Tweet Marker wins a Macworld Eddy

A few times since it launched, I've said to friends that Tweet Marker may be the best thing I've done. It has reached more users than any of my indie Mac and iOS apps, and it has been especially rewarding... Read More
December 8, 2011 02:38 PM

Redis-only migration

The best critique and praise for Heroku is that it's opinionated: only deploy with Git, only use PostgreSQL. On the whole this is a good thing, because it simplifies the choices that developers have to make. Fewer choices means more... Read More
October 25, 2011 03:20 PM

SXSW 2012 and Twitter API innovation

The short version of this post is: please vote for my SXSW talk, which I've proposed with David Barnard of App Cubby. If selected, we'll be talking about how to innovate on top of Twitter, using examples from the history... Read More
September 1, 2011 10:06 AM

Tweetbot + Twitterrific

The second app to support Tweet Marker has arrived, and it's a great one: Tweetbot. I love using Tweetbot on the iPhone and Twitterrific on the Mac and iPad. Seeing these apps work together just makes for a better Twitter... Read More
August 28, 2011 10:41 AM

Hosting for Tweet Marker

Today was day 7 of the first app to ship with Tweet Marker support. Overall, things have been working great. I thought I'd write a little bit about my hosting experience so far. First, the good news: the service is... Read More
August 15, 2011 10:06 PM

Wii Transfer 2.7.2

And now for something completely different. I released a bug fix update to Wii Transfer last night, the first in over a year. It doesn't have some of the bigger things I'd like to finish for the app, but it... Read More
August 14, 2011 05:29 PM

Tweet Marker bootstrap

Tweet Marker is getting big. I couldn't be more excited that Twitterrific 4.3 is now shipping with syncing across Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Users love it and many are rediscovering Twitterrific or becoming new customers just because of this feature.... Read More
August 13, 2011 01:23 PM

Twitter app chance

Five years ago today, I joined Twitter as its 897th user, though for some reason my first tweet wasn't until a few months later. So much has changed in the meantime — the API always in flux, the transition from... Read More
July 14, 2011 11:45 AM

iPad Pro is the new iPod Photo

I'm fascinated with the iPad "3" rumors because on the surface they make so little sense. Apple just shipped the iPad 2, no competitors can match it, and demand is strong. Why mess with a good thing so soon? But... Read More
July 12, 2011 06:00 PM

Push-based sync

Guy English writes about iCloud and the magic glue (Push Notifications' persistent connection) that makes it work: "Each of these new features tickle the persistent 'push' connection and trigger some action on the device. The short-form state may be transmitted... Read More
July 1, 2011 11:13 AM

Direct download as a bargaining chip

In the closing paragraph of my Mac App Store follow-up post, I suggested that eventually most developers will exclusively distribute through the App Store. John Brayton, the developer of CloudPull for Google Docs backup, called this out on Twitter: "Good... Read More
June 26, 2011 09:52 AM

Focusing on the wrong things

Great post from Garrett Dimon, on his biggest mistake building the bug-tracker Sifter: "I got bogged down watching our bottom-line even though we've always been comfortably profitable. I worried about preventing fraud even though the only instance we ever encountered... Read More
June 22, 2011 02:43 PM

Mac App Store follow-up

I've been sitting on this post for a while. First the good news: Clipstart is in the Mac App Store. Overall I was very happy with the response and glad to have a new way for customers to find the... Read More
June 21, 2011 11:22 AM

Carousel

Don Draper, from the season 1 finale of Mad Men (YouTube, skip if you plan to watch the whole series): "This device isn't a spaceship; it's a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where... Read More
June 15, 2011 03:37 PM

WWDC 2011 keynote: diversify

This year's WWDC keynote was one of the most significant of the last few years. Twitter integration and iCloud were the highlights for me, although at the end of the week I'm still not sure when or how I'll be... Read More
June 14, 2011 01:02 PM

FAQ for Tweet Marker

I mentioned in my first post about Tweet Marker that there were some decisions still to be made about the service. I don't know everything yet, but I do want to answer some common questions I'm hearing from users and... Read More
June 13, 2011 02:59 PM

Tweet Marker

So you want to sync the last-read tweet with all your different Twitter apps on iPhone, iPad, and Mac? Yeah, me too. While I hope to build a version of Tweet Library for other platforms, what I'd also love is... Read More
June 3, 2011 08:53 AM

The Daily

David Barnard chimes in on The Daily: "The carousel is a fun bit of UI (at least in theory, it's still a bit laggy and jittery for my taste), but there's just no way to quickly deliver enough content to... Read More
May 24, 2011 04:54 PM

Appsterdam

A great name to go along with a big idea from Mike Lee: "If you've been to a conference, you've probably thought, as I have, how nice it would be if everyday life could be like that—being surrounded by peers,... Read More
April 21, 2011 03:54 PM

Tweetbot

After about a day of using Tweetbot, I said: "Tweetbot gets nearly everything in the UI right. Love it. But.. it's a basic client. I still think the future for third parties is features." I only got a few responses,... Read More
April 20, 2011 04:01 PM

Acorn 3

On a recent Core Intuition, Daniel and I talked about version numbers and the message you send by going to 2.0 or 3.0. The version is as much about marketing as it is about technically tracking the release. I can... Read More
April 18, 2011 09:43 AM

SXSW conflict

I'm still working on a longer post about SXSW 2011 — yes, a month late — but until that's ready, here's a drawing I made after the conference.... Read More
April 10, 2011 08:58 PM

First drafts on iPad

Iain Broome on iPad writing, via John Chandler: "I can, and do, write regularly with my iPad. But, to be perfectly honest, I rarely use it to edit, because I find it kind of clumsy to move the cursor around... Read More
April 5, 2011 09:08 PM

Buy apps, help Japan

From a beautiful post by Craig Mod: "I pulled all of the poison out of the air — I drew it deep into my lungs and exhaled into my socks. My socks are full of the radiation, don't touch the... Read More
March 29, 2011 01:35 AM

Brent on baked blogs

My post on free apps was linked from Daring Fireball a few days ago. Tons of new traffic, but my site didn't go down. Why? An ancient but reliable version of Movable Type spitting out static files, with just a... Read More
March 21, 2011 09:51 AM

Twitter's platform at 5 years

Twitter recommended upgrading to OAuth "for optimal security" and so developers don't need to "worry about the user changing their password". While I dislike APIs that break old clients, I saw mostly the good things about OAuth, framed around letting... Read More
March 19, 2011 08:23 AM

Overusing the term REST

Jens Alfke, commenting on the new Rdio API: "Maybe we should just give up on the term REST, since it's become so diluted as to mean nothing more than 'HTTP API that's not as hard to use as SOAP'?" Sounds... Read More
March 17, 2011 10:52 PM

Wayback

Today is the 9th anniversary of this blog. Once a year I dig through old posts, remembering what the industry was like and the topics I was interested in. This time I found a link to a post Evan Williams... Read More
March 9, 2011 07:11 AM

Where Apple went wrong with free apps

John Gruber has a solid summary of the issues around in-app purchase. Regarding the closed platform: "iOS isn't and never was an open computer system. It's a closed, controlled console system — more akin to Playstation or Wii or Xbox... Read More
March 8, 2011 12:49 PM

iPad 2 (and tweets)

I couldn't be more excited about the iPad 2. Yes, most of it was expected, but faster and more memory is exactly what the iPad needs. I'll be getting it on day 1 and can't wait to give Tweet Library... Read More
March 4, 2011 08:06 AM

Neven Mrgan on Apple's focus

I hadn't yet read Neven Mrgan's post when I wrote my own yesterday, but he strikes one of the same themes I closed with: "But with this 30% thing, the 30% I'm really interested in is, will Apple eventually see... Read More
February 23, 2011 08:23 PM

30% of the future

I believe the iPad is the future of mainstream computing, not just of mobile devices. That's why I picked it as the first platform for Tweet Library. But forcing developers to use in-app purchase shows that Apple's version of success... Read More
February 22, 2011 07:05 PM

Tweet Library filters

John Chandler wrote a nice post on the filters he uses in various Twitter apps. Here's a clever one for "you missed it": "I try to limit how many people I follow so I can read most of what they... Read More
February 12, 2011 08:08 PM

In-app purchase changes

With the recent release of The Daily and the news of Sony's e-book app rejection, there's speculation that Apple will change the rules around iOS in-app purchases. The 30% cut makes it difficult for some businesses to move to the... Read More
February 10, 2011 12:34 PM

App Store 30% cut

The Mac App Store launched! Like many developers I spent the day taking it out for a spin, thinking about whether this changes everything, and trying to ignore the fact that my app Clipstart isn't in the store on day... Read More
January 9, 2011 12:47 PM

Holiday bundles and no-brainer promotions

Two new bundles were announced this week: The Indie Mac Gift Pack (6 great Mac apps for $60) and the Fusion Ads Holiday Bundle (an assortment of web design-related apps, icons, and more for $79). I love apps in both... Read More
December 17, 2010 03:31 PM

360iDev Austin (in tweets)

On episode 35 of Core Intuition I mentioned attending the 360iDev conference, and we brought it up again on the next show while plugging 360MacDev. I had a great time at the conference and hope to attend another one in... Read More
December 15, 2010 11:08 AM

Faster support response times

In an interview with Kevin Hoctor on episode 5 of the iDeveloper Live podcast, Scotty referenced my comment from Core Intuition that customers are so used to terrible support that they don't mind a few days or even a week... Read More
December 13, 2010 09:06 AM

$1 apps won't dominate the Mac App Store

Marco Arment wrote an interesting piece on the Mac App Store shortly after it was announced. I was nodding my head in agreement for much of it, until I got to this part: "And if the Mac App Store is... Read More
December 3, 2010 03:02 PM

Laughing at the guidelines

Apple's announcement yesterday of a Mac App Store is big news. As soon as the event was over, journalists reached out to developers to get feedback on what it means for existing Mac shops. Reading the variety of responses is... Read More
October 22, 2010 01:42 PM

Free 1-star reviews

Before I released Tweet Library, I talked to everyone who would listen about the price. Several people suggested I go with a free app, but use in-app purchase to upgrade to the full version. Two apps that handle this well... Read More
October 15, 2010 09:29 AM

Tweet Library 1.0

If you purchased, tweeted, blogged about, rated, or mentioned Tweet Library: thank you. I've been very happy to see how well it is being received. I built this app because I wanted to do more with Twitter, but I didn't... Read More
October 9, 2010 09:47 AM

EE tweets

I submitted my new iPad app to Apple earlier this week. It hasn't been reviewed yet, but Ryan Irelan has been using the beta to curate a collection of ExpressionEngine conference tweets over on the EE Insider blog. The app... Read More
October 2, 2010 12:53 PM

Birdfeed, etc.

