magnitude better.

I think I’m most proud of the diversity of the crowd. Last year’s dinner was mostly Apple people and indie developers (read: people a lot like me), but this year I intentionally tried to bring some interesting outside influences in. I think it was really great to see the Mac dev crowd mix with the web crowd, large company developers mix with indie developers, and Apple employees mix with everyone else.

My personal highlights included putting together the above RSS aggregator developer group photo, watching Dan Wood and Terrence Talbot demo Sandvox to a very receptive audience, having a very long and enjoyable chat with a guy who turned out to be Marc Liyanage (when I found out who he was, I gushed about how I used to use his PHP and MySQL installers all the time), seeing Martin Pittenauer’s awesome Steve Jobs as Che Guevara shirt, talking so much that my voice just about gave out, watching Merlin Mann work the room, introducing lots of people, and generally seeing everyone have fun. My only real regret is that there were people who showed up that I didn’t get to talk to (and plenty of people I wanted to spend longer talking to than I did).

The other downside was the money, which, despite the fact that many people generously contributed far more than their fair share, still came up about $500 short. I hate dealing with the money part of the event, so normally I wouldn’t mention it, but since a number of people have asked, the DropCash campaign is still accepting contributions. Next year I think I may explore other ways of structuring the event to make the money part of it less of an issue.

All of that unpleasantness aside, though, I had a wonderful time, and I sincerely thank everyone for coming. I hope to see you all again next year!

Cocoalicious on Intel

Originally uploaded by ldandersen.

As people who follow my Flickr photos have already seen, I spent some time at the WWDC Intel lab this week, creating universal binaries of PodWorks and Cocoalicious. Since people have expressed some curiosity about how it went, I thought I’d do a quick writeup on the subject.

Doing Cocoalicious was dead simple. It doesn’t rely on any embedded frameworks or other libraries that don’t ship with the system, and all of its networking code is handled by Web Foundation (which means endinanness is not something it really has to concern itself with), so getting it working was literally a matter of checking the little “Intel” box in Xcode.

PodWorks was a bit tricker. First of all, like NetNewsWire, it relies on several frameworks embedded within the app bundle, both of which need to be built as universal binaries before PodWorks itself can (this actually only caused build problems, most of which only happened because I was trying to get the projects set up on an unfamiliar machine with a new version of Xcode). Second, it statically links eSellerate’s serial number validation library, which is currently only distributed as a built PowerPC binary. This meant I had to strip out the serial number code before I could get it to build. Third, though I swore up and down to people that PodWorks uses NSSwapShortToHost to reverse the byte order of the iPod database’s little endian strings, I was in fact using NSSwapShort instead, meaning (rather embarrassingly ) that I was depending on the host processor being big endian.

As bad as all of that sounds, they’re still (mostly) fairly minor problems that I was able to resolve while sitting there in the lab with people looking over my shoulder, so I think my experience bodes well for 90% of the Mac developers out there. I’m with James Duncan Davidson and Brent Simmons in calling for Steve to bring the Intel based Macs on!

The first person I ever got to know at Apple was a really smart guy named Eric Albert. I read his weblog back when I was an Apple-obsessed Java developer in Colorado, eventually he started reading mine, and when I started interviewing for my current job, Eric helped me a lot by explaining how the Apple interview process works and what I should expect.

When I finally got to California, Eric and I would do lunch occasionally and talk shop. The only problem was, it tended to be a bit of a one-sided conversation. I would tell Eric about how the latest OS update was going and so on, and he would tell me…not much. Eric was unusually secretive about his work–even by Apple standards.

More recently, though, Eric started talking optimistically about his super secret project actually shipping. My co-workers and I thought we had a pretty good idea what he was working on (based on his background and the kinds of bugs he tended to file), but we all had a fun time coming up with wild, rumor site-grade theories about what it would actually be used for.

Then, last weekend, while I was hanging out in Los Angeles, I woke up to find CNet’s scoop on Apple’s Intel switch in my del.icio.us links, and I immediately knew that Eric’s long hours at work recently were about to pay off.

Yes, it’s true: Eric is one of those mysterious people Steve Jobs mentioned in the keynote–the people who have been secreted away making sure OS X works on Intel. Now that the truth can be revealed, I think Eric and the rest of his team deserve a hearty round of applause–both for doing a lot to improve the long term prospects of the Mac platform, and ensuring that what could have been a nasty transition will likely be almost transparent (he even spent a lot of time enthusiastically helping developers port their apps in the Intel lab at WWDC, as the screenshots I posted to Flickr attest).

Nice work Eric–enjoy your vacation!

One of the things that always amazes me about Flickr is the number “small world” coincidences I’ve encountered while using it.

