We in New England and points north were treated to a Leopard Tech Talk from Apple today, held in glamorous Dedham, MA. I was very shocked and pleased to observe a huge crowd of attendees, and when I asked a member of Apple’s staff, he suggested that the number of registered attendees was around 400 people!

I never knew I was surrounded by so many Mac nerds.

Overall I had a great time, in spite of the fact that I woke up at an hour normally reserved for long-distance air travel. I started up my mostly-neglected car at 7:30AM, waited for it to warm up, and putted through the light snow to arrive in Dedham shortly after 8:00AM.

They reminded us early on that everything we would learn was subject to NDA. Well, not everything. Some of it is already public knowledge, or serves no purpose is staying secret, so I’ll share these vague observations:

1. Apple is delivering a kick-ass collection of developer-happy features in Leopard. Developers who see the set of features thus far revealed are inclined to ask: “Can I make my app 10.5 only?”
2. Sal Soghoian, who has graced this blog with comments, is a stellar speaker. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing him perform before, and he’s got great style and grace, while making it look effortless. A real diamond for Apple.
3. Apple remembers the HIG, and may find time to prove it to us one of these days. They also understand the need to “violate” the HIG. Duh, that’s why it’s a guideline, and not a rule.
4. Apple has a magic quality that few other companies have. No, I don’t think this is just because I drank the Kool-Aid. Apple cares about quality. And they care about the user. This is evidenced by the raised eyebrows and the strained passionate voices of their employees as they explain the importance of various system improvements that will cause a better user experience.

I’m not exactly sure what the purpose of the Leopard Tech Talk Tour is, but I’m guessing it’s mainly to connect with developers and plant the message that Leopard is awesome. And if it’s important to plant that message, then they must realize that they need us. The goal of the talks is to excite my little developer brain, encourage me to renew my ADC membership, cause me to download and experiment with nifty new APIs, and pledge to remain a dedicated Mac platform developer. And, to feed me some cookies.

Mission accomplished.

As much as I basically like Xcode, let’s just say it’s not without its infuriating quirks. Among these quirks are a number of subtle bugs that seriously degrade its usability, but that only seem to appear after using it for several hours or days. Your text editors stop showing your changes, the spinning pizza of death is appearing more often, the index doesn’t quite seem to be working. Xcode has poor uptime, when compared with Mac OS X itself.

The workaround is, of course to simply restart Xcode when it gets flakey. But often this is an ordeal because you then have to go through your recent projects and manually reopen the one (or ones) that you were working on. I found myself frequently cmd-clicking the project window’s title to get a Finder reference to the project, so I could quickly reopen it after quitting.

Restart Xcode does all of this for you. Save the script to your ~/Scripts/Applications/Xcode folder, and keep it at easy reach from FastScripts or the Apple Script Menu. When you run it, it asks Xcode to quit, but not before accumulating a list of all the project documents you’ve got open. It waits for the quit to finish, then promptly reopens Xcode and all the documents.

Until Apple improves the uptime of Xcode, this script is going to save me a lot of frustration.

FlexTime 1.2 is out today, with the highly anticipated “Send Audio to iTunes” feature!

Why would you want to send audio to iTunes? It’s the fastest route to the iPod. Many FlexTime routines beg to be taken away from the computer. By sending audio to iTunes, users can easily collect a number of routines on their iPod and play them at their convenience.

Me, personally? I’ll probably use this feature to take my yoga routine with me on trips. Back when I was in music school I would have loved this feature for practicing complex polyrhythms. Basically you’d spot me walking down the street in a sort of hypnotic daze as I conducted one rhythm with my arm and spoke a different one (“ta, ta, ta-ta”). FlexTime would have been a great practice aid for that!

While I’m busy turning this into a links blog, I should point to Paul Kafasis’s excellent writeup about exhibiting at MacWorld.

Paul takes an “is it worth it” analytical approach that should be interesting to most of us and really useful to anybody considering exhibiting.

File under: future fantasy reference.