He snuck it in under a commentary on Alex Payne's excellent last post about Twitter, but we now have a Birdfeed postmortem of sorts from Buzz Andersen. I'm particularly interested in where Buzz thinks the Twitter app market is going:... Read More
September 29, 2010 02:20 PM

Bookshelf Touch

Although I had worked a little on iOS apps before, updating an existing app for the iPad and tinkering with unfinished apps, the first 1.0 for iOS that I played a significant role in just shipped last week: a... Read More
September 21, 2010 11:38 PM

Linchpin

I like Seth Godin. I haven't read all his books, but I really enjoyed The Dip and Tribes. They were quick reads (I got the first on audio, the other in print). He seemed to crack the problem of getting... Read More
September 14, 2010 12:18 PM

Honeymoon world tour

Via Daring Fireball, I'm loving this blog and idea from newlyweds Simon Willison and Natalie Downe, who are traveling the world on a working honeymoon: "We've been in Morocco now for just over a month. We launched Lanyrd from a... Read More
September 13, 2010 07:48 PM

I hope iAd fails

I feel bad admitting it, because some of my friends are betting on iAd revenue to feed their family, but I'm just not on board with Apple running an advertising network. I don't want to see ads in my apps,... Read More
September 10, 2010 11:49 AM

Next generation Twitter apps

I've been thinking about and playing with the official Twitter app for iPad since its release last week. The best praise I can give Loren Brichter and his team for the UI "stacking" breakthrough is: I wish I had thought... Read More
September 7, 2010 12:20 PM

Interruption and collaboration

Jason Fried, from a recent interview: "Interruption and collaboration are different things." If you haven't listened to a Jason Fried talk recently, this one covers a lot of good stuff. I also like episode 19 of their podcast, which is... Read More
August 30, 2010 05:47 AM

Deprecation mentality

Today, Twitter starts shutting down basic authentication for the Twitter API. One of my favorite Twitter clients, Birdfeed, will be allowed fewer and fewer requests until finally at the end of the month it stops working. Likewise for Birdhouse and... Read More
August 16, 2010 03:50 PM

Congratulations, you're a manager

The sort of odd "best of both worlds" balance in my different projects at VitalSource and as a solo shop is that I love working with a team, and I also love working alone. I mean really alone, doing the... Read More
August 8, 2010 02:09 PM

Mike Lee

I like this paragraph from a long post by Mike Lee "On any project, whether it's a band performance or a team shipping, there's a time to curse, and a time to praise. Someone who gets those in the right... Read More
July 21, 2010 11:18 AM

iTunes password caching

Mike Rohde racked up $190 in iTunes in-app purchases without knowing it, blaming an app called Fishies by PlayMesh for tricking his son into purchasing virtual items without a password prompt. He was obviously pretty upset — I would be... Read More
July 10, 2010 01:21 PM

iPhone 4

Alright, it's been 2 weeks. How does the iPhone 4 hold up? For me, there was less urgency to this launch then for previous iPhone releases. I wanted the 3GS on day one (video recording!) and of course I waited... Read More
July 9, 2010 09:10 AM

$10 iPad apps

I'm fascinated with App Store pricing. There's just so much interesting stuff going on: 99-cent apps and the race to the bottom. Users expecting apps to be cheaper because the device is smaller. The high-end successes like OmniGraffle. Sales and... Read More
June 24, 2010 12:39 AM

NetNewsWire production process

I like this Flickr set from Brent Simmons showing the stages of building NetNewsWire for the iPad. It's exactly the process I'm going through right now with my new app. Get some placeholder views and tables in there, then iterate,... Read More
April 18, 2010 09:56 PM

New iPad hackers

My first reaction when I started reading The Kids Are All Right on Daring Fireball was: Well, I had to disagree with a John Gruber essay eventually, might as well be this one. There was no developer program fee when... Read More
April 16, 2010 04:13 PM

Quiet rejections, no big news

It appears I was too optimistic in my last post about the App Store getting better. The iPhone version of Snowtape, in development for months, was rejected because it could let users record and share audio from the internet: "His... Read More
April 1, 2010 04:23 PM

Fast customer support

Three years ago I wrote the following about customer support: "Most people who buy Mac software from independent developers know that it's only 1-5 people behind the company. We can't compete with the Microsofts and Adobes of the world on... Read More
March 30, 2010 10:18 AM

Mac OS X Server tantrums

At VitalSource we now have a dozen Xserves running Ruby on Rails and a couple others running MySQL. While it's mostly stable now, over the years there have been several mystery show-stopper problems that no one seems to have on... Read More
March 29, 2010 09:14 AM

Trade-Off

I'm of two minds about Trade-Off by Kevin Maney. I picked up the book mostly on the strength of its tagline: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't. The Ever-Present Tension Between Quality and Convenience. Pretty good, right? The... Read More
March 26, 2010 08:48 AM

24-hour review times

I noticed a couple tweets last month about fast, less than 24-hour review times for iPhone app submissions. After I tweeted it, a whole bunch of other people came forward with similar stories. Apps going from submission to ready-for-sale in... Read More
March 25, 2010 11:34 AM

Clipstart is not iPhoto

I get a lot of great feedback about Clipstart. There's value in almost every feature request, even the ones I don't plan to directly implement. Some people also suggest that I should copy more from iPhoto. While I understand this... Read More
March 24, 2010 07:35 AM

iPad ships next week

With the iPad set to ship in just a week and a half, I've been quietly reshuffling some of my projects around it. I've written critically of the iPhone and App Store a couple times, such as how the iPhone... Read More
March 23, 2010 07:48 AM

Was Macworld worth it?

As I wrote in January, I decided to go to Macworld to show off Clipstart and Wii Transfer, and to experience the conference again and hang out with friends. I ended up doing less of the latter, because I lost... Read More
March 11, 2010 02:02 PM

Check in here

I started this blog exactly 8 years ago today, right before SXSW, so I thought I'd post about something related to the event. This year Gowalla and Foursquare are going to be huge. I was a little late to the... Read More
March 9, 2010 08:11 AM

iPad commercial

When the iPad commercial popped up during the Oscars, I thought it captured the power and elegance of the device extremely well. But as I commented on Twitter, after repeat viewings you can see that it's probably faked. The iPad... Read More
March 8, 2010 10:28 AM

iPhone patents

Wil Shipley on Apple's decision to be aggressive on their iPhone patents: "But when you sue someone for doing something you do yourself, you become one of the bad guys. Can you name a company you admire that spends its... Read More
March 3, 2010 12:31 PM

5 by 5

I first met Dan Benjamin in 2005, at an off-site meeting for VitalSource in Telluride, Colorado. I don't remember much of what we talked about over the course of those few days, but what I do remember, as the... Read More
February 27, 2010 12:29 PM

I don't use Core Data either

Brent writes a fair post on when Core Data is great and when it's a performance bottleneck: "I optimized as much as I could, spent tons of time in Shark, went all multi-threaded with Core Data, switched away from my... Read More
February 27, 2010 11:49 AM

iPad

My quote from Cult of Mac sums up my feelings about the iPad from a business perspective: "I was so annoyed with the closed nature of the App Store that I stopped developing for the iPhone. The iPad will still... Read More
February 8, 2010 10:54 AM

ParseKit (and Clipstart search)

The first couple versions of Clipstart had a very basic search feature. You could enter keywords and it would search filenames, tags, and video titles. You could also enter special terms such as tags=christmas or imported=today, but you couldn't mix... Read More
February 8, 2010 01:05 AM

Removing features

Lukas Mathis writes about removing features: "You don't have to try to please everybody and eventually create an application that is liked by nobody. In fact, since your users are in all likelihood in a situation where they can switch... Read More
February 3, 2010 02:03 PM

Bodega bootstrap

I wrote the following before the iPad was announced. The world may have changed since then, but I'm posting it anyway. Enjoy. I like the content but not the title in John Casasanta's blog post about the so-called death of... Read More
February 2, 2010 10:24 PM

Macworld Expo 2010

I haven't been to a Macworld since the late 90s. I've had it in my head for a couple years that I'd like to go back, but with so many developer-focused conferences it's been hard to justify an extra trip... Read More
January 22, 2010 02:49 PM

Indie Relief

It was just last week that we mentioned Today 2.0 from Second Gear on the Core Intuition podcast, and now Justin Williams at Second Gear is making news again by organizing Mac developers to donate to charity in the... Read More
January 20, 2010 12:52 AM

Wii Transfer 2.7

I finally took the time to give Wii Transfer some much-needed attention, releasing version 2.7 of the application tonight. It's got the usual bug fixes and some small visual improvements, but the most important change is better video streaming. The... Read More
January 19, 2010 09:43 PM

