My friend Brent Simmons, developer of the amazing NetNewsWire client, which I think I neglected to mention, but you probably learned anyway, turned free eariler this month, has written up a nice summary of the ways in which NetNewsWire serves as a router for incoming RSS feeds.

I’m especially struck by this analysis because the metaphor is very much how I see an application like NetNewsWire evolving into the future. I use the application myself for all my “regular feeds,” but I also find myself using it as a “copy/paste” stopover point, for instance, when I want to subscribe to a podcast in iTunes. I click the RSS feed URL on some podcast home page, and it pops up in NetNewsWire, where I copy and cancel the “add feed” dialog.

Taking the “RSS router” idea to the next level, I’d like to see NetNewsWire able to handle incoming RSS subscriptions transparently and without intervention. For instance, what if clicking on an RSS feed that contains a bunch of audio files as cargo, could be automatically determined by NetNewsWire, and it forwards the feed on to iTunes for me?

As the world becomes more and more syndicated, I need something smart to serve as the “post office” for RSS delivery to my Mac. And NetNewsWire is the perfect candidate.

One year ago today I signed the paperwork and handed over the check for my purchase of MacXword, the amazing crossword application that I renovated and released as Black Ink about two months later.

(Semi-interesting trivia: the transaction took place on the premises of the Leopard Tech Talk in Boston (Dedham, actually). Since the seller, Stephan Cleaves, lives up in New Hampshire, we agreed to meet at the event and complete the transaction during the lunch break.)

What a year it’s been! For one thing, it wasn’t but a month or so later that my acquisition frenzy continued with the purchase of MarsEdit from NewsGator. My work on MarsEdit last year culminated in the release of MarsEdit 2.0 in September, which has been praised by users and the media as a major step forward for the application. It even won an Eddy! I couldn’t be happier, and am busily working on further enhancements almost every day.

Thanks in part to my strangely accelerated acquisition schedule, I was asked to speak at the C4 Conference in Chicago, where I discussed many of the lessons I’ve learned in the process. This was a remarkable experience for me because it not only gave me an opportunity to challenge and overcome (or at least deal with!) my fear of public speaking, but it gave me good excuse to think about and rationalize what had actually happened over the course of the preceding several months.

Anyway, it just sort of occurred to me today that this was the one year anniversary of my taking a pretty big leap of faith, and that it was a good day to look back and judge the wisdom of it. In 2007 I went from being a full-time consultant to being a full-time indie software developer. One who does public speaking and sorta, kinda, you know, is respected and stuff.

It took money, time, and a lot of hard work, but it paid off.

It’s nice to look back and realize that many good things in your life only happened because you took a deep breath, evaluated your fears, and decided to jump into the future head first.

I wish a life-changing 2008 to all of you.

My friends at Plasq software made an exciting announcement today: Skitch is now available as a public beta!

What is Skitch, and why might this be exciting to you? Well, Skitch is, in a nutshell, a screen capture and image editing utility that makes it extremely easy to edit, draw on, and type over images before uploading them to the web.

What’s especially great about Skitch is it just sits up in your menu bar, poised for action. Press the keyboard shortcut, grab a segment of your screen, and you’re off and running. Then double-click the title bar of the Skitch window and it’s gone as quickly as it arrived.

Skitch makes a great companion to MarsEdit. I often get requests for image editing in MarsEdit, which I take very seriously and plan to implement something along those lines. But in the mean time, Skitch makes a really excellent powerful add-on to your blogging workflow, and does a lot more than MarsEdit ever will on its own. Give it a spin!

While I am regrettably not going to make it out to Macworld Expo in San Francisco next week, I have managed to do some web site traveling, by participating in panel discussions and other interviews related to Macworld and otherwise.

The Guardian: Reading The Runes For Apple

The UK newspaper The Guardian invited me to take part in a group interview about Apple and its future, centering around Macworld as a discussion point. A series of questions was posed to a large collection of people. I was honored to be included alongside such luminaries as Chuq Von Rospach, David Sobotta, Mike Evangelist, Michael Gartenberg, Adam Engst, Wil Shipley, Gus Mueller, and John Gruber.

If you don’t have time to read the full responses linked to above, you might check out the abridged version, which was edited to appear in print. But I think you’ll miss a lot of valuable context in the answers, including the perplexing omission of all of John Gruber’s replies. That’s showbusiness!

Mac Developer Roundtable: Error Handling

The latest installment of the podcast that features geeks sitting around a metaphorical table has gone live, and in it we discuss the question of error handling, and in particular how it should best be addressed in Cocoa programming on the Mac. I’m not sure we really came to any astounding conclusions, but it was nice to talk through some of the considerations for and against the popular approaches. Thanks to Uli Kusterer, Gus Mueller, Guy English, and the host Scotty for making this such a fun discussion.

Speaking of the Mac Developer Network, apparently everybody has been so busy with the holidays, preparing for Macworld, and hacking away on projects, that there has been something of a dry spell in terms of technical guests for the Late Night Cocoa podcast. Here’s an opportunity for many readers of this blog to get “semi-famous” by lending your voice and wisdom to the podcast, and agreeing to be interviewed by Scotty for the show. He makes it really easy to come off sounding like you know what you’re talking about. Don’t be timid, submit an idea!

Wired: Macworld Highlights

Bryan Gardiner from Wired discusses consensus expectations for Macworld, and gave me the opportunity to chime in with some developer perspective. My chat with Gardiner was by telephone, and I wasn’t sure what, if anything he’d be able to use from our enjoyable conversation. But what he managed to take away is an expression of sentiment that I’m quite happy to stand by. Regarding the iPhone and our hopes and dreams as developers waiting for an SDK:

“What it comes down to is right now, the universe of ideas that are available to developers is limited by browsers. We all have our own imagination we want to let loose on the platform.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself! :)