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.

Sometimes, late at night when the moon is full and no one is around, I’ll download the Emacs source. Then, I’ll make a single change. Maybe rename a variable or a function, or comment something out. Then, I’ll recompile it and put the binary on my website for people to download. But I won’t provide the source of my changes! Muahahahaha.

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.

They finally fixed threading. You heard it here first.

Taskpaper has a nice idea, using a plaintext microformat to store TODO lists. Seems unfortunate that it’s getting so much press a week before Leopard comes out with the same feature with presumably the same implementation.

I’ve long thought that TODO lists were overdue for an IMAP style, access this anywhere from any client, protocol. Nice to see Apple implementing it and it looks like they’re skipping the design-a-new-protocol phase and just using IMAP for the TODO list.

Next up, a standard way of syncing read RSS feeds? I’d like that very much, kthxbye.

I came across an interesting post about SmallTalk’s Seaside versus Ruby’s Rails.

The meat is in the comments which are very polite and informative. I’ve only played with Squeak once back in college so I didn’t really grasp the whole editing-live-objects-which-don’t-live-in-files thing.

It sounds pretty neat and pretty powerful.

Just wanted to say that Joe sounds like a lot of fun. He must be a hit at parties. Isn’t he wasting time that could be spent re-reading Atlas Shrugged?

I paid attention to Apple’s The Beat Goes On event from tuesday. Everything looks pretty good. Except for the lame Starbucks integration into the iTunes Store.

It would be different if they had some standard which any store which plays music could appear on the iPod/iPhone for purchasing. But I don’t like being told which stores I should shop at. They might as well have put a big McDonalds logo inside the software.

This is the same reason I stopped using Quicken. They started devoting user interface space to selling Intuit brand credit cards and god knows what else.

I don’t like being treated like an ATM by corporations. I bought the damn phone, I use it, I like it. Don’t start selling NASCAR-style sponsorship inside it.

I always knew that binary searching was fast, O(log₂) and all that. But when you have to run it by hand over 3000 subversion revisions, looking for the place where you introduced a memory leak, and after four steps you’ve eliminated 93% of the search space, you get a new appreciation for it.

There are some tools out there for automating these searches through subversion. They didn’t fit our problem though because determining whether we were showing a memory leak was fuzzy.

Turned out to be 4 memory leaks. Two very minor ones, and two major ones in third party libraries, one of which only showed up on the Mac platform.

Thanks to binary searching, we could quickly identify the exact spots where these leaks were introduced.