Unrealized projects

Seth Godin on an exhibit for Tim Burton: "Here's the guy who's responsible for some of the most breathtaking movies of his generation, and the real surprise is this: almost every year over the last thirty, he worked on one... Read More
January 18, 2010 09:35 AM

MDN Community Award

The MDN Show episode 16 reveals the winner of the MDN Community Award: a tie between Matt Gemmell and Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsch, with Mike Ash as runner-up. Looking back on 2009 there should be no surprise over these top three.... Read More
January 9, 2010 01:52 PM

Apple promotions survey

I was chatting with some developers the other night about giving away software to Apple employees. If you're not familiar with the practice, it's fairly common to give free or discounted licenses to Apple employees as a gesture of goodwill... Read More
January 6, 2010 09:17 AM

Clipstart 1.2.4

Clipstart 1.2.4 is done! It's a minor bug fix update but includes dozens of small improvements (and some not so small, if you're measuring not with new UI but in number of lines of code changed). I'm very happy with... Read More
December 31, 2009 02:59 PM

Indie payment processing

This story about PayPal screwing over a Mac indie business should be a real concern to anyone relying on PayPal. These kind of things come up from time to time, often with frozen accounts because too much money was suddenly... Read More
December 28, 2009 11:27 AM

Healthcare fallback plan

In the software world, the best strategy is to ship early and often. Get something out there that solves a real problem, then fill in the missing pieces and continue to improve it. Iterate. In politics, though, we often only... Read More
December 27, 2009 12:29 AM

iPhone giveaway wrap-up

I was reminded by Nick Bonatsakis on Twitter that I never wrote about how giving away the iPhone worked out. The short answer is: pretty well! The longer answer follows. I've conducted 3 giveaways for Riverfold Software now: Nintendo Wii,... Read More
December 23, 2009 01:52 PM

Clipstart duplicates

Clipstart 1.0 tried to be smart about not importing videos that were already in your library, but it stopped short of actually giving you much control over whether to import duplicates or ignore them. I also felt like the window... Read More
December 22, 2009 02:17 PM

The Princess and the Frog

Walt's nephew Roy Disney died this week. In 2003 I blogged about Roy leaving the company. I said: "It's a shame that Roy is the one to leave. It's clear that Disney (the company) has lost its way, and Eisner... Read More
December 18, 2009 12:20 PM

Decentralization and no-SQL

I've been meaning to link to this since it was posted earlier in the year. Jens Alfke hopes for a decentralized future Web 3.0: "Centralization creates concentrations of power, and that's dangerous. The people who run the servers have total... Read More
December 12, 2009 04:32 PM

Worthless apps

I like this article on Mobile Orchard about the relationship between price and ratings: "Customers with some skin in the game carry a psychological pressure to feel that they've been wise in their purchases; they'll tend to over emphasize their... Read More
December 10, 2009 09:17 AM

New blog design

I've been blogging here since 2002, and I started Riverfold in 2006, but it's taken me a while to realize something pretty obvious: traffic flows back and forth between my personal blog and the company site, and I should stop... Read More
November 24, 2009 10:08 PM

The only 2 fixes for the iPhone platform

I let my iPhone developer account expire last week. Even though I had already stopped development on my iPhone projects, officially letting go of even the temptation to build for the iPhone platform has really helped me focus. The Rogue... Read More
November 13, 2009 02:07 PM

Feedback about lost sales

Great post by Jason Cohen on why you need feedback about the real reason people aren't buying your product: "You need to talk with the people who were interested enough to find your website, read your marketing copy, download your... Read More
September 21, 2009 05:05 PM

It's okay to ignore the iPhone

I talked in Core Intuition episode 22 about how I've stopped working on my indie iPhone apps. Mike Ash is also done with it. He writes: "I have abandoned the platform. Apple's nonsense is just too much for me. There's... Read More
September 18, 2009 08:02 AM

VoodooPad help update

Somehow it's been a couple years since I wrote about using VoodooPad for authoring help. I always meant to update the post with more information, and I still receive occasional follow-up emails from developers who are trying this for themselves.... Read More
September 7, 2009 06:44 PM

Image Capture API

In episode 21 of Core Intuition, I called the Image Capture API "quirky". What did I mean by that? A few things. Refcon. This should be familiar to anyone who has built Mac OS 9 or Carbon apps. I've certainly... Read More
September 6, 2009 10:50 PM

LEGO minifigures

My son is seriously into LEGO Star Wars right now. He'll spend hours every day building ships, and it's the most incredible thing watching how good he's gotten at it over the last couple of months. For his birthday we... Read More
September 5, 2009 10:56 PM

Crippled iPhone LGPL

I mentioned on the latest Core Intuition that I no longer have any plans to release my own iPhone software. While that decision is mostly based on my unwillingness to give Apple so much control over my business, and frustrations... Read More
September 5, 2009 05:04 PM

Better is the best marketing

Gus Mueller, in response to a post from Joel Spolsky: "If no one is buying your app then you've either got a dud and you need to focus on something else, or you need to improve your app so it's... Read More
September 3, 2009 08:29 AM

Go without food

For the last couple of years, I've been squeezing work out of every free moment I have to build Clipstart and Wii Transfer, and every six months or so I'm just completely burned out and need to take a break.... Read More
August 30, 2009 09:53 AM

Clipstart 1.2 ships soooon

Now that I'm done giving away a free iPhone, I can move on to the next phase of my marketing plan: release new and better software! Crazy, huh? Clipstart 1.2 is nearly ready and I'm very proud of this release.... Read More
August 22, 2009 01:27 PM

Wii Transfer survey

Yesterday I sent out a newsletter to all my Wii Transfer customers. You can see the text of the newsletter here. I wasn't sure how effective this would be, but I immediately got a bunch of responses to the survey,... Read More
July 30, 2009 11:01 AM

Dreamhost scale

I get a lot of funny looks when I tell people I host everything on Dreamhost. It's not a great fit for everything — I have some ideas for projects that would be better suited to Amazon EC2, and who... Read More
July 24, 2009 05:38 PM

It's like iTunes for...

Sometimes it seems like every app is trying to be "the iTunes for <insert subject here>". I've worked on an app that fits into this category, and there are countless more. iTunes 1.0 represents one of the biggest shifts in... Read More
July 23, 2009 02:26 PM

Macworld review for WebSentinel

This month I've been lucky to have Clipstart featured in both the US and UK print editions of Macworld. It's great to see the product in print. Around 1996 to 1998 I worked for a small Mac software company called... Read More
July 16, 2009 05:34 PM

$999 hope

Huge post from Craig Hockenberry on the App Store. Lots of good points. I especially like the insight comparing it to the music store, the need for upgrade revenue, and ideas for improving discoverability. Where I have a problem is... Read More
July 14, 2009 02:41 AM

MobileMe UI

I'm extremely impressed by this UI from MobileMe. All web-based, of course. Excellent progress feedback, great attention to detail... But then they nearly ruin it with "item(s)".... Read More
July 10, 2009 02:27 PM

A fan for your unreleased app

Every product needs a believer. Not on the product team, but outside. A champion beta tester. Someone who sees the potential and will offer such constructive criticism and feedback early on that if you don't make the app perfect you... Read More
July 9, 2009 10:20 AM

Clipstart file actions

Clipstart 1.1 is out, with support for the iPhone 3GS, YouTube, and more. I'm really happy with the response I've received so far. The 3GS is such a convenient device for video that even people who weren't taking lots of... Read More
July 3, 2009 12:31 AM

Clipstart for iPhone?

You know it has been a good conference when you come back inspired, with ideas and tools to build new things. No surprise that WWDC was like that for me, as it is pretty much every year. Even before the... Read More
June 29, 2009 01:01 PM

FastScripts 2.4

What I like most about the FastScripts 2.4 release is that Daniel was willing to completely change the product evaluation terms to give new life to the product and get it out to more users. "I have been thinking for... Read More
June 28, 2009 09:10 AM

Rogue Amoeba at Macworld

Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba on exhibiting at Macworld 2010: "I'm delighted to be able to plant a flag and say that in 2010, Rogue Amoeba will again be exhibiting at Macworld. We still believe in Macworld and all that... Read More
June 5, 2009 12:43 PM

Introducing Clipstart

Last week I looked at the SVN log for my application in development and realized that I had started it exactly 1 year ago. While I wasn't actively working on it every day or week during that time, that's still... Read More
May 4, 2009 09:58 PM

Apple competition in iPhone 3.0

There's always the risk when developing for Mac OS X that Apple will compete directly with your product. iTunes, Mail, and Safari are high-profile examples, as well as the "lightning strikes twice" hit of Watson/Sherlock and Sandvox/iWeb. That history is... Read More
April 17, 2009 10:19 AM

MacHeist, roofing, and making it up on volume

I wasn't going to write about MacHeist this year, but after a hail storm damaged nearly every roof in our neighborhood, I noticed something kind of obvious: there are a lot of business that make it up on volume. This... Read More
April 14, 2009 08:44 PM

Twitter @wii

Last week my @wii account on Twitter passed 3000 followers and seems to finally be growing strong after a year of neglect. I now try to post once every couple days with Nintendo news, and I'll eventually throw in a... Read More
March 30, 2009 09:46 PM

Open source regression

On a previous episode of Core Intuition, number 14, Daniel and I talked about open source. One LGPL tool I use in Wii Transfer is called FFmpeg, a very popular video conversion project that forms the base of many video... Read More
March 23, 2009 03:11 PM

Tab click-through areas

It's often true that the further away you get from an event, like the release day for the Safari 4 beta, the closer you get to a fair analysis. Initial Twitter reaction was gut level and some not even based... Read More
March 10, 2009 09:28 AM

