penguin sounds

Matt Ball writes about the tendency of “delicious generation” apps to become abandonware.

That’s fine by me. My biggest problem with them is that they seem to be composed almost entirely of lightweight to-do list applications and other such “my first real program” homework assignments.

http://www.anxietyapp.com/
http://hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper
http://www.culturedcode.com/things/
http://www.objectivesatisfaction.com/what_todo/
http://www.jimmcgowan.net/Site/DoIt.html
http://www.nomicro.com/Products/ToDo/
http://www.magnetismstudios.com/MonkeyBusinessLabs/Checkmarker
http://www.bluehenley.com/products/dobedo/
http://www.mygnu.com/julius/proj_todo.html
http://www.myownapp.com/istk_app.html
http://www.intuiware.com/Products/MacOSX/HotPlan/
http://www.myownapp.com/meinkopp_app.html
http://www.desertsandsoftware.com/?todo_home
http://www.orionbelt.com/productMac.php
http://a-sharp.com/opal/opal

Nice icons and websites though. Makes me wonder where the developers’ real strengths lay.

In Vacuous Virtuoso’s CTGradient code bloat article, he showed how easy it was to trim a 1300 line 3rd party piece of code down to 30 lines by trimming the unneeded code.

Super. We should all look at what code we use and whether it is inefficient or not.

The problem is he didn’t include any numbers beyond the LOCs. It would have been nice to have had some before and after numbers on execution speed, binary size, and memory usage.

No big deal though. It’s still a decent article.

It’s turned into a bit of a flame war though, or as close to a flame war as the usually polite Mac developer community gets.

I started it with what I like to think of was an innocuous comment.

It went back and forth a little bit with Daniel Jalkut joining in too.

Then this guy, Rick, joined in and immediately went personal.

Rick also posted a fun little timecube style rant on his blog where he referred to developers as the Landed Gentry of Mac Development and as snakes. He also put the word “people” in scare quotes.

It’s also amazing how far these ‘people’ will go to defend what essentially is a defenceless position.

Not quite sure what he thinks we are instead.

Sean was totally unnecessary with his

Do us a favor, think of this as being a thanksgiving dinner. The adults are busy discussing things at the dinner table. Take your slice of turkey, and go back to the childr- Oops, I mean, “indy” developer table.

style comments.

I just think that the personal attacks are pretty lame in a discussion by a bunch of developers about the relative merits of a code cleanup.

Gruber isn’t very good at imagining other people’s computing needs.

No important software for the Mac depends on Java.

I think he meant “I don’t have any important software that depends on Java”. There. Fixed that for you.

What I like about the most about his subsequent backpedaling is that it avoids the original issue people were complaining about.

1. Gruber says Java isn’t supported in the new MacOS X 10.5 and no one cares except Java developers.
2. People who do care write him and complain.
3. Instead of saying, “oh, hey, some people clearly have different computing needs than me,” Gruber gives them a condescending lecture on prioritizing development issues, which wasn’t the point at all and as if developers don’t already know about needing to delay low priority tasks.

Somewhere in there he also found the time to talk about a new feature to AppleScript, a language that no one cares about, except AppleScript developers.

PS. I’m not a Java developer.  I don’t even care for Java.

John Gruber attacks someone for criticizing the iPod. In this case, a mutual funds analyst who says that it would be better to invest the money instead of buying an iPod. Which is a good point to make. Too many people fritter their money away on gadgets instead of investing it.

Not sure why that qualifies the man as a “jackass”, but Gruber throws that term around a lot anyways.