For example, a little while ago, I posted a photo of St. Ignatius Church here in San Francisco, and remarked in the caption that “If [the fairly obscure British band] The Clientele ever hold an album cover competition, this will be my entry.” Not long after that, a woman who evidently is a friend of the band added it as a favorite. Another time, I posted a photo from a Doves show I saw at SXSW this year, and got comments from someone else who had attended the show and someone else who had been a stagehand. And yet another time, I posted some photos I took during a completely spur of the moment trip to Las Vegas, only to discover through Flickr that Mike Merrill from Panic was there at the same time.

Now, I was browsing through my friend Mike Smochko’s photos on Flickr and noticed that he had posted a photo he took from high up on a balcony while The Wallflowers played at this year’s WWDC Campus Bash. Later, while I was browsing through Dan Dickinson’s photos, I noticed he had posted a shot of Mike, and my other co-workers Joshua Benjamin and Andrew Wooster up on the balcony.

The cool thing is, this kind of thing is only likely to become more common as Flickr grows. It’s not hard to imagine people in the near future tuning into Flickr streams for far more detailed, grassroots coverage of events than the traditional media could hope to provide (I already do, to some extent). As someone said in the comments on one of my photos, Flickr is turning into world glue.

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!

Last week, Fraser Speirs posted Apple’s “Meet the Engineers Behind Tiger” page to his del.icio.us links. In what has proven to be an interesting study of the social power of del.icio.us, I then posted the same page to my own del.icio.us links, not so much because I wanted to bookmark it, but rather so that I could add the comment “Someone should make trading cards!” to the URL’s del.icio.us history. Since then, I have had one person contact me with a proposal to actually print some, and Martin Pittenauer actually went to the trouble (using Interface Builder no less!) of mocking up a series of “Magic: The Gathering”-style cards.

Like any good game, MAP’s cards have some tricky surprises. For example, you might think that Bertrand Serlet, the dread lord of OS-related software development at Apple, would be darn near unbeatable. But you’d be wise not to underestimate the might of Spotlight czar Yan Arrouye, who packs a +100 “Find Stuff” punch (not to mention the ability to summon Dominic Giampaolo at will).

Who knows–perhaps some enterprising soul will organize a “Battle of the Tiger Engineers” tournament for WWDC this year? I’ll provide the 12-sided dice.

It’s not even officially spring yet, but the recent unseasonably warm weather in the Bay Area has already had me pining away for last year’s “Summer of Buzz.” As torturous as that can be when you’re stuck in an office verifying Tiger bug fixes, at least it has gotten me thinking about and planning for some of this summer’s activities, chief among them my aforementioned WWDC dinner.

As I said in my last post on the subject, this year I was really hoping to secure The Thirsty Bear as our venue. As much as I enjoyed last year’s event at Bucca di Beppo, I was a little disappointed that the rigid seating arrangements there didn’t allow people to circulate more, and I think the big open room above The Thirsty Bear would be much more conducive to socializing (it even has a pool table and dart boards!). Plus, the food and drink are light years ahead of Bucca di Beppo for not that much more money.

Fortunately, since I got a reservation early this year, I was able to beat O’Reilly and whoever else had the Bear all booked up around WWDC-time last year. Based on my previous straw poll, I made the reservation for 40, but this can be adjusted up or down as we get closer to the event and peoples’ plans become clearer.

Last year I stressed quite a bit about the payment details, but in the end everything actually worked out great, because everyone simply threw money at me the last minute (I think I ended up making money on the deal!). In light of that, and having been inspired by Merlin Mann’s informal collection for his 43 Folders MacWorld Meetup, here is what I’ve decided to do:

• Sci-Fi Hi-Fi will put up the money to secure a private bartender for the evening (tax writeoff don’t you know—gotta wine and dine all those industry bigwigs!).
• I have set up a DropCash campaign to collect money for the food. The minimum food purchase The Thirsty Bear requires for an event like this is $18/person ($21.60 with tip), which, with tip, puts out target around $868. This will essentially buy us lots and lots of excellent tapas (a variety of Spanish small plates for the uninitiated) which people can munch on casually as they mill about discussing Tiger or RSS or what have you.

I like this informal arrangement because it allows people who have a little more money to spend to possibly subsidize some of the people who have less (i.e. students). Anyone who donates to the “student fund” by contributing more than $21.60 will receive recognition for that somehow (I’ll have to figure out exactly how later).

That’s about all for now, other than to note that the event’s official web page is now live. More later…

So, it would seem the dates for Apple’s 2005 Worldwide Developer’s Conference have been announced. As those of you who came to my WWDC dinner last year may recall, this year I’m hell bent on beating O’Reilly (and everyone else in the world, it seems) to reserving the Thirsty Bear.

Since the number of people attending will have a lot of influence on the specific arrangements I make, I’d like to take a quick, non-binding straw poll of how many people out there would be interested in attending. Last year we had a pretty healthy turnout (over 30 people), but I honestly have no idea what to expect this year so I’d like to get a better idea what scale of event I’m dealing with before I make the call.