Brent Simmons on Git, plus blog anniversary

Brent Simmons is still looking for the perfect version control system: "People talk about how wonderful are features like re-writing history — and I read that stuff and think, 'Wow, Git's really cool and powerful.' But then I know it... Read More
March 9, 2009 08:33 AM

Ugly reminders

In my last post about family pricing, I mentioned that I modified my PayPal scripts for backend order processing to support family packs, but I left out that the whole system is a hack. A hack that processes a nice... Read More
February 27, 2009 10:02 AM

Defending Safari 4 tabs

The first reaction most people had to Safari 4 — especially the new tabs interface — was negative. I'm here to defend it. But first, let's get the mistakes out of the way, because they are substantial. Safari 4 tabs... Read More
February 25, 2009 10:27 AM

Coraline

While not a major blockbuster, Coraline seems to be quietly doing pretty well. It has recouped about half of its production costs, and according to Box Office Mojo actually added a few theaters in its second week of release. One... Read More
February 16, 2009 09:44 AM

Better software, less support

A few months ago Ars carried a story about Apple canceling a call center in Colorado. This part stuck out to me: "Somewhat surprisingly, the iPhone 2.1 update was also named as one of the reasons for the cancellation. The... Read More
February 7, 2009 07:26 AM

Five stages of podcasting

Daniel and I have now recorded 13 episodes of Core Intuition. Each time I go through these stages of denial and acceptance: During recording. Great! This will be our best show yet. Hours later. I wish I had said "X"... Read More
February 6, 2009 04:31 PM

Software product myth

Rob Walling has a good post about all the expenses it's easy to overlook when starting a software business. The most insightful line is this: "The point of The Software Product Myth is that at some point you are going... Read More
January 24, 2009 02:47 PM

Work at sunrise

I don't have an expensive camera and I don't know that much about photography, but you'll just have to trust me that the sky looked amazing this morning. Especially a few minutes before this picture was taken. We should have... Read More
January 23, 2009 08:12 AM

App Store new version UI

Centralized app update notifications on the iPhone were a great idea, right? Turns out, maybe not. My App Store icon has a "26" badge on it. I have no idea which apps have a new version available until I click... Read More
January 19, 2009 08:11 PM

Stan Sakai

The 5th annual STAPLE! indie comics expo is coming up in 2 months, and I'm happy to say that one of my favorite comics artists growing up will be headlining the show: Stan Sakai of Usagi Yojimbo fame. If you... Read More
January 16, 2009 03:58 PM

Core Intuition 12: Macworld

Daniel Jalkut and I have wrapped up episode 12 of Core Intuition, available now on the Core Intuition web site. If you are a Mac or iPhone developer, or even if you are just interested in what two developers think... Read More
January 13, 2009 03:46 PM

Leonardo tips

Every year my New Year's resolutions look about the same: draw more, journal more. (Blogging more is never one of my resolutions, but I'm nevertheless off to a good start this year with a goal of about one new... Read More
January 12, 2009 10:42 AM

JSCocoa in Acorn

I like this KVC mini-rant from Gus Mueller's post about writing Acorn plug-ins in JavaScript: "While KVC hacks can be awesomely cool and amazing and generally useful... it is possible to go a bit too far. So don't use that... Read More
January 11, 2009 04:54 PM

Tagging survey

Last month I asked on Twitter for opinions on comma-delimited vs. space-delimited tagging. I didn't get very many responses, but what I did get was pretty interesting. Consensus: most people like commas and everyone likes Flickr. (The second takeaway here... Read More
January 10, 2009 11:01 AM

Will paginate for food

As I mentioned in my Rails rant last week, I have an unhealthy distrust for Rails plug-ins and monkey-patching gems. In addition to often breaking when you upgrade Rails, too many high-level abstractions can make it difficult to understand and... Read More
January 9, 2009 02:19 PM

Get Rich Slowly

I started reading the Get Rich Slowly blog last year and it has quickly become one of my favorites. Don't let the name fool you — it's really just about practical advice for paying off debt, keeping a budget, and... Read More
January 8, 2009 02:12 PM

Follow-up on family packs

In October I blogged about and then launched a "family pack" purchase option for Wii Transfer. $39 for 5 licenses vs. $19 for 1. The results are in, and they are unspectacular. 2.6% of orders were family pack purchases. At... Read More
January 7, 2009 10:04 PM

Macworld 2009

I liked today's Macworld keynote. In many ways it was a return to pre-iPhone keynotes, with a few good announcements but nothing crazy earth-shatteringly amazing how-can-we-ever-top-this-again. Solid upgrade to iLife. Good news on iTunes. Impressive battery life on the refreshed... Read More
January 6, 2009 01:55 PM

Dave Winer rethinks auth

Dave Winer proposes a simple solution to revoking authentication in web services: "Now imagine that Twitter had a page that showed all the IP addresses that have used your login in the last 30 days, with a start date for... Read More
January 5, 2009 12:09 PM

Dan Benjamin turns it up

Dan Benjamin did something interesting several weeks ago: he took his popular blog Hivelogic, where he's been posting since 2001, and rebranded the content under a new domain, danbenjamin.com. Apparently that was just the kick he needed to get even... Read More
January 4, 2009 05:00 PM

Mike Ash on private APIs

Mike Ash has been rocking with his weekly Friday Q&As. From the latest about using private APIs: "Remember that the cost is not just to you, but to your users. If you're really unlucky the break will be so bad... Read More
January 3, 2009 09:01 AM

Rails 4 years later

Blog archives don't lie. It's been nearly 4 years since I first blogged about Ruby on Rails. (Three years and 10 months, but I'm not patient enough to wait until February to post this.) Here's a portion of what I... Read More
January 2, 2009 05:45 PM

Sita

As we start 2009, I continue to be inspired by what independent artists and developers are able to create with limited resources. Here's one example. Roger Ebert recently posted a thoughtful review of animator Nina Paley's independent feature Sita Sings... Read More
January 2, 2009 05:11 PM

The Wii fad, 2 years later

Video game console sales numbers for November are in. Two years after the Nintendo Wii was introduced — you know, the console that was derided as a gimmick, a fad, just a faster GameCube — the little white console still... Read More
December 14, 2008 01:03 PM

The 99-cent message

Forget the developer perspective for a minute. Even as a user I find the race-to-the-bottom iPhone price drops completely maddening. I've bought apps for $5 and $10, and now many of those prices have either been cut in half or... Read More
December 12, 2008 10:15 PM

Small icons

I mentioned on Core Intuition episode 11 that I've been having fun making small icons for my new app. Here are a few partial screenshots: Some of these are just pixel-by-pixel drawings, with slight gradients in places. For other parts... Read More
December 11, 2008 08:02 AM

Family packs

I rolled out "family pack" pricing for Wii Transfer over the weekend. I had to make changes to my custom PayPal integration scripts to support it, and I also modified the product page to use a simplified checkout (no standalone... Read More
October 27, 2008 11:02 PM

Slow-growing trees

We planted some trees in our front yard recently. They take decades to grow, and we are under no illusion that they'll provide meaningful shade before our children have families of their own. It's easy to say: "Why should I... Read More
October 20, 2008 02:48 PM

Campaign Monitor

Last month, on the 7th episode of Core Intuition, we talked about promotion. In particular I had good things to say about Campaign Monitor, and the folks who built it heard the episode and wanted to ask a set of... Read More
October 15, 2008 11:54 PM

Favorite essays

The best essays are the ones that contain some truth or insight that doesn't go out of style months or years later. As I return to regular blogging (12 posts in September compared to about the same number of posts... Read More
October 8, 2008 03:09 PM

Passion and Paul Potts

The other night I was digging around in other people's old blog posts, catching up on things I never read but should, and I found this gem on Seth Godin's blog. Watch it on YouTube and then come back here.... Read More
October 4, 2008 04:49 PM

Gruber on The Fear

I don't link to Daring Fireball much anymore. Everyone who cares about the Mac and reads my blog, also likely reads his. I will link or write about obviously redundant topics that everyone else is also writing about only when... Read More
October 2, 2008 11:17 PM

NDA and overnight optimism

Last week I blogged about my experience with a late Amazon order, commenting that I was a happy customer again after they apologized. Even after being mistreated, customers will forgive everything if only the company does the right thing in... Read More
October 1, 2008 01:55 PM

Ajax as a scaling tool

When MobileMe launched with a beautiful new design, the web application suite was essentially unusable because of terrible performance. Timeouts and slow page refreshes were the norm. At the time, I didn't think too much of this. I just waited... Read More
September 30, 2008 01:05 PM

Cuts in Core Intuition

When producing Core Intuition we generally record more than we need, giving us flexibility to cut out the rambling tangents, technical errors, and frequent "uhms" that threaten to destroy any kind of pacing or interest in the show. The decision... Read More
September 29, 2008 09:21 PM

Ship it, software and newsletter

I've been meaning to link to this post by Justin Williams on shipping his Today app quickly: "I'm a big fan of foundation releases. In other words, release the bare minimum you possibly can to constitute a 1.0 and then... Read More
September 26, 2008 08:41 AM

Almost-right Amazon response

I placed an order on Amazon last week and chose Amazon Prime overnight shipping, something I do pretty often. The package was late. Even on Saturday, when the package was nowhere near Texas, the Amazon order page still showed estimated... Read More
September 25, 2008 04:59 PM

Developer-hostile platform

Paul Kafasis writes on the Rogue Amoeba blog: "I certainly feel like I've been talking about the iPhone a lot, particularly for a company that doesn't currently have any iPhone software available. There are many reasons for that, but perhaps... Read More
September 25, 2008 01:26 PM

