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! :)

Something is changing. In the past few years, more and more of my developer friends have started talking about “going indie.” That is, going out on their own to develop, market, support, and profit from their own software. Many years ago, while I was working at Apple, the notion of striking out on one’s own was not even on the table for most developers I knew.

I met Peter Bierman in 1994 or so, while I was a contract quality tester at Apple, in the System 7.5 team. I was 19 and finishing college. Peter was a young intern. Together, we were by far the youngest people in our department, and among the youngest people either of us knew in the entire company. We had Apple fever, and the future stretched out as far as we could see, working in the safe and exhilarating comfort of those corporate walls.

I didn’t meet Jens Alfke until much later, though his name was familiar to me because he had been the author of a piece of software called Antler Notes, which Apple had acquired and was including in the forthcoming 7.5 release. Today, you know it as Stickies. Over the years that followed, Jens played greater and lesser roles inside Apple. He left for a while, came back. Developed iChat. Developed Safari RSS. You know, little things here and there, that hardly have any impact on the Mac experience.

In those old days when going indie seemed like such an unlikely goal for the future, people did still leave Apple. Even happy people, who loved Apple, and wanted to see it prosper. At that time it was far more likely however for people to leave the company to join a startup venture. Startups were widly popular. After all, this was the dawn of the dot-com boom. So several of my Apple developer friends ended up shipping off to companies who promised big IPOs and the opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond.

Going indie provides the opportunity to be a very big fish in a very, very small pond. In fact, the only way to extend the metaphor successfully is that as a new indie entrepreneur, you’re going out on a limb, hoping that you’ll find a pond even big enough to support yourself and your family. You might roll around in muddy shallows from time to time, gasping for air and hoping for rain, but in any case, you’re the big fish and at least you run the show.

Within the past week, both Peter Bierman and Jens Alfke, two long-time Apple employees and passionate Mac developers, have decided to become big fish in their own ponds. They’ve gone indie.

Peter Bierman: I’m leaving Apple to start my own Co.

Jens Alfke: I’ve left Apple, and I’m now working on my own.

What? Did these guys get together and coordinate this? I don’t think so. The fever is running rampant through the Mac community, and people are catching it everywhere, including inside Apple. I know at least two other people personally, who work at cushy jobs in multi-billion-dollar companies, who are also threatening (read: building up determination) to strike out on their own.

As an Apple aficionado and stockholder, it concerns me to some extent that Apple is losing such qualified developers, and that they may be poised to lose even more as the fever spreads. I suspect that the draw of indie living has only barely scratched the surface at companies like Apple, where currently only the most ambitious and free-spirited individuals are leaving the nest. In the coming months and years, I expect to send congratulatory notes to other of my past colleagues, and I further expect that many qualified people who I’ve never met are also at this time making up their mind that it’s time for a new adventure. What will Apple do without all these amazing people?

The good news is not everybody is cut out for the indie life. A great number of Apple’s amazing employees are perfectly content to continue cranking away on the next super-fabulous Apple thingy. In fact, the vast majority of people I worked with ten years ago, are still employed in Cupertino. Furthermore, while Apple may lose a person here or there to the indie life, there are plenty of people knocking on the door, eager to get their chance to “live inside the castle.”

But most importantly of all, those individuals who leave Apple, and choose to develop Mac software on their own, aren’t really leaving Apple. We’re a major component of Apple’s success. Just ask anybody who’s ever been converted to the Mac because of an amazing indie offering. As I quipped on Jens’s blog, all of us who develop for and promote software on the Mac are working for the “biggest Apple team of all.”

Welcome to the indie team, Peter and Jens!

Some time ago I shared a free AppleScript interface I put together for accessing the Mac OS X keychain with some degree of speed and grace. The download, named “Usable Keychain Scripting” was my frustrated response to the more or less completely unusable Keychain Scripting interface in Mac OS X.

Usable Keychain Scripting was awesome, completely spanking Apple’s scripting support in speed and functionality. Frankly, I was hoping that by the time Leopard rolled around, they might have fixed the built-in scripting support, but unfortunately, they have not. So UKS still has a place in this world. As luck would have it, I don’t find myself particularly needing to script the keychain so often these days, but since I shared the resource in August, 2006, a few of you have gotten in the habit of using it. Some of you even wrote in to let me know that it was itself rather broken (and therefore unusable) as of Leopard. Thanks for the tip!

As I was addressing a confusing issue for Leopard (basically the keychain items all lost their “name” attributes), I also discovered something much more sinister. UKS was exceedingly unusable on Intel-based Macs, thanks to a classic “OSType < -> String” conversion problem, which didn’t account for byte order on Intel CPUs.

Long story short? If you’re one of the few who needs Usable Keychain Scripting, you’ll be a lot happier with the 1.0b3 release, which I’ve just posted.

Download UKS 1.0b3

If you’ve got an older version of UKS installed, be sure to get rid of it completely so it doesn’t get “addressed” when you write your script. To be sure, run the script:

version of app "Usable Keychain Scripting"

And make sure it’s 1.0b3. If it’s not, you’ll have to kill all off any running copy of UKS and throw out the old copy of the app. The safest bet is to throw away the old app and reboot your computer.

If you’re not one of the people already using it, keep it in mind the next time you get completely frustrated by how insanely unusable Apple’s keychain scripting is.

I just posted MarsEdit 2.0.5, a modest fixes-and-nuisances update.

Improved Handling Of HTML Entities In Categories

WordPress has an issue in which category names end up literally containing the HTML entity codes for things like ampersands, etc. If you were bit by this problem, you’d notice MarsEdit listing these in the category table. I now work around the problem by double-sanitizing the category name for maximum prettiness.

Support For Specifying Number Of Posts From Blogger

Blogger users may have noticed that the “recent posts” setting in MarsEdit doesn’t seem to affect the number of posts that are fetched from their blog. Starting with 2.0.5, the number should be respected and directly correlate to the number of posts that are downloaded.

Restored Automated Publishing AppleScript Command

If you’ve tried to automate weblog publishing with AppleScript since 2.0 was released, you’ve discovered that the “send post to weblog” command was irreparably broken. It’s not perfect now, but at least it works again. Stay tuned for more AppleScript fixes in the future.

A Couple Squashed Bugs

Two things that may have annoyed you: incessant “check for update” reminders after you selected “remind me later,” and a bug with the Media Manager’s “Insert” button not changing back to “New Post” after you close the last document.