Next week, San Francisco will become the extremely concentrated stomping ground of Mac developers from around the world. I’m attending this year and am very excited (if a bit overwhelmed!) by the amount of activities that I’m scheduled to participate in both within the official confines of the conference, and outside those walls in various lunch meetings and evening meet-ups.

This is the first WWDC I’ve ever paid for. Ouch! That part stings – but I think it will be worth it. The last WWDC I attended was in San Jose, while I was still working at Apple. I had been several years running, although to be honest I didn’t spend all that much time in the sessions or parties. As a member of the Core Services team I had little time or inclination to be too curious about the various technologies that comprised “complete developer landscape.” Usually I learned about technologies as they related to the Core Services functionality that my team was providing.

This year is going to be different. As an independent software developer, I’m interested in — no, fascinated by — almost every facet of the system. The reason of course is that almost every facility Apple provides has the potential to be useful to me in providing new features to my users.

The other huge difference between now and then is the number of people I have become acquainted with outside of Apple. I have to confess that as an inside developer I didn’t go out of my way to make friends with 3rd party developers. I did meet a few at various developer kitchens and through email correspondence, but mostly I just stuck with my Apple friends. This WWDC will be exciting because I’ll get to see so many of my old Apple friends again, and also see so many of the 3rd party developers I’ve come to know through the web.

Meet Me In San Francisco

If you’re going to WWDC, be sure to wear a flower in your hair. Whoops, phrase-o. If you’re going to WWDC, and you have an interest in meeting me, I’ll be showing up in some predictable places throughout the week. These events all promise to be jam-packed with interesting folks. They’re not the only places you’ll find me, but they’re probably the most reliable (i.e. I’ll be there for a while):

I would be honored to meet any readers of this blog who happen to stumble upon me. Don’t worry, it will be easy to spot me in the crowd. I’ll be the nerdy programmer!

O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter has posted the most definitive article I’ve ever seen on attaching keyboard shortcuts to scripts:

Hit-and-Run: Launching AppleScripts With Keyboard Shortcuts

Jochen Wolters explains the why and the how in brilliant detail. Of course, I’m also excited that his description of the how settles on FastScripts and QuickSilver as the best choices. I especially like this summary of FastScripts:

“If you want to use global keyboard shortcuts for launching your AppleScripts, FastScripts simply is the most Mac-like way to achieve this.”

I can live with that description!

I noticed that Jochen dings FastScripts slightly for its alleged inability to run Automator workflows. It can in fact run workflows, it’s just a question of getting the workflow files into a folder where FastScripts will notice them. Since FastScripts 2.2.3 (finally!) added the ability to drag aliases to folders into your script folder hierarchy, you should be able to simply drag an alias of ~/Library/Workflows into your ~/Library/Scripts folder, and FastScripts will pick them up.

For the especially Terminal-gifted, there is a secret FastScripts defaults key that would also help here. The ScriptTreePathsKey specifies the list of paths FastScripts should include in its search for scripts and other launchable items. If you add “FSSP%%%$HOME$/Library/Workflows” to the list, then you should be in business.

It occurs to me that I should include automatic support for listing the contents of ~/Library/Workflows in a future release of FastScripts.

The results are in for the 2007 MacTech 25, a community-selected list of the 25 “most influential” members of the Mac community. (Apple employees are not eligible, or else the list would probably look a lot different!)

I couldn’t be more thrilled, because not only does the list include everybody I suggested as good candidates, it also includes me!

I’m particularly happy to share the honor with so many people I have so much respect for. I would try to itemize them but there are just so many that I am still in awe of actually being listed among them. Many thanks to those who voted for me. It feels great to be recognized, and I’m glad if it means I’ve had a positive influence on you.

I would also like to point out that everybody who has programmed for MarsEdit is on the MacTech 25 list this year :) This project has the golden touch!

I swear we didn’t coordinate this, but MarsEdit’s older sibling NetNewsWire also celebrates a new release, turning 3.0 today!

I’ve been using this in its pre-release form for months and am very confident about its power and stability. A really excellent update. Nice work, Brent!