Wil Shipley on bugs

From a Wil Shipley post a few months ago: “Software is written by humans. Humans get tired. Humans become discouraged. They aren't perfect beings. As developers, we want to pretend this isn't so, that our software springs from our head... Read More
September 22, 2008 01:59 PM

River of news

No, I don't mean Dave Winer's thoughts on RSS reader design exactly, although that's part of it. It's more the way we in the technology community interact with the world. Hundreds of news feeds, company chat, external IRC channels, private... Read More
September 22, 2008 11:24 AM

Tracking sales referrers

The primary way to track marketing and word-of-mouth about your product is to look at web site referrers. Easy. Just install Mint and you're done. But not all referrers are created equal. A prominent link on Digg might lead to... Read More
September 15, 2008 07:12 PM

C4[2]

There will be many C4 wrap-up blog posts, but Fraser Speirs hit the spirit of the conference very well: “I thought C4 was incredibly reflective. If you imagine it as a smaller WWDC, it's really nothing like that. The amount... Read More
September 11, 2008 10:59 PM

Promoting Core Intuition 7

The latest episode of Core Intuition is up. Daniel and I focus on promotion and marketing in this show — releasing a new version, sending email newsletters to customers, and promoting your brand on a blog. We also hear from... Read More
September 4, 2008 10:55 AM

Wii Transfer 2.6 and August

As I mention on the next Core Intuition, which I'm currently finishing editing and should be out tomorrow, Wii Transfer 2.6 was very well received. I put out a 2.6.1 tonight to address Mii problems for some customers, and with... Read More
September 2, 2008 09:59 PM

BBEdit 9

BBEdit 9 is out, and it's a solid upgrade. A recently came across an old BBEdit 4 CD, which Rich Siegel gave me back in the mid 90s when I was helping run the WebEdge Mac web developer conference. Good... Read More
September 1, 2008 10:51 AM

Palin

I made a comment on Dave Winer's points about McCain VP pick Sarah Palin that I feel like I should republish here. I've commented on dozens of blogs and news sites through the primaries, but I haven't posted here on... Read More
August 30, 2008 02:28 PM

Buzz on software entrepreneurship

Buzz Andersen responds to some of Mike Lee's recent blog posts: "We're living in the 'anyone can play guitar' era of software entrepreneurship. Because of the confluence of increasingly accessible developer tools and the Internet, it's now reasonable to think... Read More
August 27, 2008 10:42 AM

FLV metadata performance

One of worst-kept secrets of Wii Transfer is that the movie playback is not as good as what you might see on an Apple TV, Xbox 360, or PS3. I do my best to improve the quality with every release,... Read More
August 11, 2008 12:57 AM

I Am Rich

I wasn't going to give the silly $999 "I Am Rich" iPhone application any more attention after the initial laugh, but the more that everyone reacts to what went wrong the more clear it becomes that there is something to... Read More
August 8, 2008 01:20 PM

Core Intuition 6

I've really been neglecting this blog. I'm not sure what it is — I have plenty of posts in draft form and it's not particularly hard to hit the "Send to Weblog" button. Speaking of people who wrote MarsEdit, our... Read More
August 7, 2008 12:15 AM

WWDC 2008 wrap-up

Yes, this post is a month and a half late. I could probably just re-post what I wrote in 2007 and it would almost pass for this year's WWDC review. Just insert more iPhone and more beer. Instead of a... Read More
August 2, 2008 10:03 AM

Second episode

Daniel Jalkut and I just posted the 2nd episode of Core Intuition. I'm not sure which is a bigger milestone: starting the podcast to begin with or sticking with it for at least two shows. I think the podcast is... Read More
June 5, 2008 10:10 PM

Core Intuition

Like many new tech endeavors for 2008, it was announced first on Twitter. Core Intuition is a new podcast from Daniel Jalkut and me, with a focus on the daily life of a Mac developer and whatever related subjects are... Read More
May 30, 2008 04:04 PM

Wii friend codes from Twitter

As most Nintendo Wii owners know by now, Mario Kart for Wii shipped last week. I put together yet another friend code database to track and share codes, but this one is unique because it builds on Twitter. Just follow... Read More
May 4, 2008 10:32 PM

Flip Ultra

I first heard of the Flip a few months ago, but it wasn't until this 37signals post that I started paying attention. I was attracted to the simplicity of the video camera: few buttons, decent quality, and kid-proof design. Here... Read More
April 24, 2008 08:07 AM

Wii Transfer serial numbers

The search phrase "wii transfer serial numbers" (or "wii transfer serials") is consistently one of the top referrers from Google to this blog, usually pointing to my post about the first 75 days. I figure I get enough traffic that... Read More
April 23, 2008 08:57 AM

Unite the Party

After Hillary won Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island last month, I decided it was time to think less about actively supporting my own candidate, who clearly wasn't going away, and more about the future of the Democratic Party and what... Read More
April 21, 2008 11:06 PM

Ollie Johnston

Last week Traci asked me if I had heard about the animator who had died. Now of the 220 feeds I subscribe to in NetNewsWire, a full 60 of those are in a group called "Animation and Comics", so I... Read More
April 21, 2008 08:59 AM

MacLife write-up and Wii Transfer beta

Wii Transfer has a full-page mini-tutorial in the May edition of MacLife magazine, as part of a section on connecting your Mac to video game consoles. I finally picked up a copy last night. It was certainly a nice... Read More
April 20, 2008 12:29 AM

Fancy-pants productivity

There are a few things in this post by Ryan Norbauer (via 37signals) that bother me. One is this idea that "code is meant to be read by humans first and computers only secondarily". I understand what he is getting... Read More
March 14, 2008 12:38 PM

iPhone SDK and NDAs

Craig Hockenberry half-joked on Twitter about the iPhone SDK non-disclosure agreement and it reminded me of one of my personal annoyances in the development community: we tend to take NDAs very seriously. I've always been impressed by how Scott Stevenson... Read More
March 13, 2008 12:21 AM

STAPLE! in Austin today (year 4)

Like independent comics and art? STAPLE! is in Austin today at the Monarch Event Center, off I-35 and 2222. I've been on the STAPLE! planning committee for four years now and have enjoyed watching our little show grow from its... Read More
March 1, 2008 09:30 AM

Hillary podcast

About once a year I like to put together a podcast episode around a theme, and this weekend that subject is Hillary Clinton. I think I've prepared it with fairness and respect, so even if you disagree please do the... Read More
February 18, 2008 06:23 PM

Don't give up, shipping takes time

I love the passion in this comment from Wil Shipley: "This app is all I'm working on. My entire reputation, my 25 years in the industry, my company is all riding on this release. I'm not going to just suddenly... Read More
February 9, 2008 03:44 PM

Animation podcasts for a Super Tuesday

Need something to listen to on your iPod while waiting in line to vote today? Try out these fantastic recent episodes of two of my favorite podcasts for animators and animation fans. Spline Cast with Ed Catmull. I'll be honest,... Read More
February 5, 2008 08:51 AM

MacBook Air and Europe trip

The MacBook Air is the first Apple product to come along in years that I don't want to buy. It looks great, the multi-touch trackpad is cool and unexpected, and I like Remote Disk. But it's just not significantly different... Read More
January 17, 2008 02:38 PM

Give us a tablet already

I'm going to skip the usual Macworld predictions and cut straight to the good stuff: Apple needs a tablet for the huge numbers of artists and creative professionals who have stuck with the Mac for so long, or who are... Read More
January 15, 2008 10:31 AM

New and old posts about NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire is free (congrats again Brent!) and reaction is coming in from other indie developers. Rory Prior: "It's hard to compete with a product that's as well known and frankly as good as NNW, it's damn near impossible to compete... Read More
January 11, 2008 01:29 PM

More on Kindle

I received a lot of feedback after I first wrote about the Kindle, so here's an update. I admit I'm still trying to understand the device; it has not immediately fallen into a spot in my routine the way the... Read More
January 11, 2008 07:20 AM

Rails on shared hosts

David Heinemeier Hansson writes in detail on the problems with Rails in shared hosts: "Most Rails contributors are not big users of shared hosting and they tend to work on problems or enhancements that'll benefit their own usage of the... Read More
January 10, 2008 08:52 AM

Why I support Hillary

Obama is passionate, thoughtful, centrist enough for broad appeal, and a brilliant speaker. If he's the nominee I'll support him fully with every bit of strength I have. There is something special about him, and it comes around rarely in... Read More
January 9, 2008 09:08 AM

MacSanta 2007 in time for Christmas

Wii Transfer's featured day for MacSanta starts at midnight tonight, but I've already rolled out the coupon code. Because I'm still using simple PayPal "Buy Now" buttons, I hacked together a little custom coupon field just for MacSanta (based on... Read More
December 19, 2007 05:23 PM

Wrapping up the Wii Giveaway

After sitting on a shelf in my office for 2 months, unopened and unloved, I finally shipped off the Nintendo Wii today to the lucky winner. I was initially worried because he didn't respond until well into the second... Read More
December 18, 2007 11:41 PM

Holiday Wii Giveaway and Twitter

A few months ago I was in Target and they had some Wiis in stock, so on an impulse I bought one. I've owned a Wii since launch day, but I had this idea to give one away for Christmas... Read More
December 4, 2007 11:18 PM

Kindle

All we do at VitalSource is e-books, from working with publishers on converting their content to our format, to managing the delivery of digital files and building the web-based infrastructure to support it, and finally to designing and coding the... Read More
November 26, 2007 09:10 AM

Scully, 1997 - 2007

Read More
November 11, 2007 09:01 PM

Android and getting real

Steven Frank on Google's phone announcement: "Find someone, ONE person, with a unique vision. Lock them in a room with some programmers and a graphic designer. Twenty people, tops. Change the world. Quit re-hashing the same old bullshit and telling... Read More
November 9, 2007 07:45 AM

Ironcoder (now with prizes!)

A new Ironcoder launches today with a longer hacking period and a nice iPod touch as the prize. I've come close to participating in the past and just haven't had time. Although I don't expect that to change this week,... Read More
November 9, 2007 07:38 AM

Five days, one paragraph

So I am 5 days or 700 characters in to my Story 140 experiment. Even though separation between each tweet is only implied, this is the end of the first paragraph, and on the web site I will be formatting... Read More
November 6, 2007 01:34 PM

MarsEdit guilt trip

In which I am the last person to point to the MarsEdit 2.0 release. I figure if James Duncan Davidson is just now purchasing MarsEdit, I don't feel bad waiting so long to say good things about 2.0. (Rumor has... Read More
November 4, 2007 11:39 PM

Story 140

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), but I'm way too busy to participate this year. (See my wrap-up post from 2005 for the last time I did it.) I would love to write something, though. Maybe I should consider... Read More
November 3, 2007 03:06 PM

How I use Twitter

Twiterrific 3.0 is out, with a new price of $15 or free to use with ads. The ads are very effective and difficult to ignore, but really they don't take anything away from the Twitter experience. The new version is... Read More
November 2, 2007 11:20 PM

Bush veto

Yes, it's a politically-themed post. Probably the only one before 2008, so don't run away just yet. The Bush veto of the bipartisan children's health care plan a few weeks ago really made me angry, but it wasn't until Justin... Read More
November 1, 2007 09:48 AM

Wii Transfer 2.5.2 and Leopard

Happy Halloween! Wii Transfer 2.5.2 is now available. This is probably one of the most difficult bug fix releases I've done. Full changes are in the release notes, but the biggest stuff includes fixed Leopard UI glitches and a new... Read More
October 31, 2007 10:54 PM

Wii Transfer on macZOT

After I shipped Wii Transfer 2.5 I decided to start spending a little time promoting the product. Every month or so I'll do some small thing to improve sales. Last month that was a press release, followed by the ad... Read More
October 17, 2007 09:01 AM

Lowbrow Monster Mash

Late notice, but I'll have a watercolor piece in tonight's Monster Mash art show at the Lowbrow Emporium on South Lamar. If you're in Austin, drop by between 7 and 11pm and say hi. (Address and other details on the... Read More
October 13, 2007 09:08 AM

Welch on iPhone ringtones

Ambrosia Software's Andrew Welch in a TUAW interview: "The tack they are taking with the ringtones, though, is not 'We'll provide such great ringtones that you'll want to buy from us' but rather 'This is all you're ever going to... Read More
October 3, 2007 10:38 AM

The Talk Show ad and porting to Windows

Episode 11 of The Talk Show is up, and I'm happy to say that Wii Transfer is this week's sponsor. Even if you've been subscribed since the first show, click over to see the new site design by Airbag Industries.... Read More
October 1, 2007 01:28 AM

Using Acorn

I have a copy of CS3. Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash are all permanently in my Dock. If you do any graphics or animation work, you pretty much need these tools, in the same way that anyone who does any kind... Read More
September 25, 2007 01:18 PM

Wii Transfer 2.5

This morning I finally rolled out version 2.5 of Wii Transfer, the most significant release of the product yet. It probably deserved a 3.0 label slapped on it, but I like how all the 2.x releases revolve around the sharing... Read More
September 20, 2007 11:41 PM

Rails and Mac dev communities

Damon Clinkscales has a write-up of the Charity Workshop that took place before the Lone Star Ruby Conference in Austin a couple weekends ago. I skipped the conference and attended these tutorials instead, enjoying some great talks by Marcel Molina,... Read More
September 17, 2007 01:11 PM

Not a C4 wrap-up post (iPhone!)

Soundtrack for this blog post: The Touch from the 1980s Transformers feature. Yesterday Apple announced new iPods, plus cool stuff like the Starbucks integration and iTunes Wi-fi Store. I was out at lunch and errands, so I followed the announcements... Read More
September 7, 2007 02:21 AM

Wii Transfer in PMC auction bundle

Seth Dellingham is auctioning off a bunch of great Mac software for the Pan-Mass Challenge, raising money for cancer care and research. Wii Transfer is included in the 2nd bundle, full of games and useful utilities. Some of the gems... Read More
August 21, 2007 08:50 AM

Ta-da List export to TaskPaper

I've been using Ta-da List for the last couple of years for all my to-do lists. I have about 100 lists and love the speed of adding new items and some of the subtle smarts it applies to sorting recent... Read More
August 4, 2007 01:38 AM

Foreign sales market

From time to time on the MacSB list people ask about the value of localization and what percentage of sales come from foreign customers. Since day 1 of Wii Transfer I've always been surprised at how many sales are from... Read More
August 3, 2007 09:28 AM

Professional email app

Ignore that this post is a week late. While I was out sick last week there was a great discussion across blogs about email clients, starting with Brent Simmons and then to Paul Kafasis while passing through several good blogs... Read More
July 13, 2007 03:42 PM

iPhone - it's from the future

That's the way I described the iPhone to anyone I showed it off to over the weekend. The thing is amazing. Easily the most advanced and beautiful UI that we have ever seen on a portable device. I waited outside... Read More
July 2, 2007 11:58 AM

Wii Transfer 2.3

I finally released Wii Transfer 2.3 late last night. This is the version I demoed in my interview with The Unofficial Apple Weblog. The most notable changes are AAC support, an improved music player interface, and better use of the... Read More
June 20, 2007 08:05 AM

WWDC 2007 in one post

Along with most of our house, my office is packed up and ready to move this week. The photo to the right is of one of the handful of items in a box labeled "Manton's desk," or, if someone... Read More
June 18, 2007 07:50 AM

New software releases (plus screencast)

Today is a good day to release software. MarsEdit gets a nice update and NetNewsWire 3.0 ships. At VitalSource we also just released Bookshelf 4.6 today, which lays the foundation for media-rich textbooks and adds a highlighter rating UI for... Read More
June 5, 2007 08:20 PM

The /Applications social network

Brent Simmons, from a TUAW interview: "One of the things I love about being a Mac developer is getting to meet the folks who make the apps I use. In a way, my /Applications folder is also my social network.... Read More
June 5, 2007 01:59 PM

Learning from Rails design

Since version 2.0, Wii Transfer has had a built-in web server for serving music and photos to the Nintendo Wii. The server was written in Cocoa and the code became very unwieldy as I continued to add features. Dozens of... Read More
June 4, 2007 12:46 AM

Apple announcements and Flash video

If you are wondering why I haven't posted here in over a month, it's because I've been getting my writing fix over on Twitter, in 140 characters or less a couple times a day. Still trying to figure out the... Read More
May 30, 2007 11:09 PM

Essays about the web

Paul Graham thinks Microsoft and desktop apps are dead: "Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called 'Ajax.' And that was the second cause of Microsoft's... Read More
April 9, 2007 01:20 AM

WiiTransfer.com

After I blogged last month about the very small number of domain names I own, I got some good feedback from people I respect. They basically said: "You're an idiot. Domain names are cheap." And the more I thought about... Read More
March 22, 2007 09:52 PM

TwitterConf 2007

It's been over a week since SXSW Interactive wrapped up, and I can't bring myself to post anything interesting about it. Don't get me wrong, I had a great time. But I missed more sessions than usual this year (I'm... Read More
March 22, 2007 12:55 AM

Weblog 5th Year

Ten minutes until midnight as I type this. I started this blog 5 years ago. There have been just 329 posts in those 5 years, but there are some good ones in there. One thing I've noticed is that over... Read More
March 9, 2007 11:58 PM

STAPLE! 2007 weekend wrap-up

STAPLE! The Independent Media Expo was last Saturday and it turned out great. The animation panel I wrote about last week was a lot of fun and didn't seem to suffer too much from my amateur moderating abilities. The projector... Read More
March 7, 2007 11:00 AM

First 75 days of Wii Transfer

In the tradition of other independent Mac developers such as Mike Zornek, Daniel Jalkut, and Gus Mueller, I'm going to share some sales information from the first 75 days of Wii Transfer. The following chart shows daily sales (in units... Read More
February 27, 2007 09:40 PM

Animation panel and web site for STAPLE! 2007

Chris and I headed over to Northcross Mall yesterday to take a final look at the conference center rooms before next week's STAPLE! Expo. Although I've been on the planning committee since the very beginning of the conference over 3... Read More
February 25, 2007 11:30 PM

Customer support

One of the most interesting (and difficult) parts of running an independent software business is responding to support email. It is very time-consuming and often more frustrating than writing code because the solutions can be illusive. You want to help... Read More
February 20, 2007 11:38 PM

Reflecting on a beta release and server testing

Wii Transfer 2.2 is taking longer to get ready than I had planned, so I've decided to post a public beta while the last pieces are polished up. You can grab it from the news section of the Riverfold site... Read More
February 9, 2007 11:23 PM

Spoiled by iTunes, and the future of music

I have been iTunes-free for four weeks now, and I hate it. It must be like quitting smoking, except without the fear of dying always at your back. I stopped by a Best Buy the other day and couldn't find... Read More
February 7, 2007 11:37 PM

I hate domains

There is a story behind the name Riverfold, but it's probably not a very good one and I won't go on a tangent by telling it here. What I will say is that I hate domain names. Maybe it's because... Read More
January 29, 2007 11:21 PM

Bookshelf note sharing

I've blogged a lot about my side project Riverfold lately, but it's time to show my "real" job some love as well. Internally at VitalSource last week we rolled over to beta status for the upcoming Bookshelf 4.5, and I'm... Read More
January 28, 2007 10:25 PM

Wii Transfer takes over internet

Okay, not really. But this has been a crazy and surprising week for my "little" application, Wii Transfer. Putting 8 hours each day into VitalSource (I have a post coming about that tomorrow, by the way) and then juggling home... Read More
January 28, 2007 12:40 AM

Wii Transfer 2.0 featured on Apple Downloads

I finished Wii Transfer 2.0 late Thursday night. This version is an interesting milestone for the application because it goes beyond just using the SD card to shuttle data back and forth between your Mac and Wii. There is a... Read More
January 20, 2007 01:12 AM

You had me at scrolling

Last week I said I wasn't interested in an iPod phone, unless it was something no one had even thought to expect. Well, it is. I am blown away by the iPhone. The thing runs Mac OS X. The iPhone... Read More
January 9, 2007 10:59 PM

Falling in love with VoodooPad again

A few years ago I used VoodooPad Lite extensively. Every note, to-do list, and feature description went into it. At some point I migrated away from VoodooPad to a combination of text files and Ta-da list, perhaps fearing I would... Read More
January 6, 2007 12:21 AM

The Hivelogic Podcast

Watching from the sidelines as Dan Benjamin prepared his first podcast really made me want to get out the microphone again. Creating a podcast is a great experience, and I always tell myself I'll do them more frequently. There have... Read More
January 5, 2007 04:49 PM

Macworld 2007 predictions

Dan covers his Macworld predictions in great detail. Instead of predictions, since mine will probably be wrong, I'm going to list what I want to see: Tablet. I tend to agree with Steven Frank's analysis more than this former Apple... Read More
January 5, 2007 07:27 AM

Goodbye iTMS

When I started on the music sharing feature in the upcoming 2.0 release of Wii Transfer, I knew it couldn't support protected songs from the iTunes Music Store. Still, it was disappointing when I started using it and such a... Read More
January 3, 2007 11:36 PM

Holiday hacking on Wii Transfer 2.0

I got sick (the flu?) shortly after Christmas, but nevertheless managed to sneak in some coding on Wii Transfer 2.0, which I hope to release this weekend. The big new feature for 2.0 is music and picture sharing. Essentially, there... Read More
January 3, 2007 12:02 AM

MacSanta and Wii Transfer 1.5

Wii Transfer is now listed as part of the MacSanta promotion. Only $7 through Christmas day! I also released Wii Transfer 1.5 late last night. The major change in this version is support for automatically backing up saved game data... Read More
December 20, 2006 07:40 PM

Re-introducing Wii Transfer

I guess it's a sign I'm not blogging very often when I don't even announce my own product! A big thanks to Dan Benjamin and John Gruber for linking up Wii Transfer, a little application I quietly rolled out last... Read More
December 14, 2006 08:45 PM

Nintendo Wii purchase

If you've talked to me recently about video games or read my post about trying for a Wii pre-order, you know I have become obsessed with getting a Nintendo Wii at launch. The high scores that the new Zelda was... Read More
November 23, 2006 10:11 AM

NaNoWriMo 2006 attempt

Last year I participated in NaNoWriMo and successfully completed a 50,000 word novel in one month. It was a great experience, but when someone conducted an informal survey on 43things of who would be doing it again this year, I... Read More
November 9, 2006 09:48 AM

The 50-state strategy

I started writing this post yesterday afternoon. Worried that I would jinx a victory, I wrote two versions: one for a narrow loss and one for what really happened. Two years ago, after Kerry lost, I wrote: "We almost won,... Read More
November 8, 2006 03:41 PM

Midterm elections matter

I voted today. Here's the scene for my precinct today. Not too crowded, but a steady flow of people. Yesterday Traci and I called voters as part of MoveOn.org's Call for Change. I'm always nervous about calling complete strangers. I... Read More
November 7, 2006 03:06 PM

Hair High at Alamo

Bill Plympton was in town tonight for the Texas premiere of Hair High at Alamo Drafthouse downtown. I've been lucky enough to see each of his films in the theater, and this is definitely his best yet. It has... Read More
November 5, 2006 10:14 PM

The Prestige

I saw The Illusionist when it came out a couple months ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. I love magic. The film was well told, the ending a surprise for me. Edward Norton was really good in it too. I re-watched... Read More
October 30, 2006 10:39 AM

Wii pre-orders

Two weeks ago I casually showed up to EB Games 5 minutes before they opened, hoping to luck out with a Nintendo Wii pre-order. Unfortunately the last slot was taken by someone who was there over two hours earlier, and... Read More
October 29, 2006 02:17 PM

I didn't go to C4

C4 was last weekend and looked like a lot of fun. Unfortunately I was about travelled-out this year with RailsConf and WWDC. Perhaps next time. Daniel Jalkut was the first I saw with nice write-up. He provides a speed-through of... Read More
October 25, 2006 09:47 PM

Da Vinci book, companion, and short film

The Da Vinci Code appealed to me and many others because it successfully mixes pieces of both art history and code breaking. The book captures in fiction the same fascination I had first cracking open Applied Cryptography. A few months... Read More
October 11, 2006 09:47 PM

Carcasonne

I picked up the board game Carcasonne a few weeks ago and have been enjoying it. It's great to see some innovation in board games again, and it's a relaxing change of pace from video games. Target and the other... Read More
October 10, 2006 11:29 AM

Lost season 3

The 2-hour season finale for Lost last year was some of the best television you'll ever see. I re-watched it a few days ago and it was great stuff. And yet, I had a feeling that season 3, which premiered... Read More
October 6, 2006 11:03 AM

Enrico Casarosa interview

In my San Francisco podcast I mentioned Enrico Casarosa and Sketchcrawl. I really wanted to interview him, but there just wasn't time to contact him and arrange it. Luckily, Illustrationmundo's Iconic podcast has conducted an interview with Enrico and they... Read More
October 3, 2006 10:18 AM

Cars

There are a lot of computer animated films out this year. It was inevitable, with Disney shutting down its 2d division a few years ago and all of Hollywood getting on the 3d bandwagon. Some will be successes, some failures... Read More
September 13, 2006 10:25 AM

Five years later

I couldn't let the 5th anniversary of September 11th pass without saying something. On Friday the Senate intelligence committee released a report showing that there was no link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. That isn't news. What is news is... Read More
September 11, 2006 10:49 PM

San Francisco podcast

My third podcast is about San Francisco. Download it here or subscribe to the podcast feed in iTunes. » Download (MP3, 16.8MB) » Audio-only RSS feed (drag to iTunes) I had a lot of fun putting this together, recording sounds... Read More
September 8, 2006 02:16 AM

Animation history, worth the wait

I received two great surprises this week. In the mail came the 9th issue of Animation Blast, Amid Amidi's magazine on the art and history of animation artists. This started as a smaller quarterly magazine, but the latest issue has... Read More
September 7, 2006 09:35 AM

Copyright law

Copyright law is a major thorn in the side of creativity. Of course I knew this, and supported the work that Lawrence Lessig was doing including the Eldred case, but it wasn't until I actually needed to use copyrighted material... Read More
September 6, 2006 08:53 PM

The web is incomplete

When we use Google everyday and mostly work with technology and related topics that are well indexed, it's easy to forget the truth: the web is horribly incomplete. I've been doing some research for an upcoming podcast and it's very... Read More
September 2, 2006 10:34 PM

Reflecting on WWDC 2006

WWDC 2006 was great. (Yes, it was two weeks ago. Finally making time to blog again.) I won't dwell on the announcements too much, but I generally agree with some that there was nothing earth-shattering. We have only seen a... Read More
August 25, 2006 01:00 AM

San Francisco walk

It's Sunday before day 1 of WWDC 2006. Willie and I took a walk this afternoon, down Market Street to the bay, following the water around to Pier 39, then up Lombard and meandering through quiet San Francisco back streets... Read More
August 6, 2006 10:20 AM

WWDC 2006 coming up

John Siracusa rants a bit about the lack of access to WWDC for non-attendees. I agree that the session DVDs, sample code, and other resources should be made available to everyone. But there is so much to the conference that... Read More
August 4, 2006 03:39 PM

FlipBook

Last year I started some extra work to help bring DigiCel FlipBook to the Mac. FlipBook is software for traditional, hand-drawn animators, and it is actually somewhat unique in the industry. Whereas Flash and Toon Boom are vector-based, FlipBook started... Read More
August 3, 2006 12:35 AM

Muybridge panoramas

In 1997 I walked into Half Priced Books to browse and left with a copy of Eadweard Muybridge and the Photographic Panorama of San Francisco, 1850-1880 for $5. I had been familiar with Muybridge through his series of photographs of... Read More
July 29, 2006 09:14 PM

Weblog design update

I just rolled out some design tweaks and realignment to this site. The original design (if you could call it that) was whipped together several years ago and hasn't really changed much since then. It even used HTML tables, a... Read More
July 29, 2006 01:20 AM

Video Games podcast

My second podcast episode is about video game music. You can download it here, or subscribe to the new podcast feed in iTunes. » Download (MP3, 13.4MB) » Audio-only RSS feed (drag to iTunes) I started working on this last... Read More
July 25, 2006 12:43 PM

Comic-Con, Scanner, and independent shorts

Comic-Con San Diego has started. For a humorous look at the kinds of people you might see walking the show floor, check out the excellent series of recent sketches on the Story Boredom blog. I've never been to the convention,... Read More
July 21, 2006 03:49 PM

RailsConf 2006

I attended RailsConf in Chicago last month. There's a lot of excitement in the Rails community right now, and it was nice to be there for the first year before it explodes to the even bigger event that the... Read More
July 20, 2006 09:31 AM

More gaming, year 2

At the beginning of last year I wrote about my new Game Boy Advance and how it was finally the system that pulled me back into gaming, something that consoles and computer games could not do. A year later, the... Read More
July 19, 2006 10:31 AM

Ingram

I don't blog much about VitalSource in this space, but I should. When I joined the company, it was to return to designing and building Mac software, with the potential for working on something meaningful (education tools) as a refreshing... Read More
July 18, 2006 10:23 AM

An Inconvenient Truth

I saw the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth last month. It's a very important movie, and I hope everyone has a chance to see it. They handed out copies of Seed Magazine at SXSW this year. There were a... Read More
July 17, 2006 02:03 PM

RubyCocoa

I write Mac software, but over the last year I've increasingly been building Ruby on Rails web apps as well. Today I finally took a look at RubyCocoa. I wanted to whip up a quick Cocoa app that would involve... Read More
July 16, 2006 10:08 PM

Creative professionals

My friend John Rubio has launched a new site: CREATEaPro. A steady flow of good essays is already filling up the site. His latest, 10 Essential Tips to Becoming a Successful Creative Pro, is equally applicable to a wide range... Read More
July 11, 2006 08:43 AM

Time for thinking

Gillian Carson talks about vacation time on the Amigo blog: "A holiday is a time for thinking, for relaxing your mind, for drinking beer and laughing and... for having ideas. The last time we went on holiday we came up... Read More
July 4, 2006 01:05 PM

New fence

Last month I tore down the rotting privacy fence in our backyard and built a new low spaced-picket fence. In addition to just being ugly to look at and nearly collapsed in a few places, the old fence was tall... Read More
May 29, 2006 03:13 PM

Hello Saturday

I had a busy week coding. Long days and longer nights. Deadlines are fast approaching. The last few weeks of a project are always the most stressful, but also the most rewarding as all the pieces start to fall into... Read More
May 27, 2006 02:53 PM

Red crayon

I was wired when I got back at midnight last Thursday from the late Mission Impossible 3 show with Damon. A storm had passed over while we were in the theater. Tree branches were down in the neighborhood, and rain... Read More
May 7, 2006 09:08 PM

United 93

When I first heard about the United 93 movie I had just about the same reaction as Matthew Haughey. Hollywood only wants to make some quick cash off of other people's tragedy. The movie is going to be painful to... Read More
April 30, 2006 09:42 PM

Three text editors

I love reading about the setup for other Mac users: what kind of desks, computers, and software they use. The full list of applications usually overlaps quite a bit with my own Dock, but every once in a while there... Read More
April 20, 2006 11:13 PM

Education is broken

I snapped this photo of a banner last week. It sums up quite nicely one of the big problems in American public education.... Read More
April 17, 2006 01:56 PM

Happy Easter, and TextDrive to DreamHost

Easter is a time of rebirth and starting over. So today I’m flipping over two new things. The first, to fulfill a new year’s resolution that died before February. I rearranged my office and drawing desk yesterday to make... Read More
April 16, 2006 09:21 PM

Mediocrity is the new application platform

Today marks the 4-year anniversary of this weblog. What better way to celebrate than with a discussion of web applications. Willie Abrams said in a recent Campfire chat: “Web applications automatically have sync.” He hits on the fundamental principle of... Read More
March 9, 2006 09:41 PM

STAPLE! 2006

It's not often that I get out of the house early on a Saturday, but STAPLE! The Independent Media Expo is today. If you are anywhere in the central Texas area, check out the web site for the schedule and... Read More
March 4, 2006 08:34 AM

Austin on Rails

About 20 people met at the Frog Design building downtown a few months ago for the first Austin Ruby on Rails user group meeting, and by the third meeting that number had doubled. Founders Damon, Robert Rasmussen, and Rob... Read More
February 22, 2006 09:45 PM

Smart software bloat

Everyone complains about software bloat. And it’s easy to see why — applications are bigger and slower than they’ve ever been, and users think the dozen features they will never use are to blame. On the Mac we are lucky... Read More
February 21, 2006 04:09 PM

Campfire Beep

I’ve been living in Campfire quite a bit over the last few days. It’s a great app, well designed and very fast. But it suffers from a problem that iChat and other AIM clients do not have: it’s easy to... Read More
February 18, 2006 12:35 PM

Disney buys Pixar

It was made official today. The rumor only surfaced a week ago, but in that time many people have gone from surprise and skepticism to hope that maybe it could be great for both companies. For Pixar, it might mean... Read More
January 24, 2006 05:52 PM

Limitations in toys and software

One of the first things you notice when you have kids is how bad the toys are. Everything is electronic, makes too much noise, and is quickly discarded when the batteries run out or when everything you could possibly do... Read More
January 17, 2006 04:24 PM

New year drawing resolution

For me, one of the best sources of motivation is when I know other people are paying attention. So, my new year’s resolution is going to be to draw more and post at least one drawing a week to this... Read More
January 1, 2006 09:37 PM

To-do lists and embracing the network

There is something about Ta-da List that works really well. Simple things like hitting return to save one to-do item and start a new one, tidying up of completed lists, and automatic ordering of recent lists. And above all else,... Read More
December 17, 2005 10:15 AM

Bring me the head of Charlie Brown

Tonight ABC aired the original Charlie Brown Christmas special yet again. That thing never gets old. The animation is limited and the characters always off model from one scene to the next, but it has great voices and characters and... Read More
December 16, 2005 11:58 PM

Randal and Rebecca

Okay, I admit it. I’ve been watching The Apprentice this year. I hate being addicted to it. It’s not even entertaining for me because it’s so stressful just to watch. I’m probably more nervous sitting on my couch then they... Read More
December 15, 2005 11:25 PM

CGContextSelectFont is slow

We’ve heard it countless times: Before you spend any time optimizing, profile your code. And yet we always think we know where the performance problems are without testing. Earlier this year I started some extra work to help a company... Read More
December 14, 2005 05:41 PM

Set unreasonable deadlines

Damon and I have been discussing how time constraints can encourage creativity. I hinted at this in my first NaNoWriMo post, and it’s something I’ve been trying on other projects at work. Of course the concept is all through what... Read More
December 11, 2005 01:12 PM

I found my cell phone

So a couple of months ago a 1-year-old who shall remain nameless tossed my cell phone into the toilet. I thought surely I would have to buy a new phone, but after taking it all apart, cleaning it, and letting... Read More
December 11, 2005 11:25 AM

My podcast process, take one

Ryan described his hardware setup for podcasting a while back. With at least a few dozen podcasts under his belt, he’s got his system down. I wanted to write a little about the process I used to create the Trains... Read More
December 8, 2005 12:11 AM

Music to drive back to

The U2 concert in Houston a few weeks ago was great. I drove back late at night, with The Killers album on repeat to keep me awake. In the era of single-click pop song purchases on iTunes, it’s not often... Read More
December 7, 2005 09:43 PM

50,136 words

As I posted about a few weeks ago, I decided to write a novel this month (National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo). I posted some of my progress on 43 Things, and I’m going to repost those entries here.... Read More
December 1, 2005 09:43 AM

Harry Potter book 4

So I finished rereading Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire in anticipation of the 4th film, which we just saw last night. (Thanks Damon for remembering to buy tickets a month early.) The film did a great job of... Read More
November 20, 2005 02:32 PM

Mario Kart DS

It's all about the games. I picked up Mario Kart DS yesterday and it doesn't disappoint. The Nintendo WiFi network was a little flaky last night, but things are running smoothly today. And it's been fun to watch friend codes... Read More
November 16, 2005 03:41 PM

10,302 words

A few weeks ago I heard about NaNoWriMo, a month-long “contest” to write a novel. You start November 1st, end at midnight November 30th, and if you’ve amassed 50,000 words, you win. Of course there are a lot of winners,... Read More
November 9, 2005 01:05 AM

iPods, videos, and U2

Steve Jobs in yesterday’s special event, discussing the white iPods: “It’s been a huge success for us, and therefore it’s time to replace it.” The new iPods look great. At first I was disappointed by the $1.99 price for music... Read More
October 13, 2005 02:50 PM

Wallace and Gromit

What a great film. To prepare I dusted off my old Laserdisc with the three original Wallace and Gromit short films, but the feature equals and surpasses those films in every way. Thoroughly enjoyable. Aardman Animations fans should also... Read More
October 12, 2005 02:52 PM

Corpse Bride

Finally I had a chance to see Corpse Bride last night. Caught it at the Alamo Drafthouse, which is the only theater smart enough to show short films and other theme-appropriate clips before shows. Last night they played Vincent (Tim... Read More
October 10, 2005 08:49 AM

Hurricane Rita

They warned of 70mph winds, massive flooding, and loss of power, but in the last days before landfall Hurricane Rita shifted north and Austin didn’t receive even a drop of rain. The organizers of Austin City Limits Music Festival... Read More
October 5, 2005 04:34 PM

Hurricane Katrina

Last Wednesday I wrote a rant destined for this space, I was so saddened and then upset by what was happening in Louisiana. But I let the post sit unpublished, and by the end of the week others were voicing... Read More
September 6, 2005 09:48 PM

Trains podcast

This is my first podcast, called Trains. If you subscribe to the main RSS feed using a podcast-aware newsreader like NetNewsWire 2.0, you may already have the MP3 in your copy of iTunes. If not, here it is for download:... Read More
August 29, 2005 03:02 PM

Podcast coming

There is a place for text, and a place for sound. If you are like me, you read and write text all day. Whether it’s email, chat, html, code. For those times, music is all the sound you can take... Read More
August 28, 2005 01:24 PM

New office

I have been officially kicked out of my office by a 1-year-old. Such is life in a three bedroom house with 5 people, I guess. We packed up over 10 boxes of books and other junk, which will sit in... Read More
August 23, 2005 02:41 PM

Perfection

I don’t consider myself a perfectionist. In fact, I can often be downright lazy. I write sloppy code sometimes. I am hasty with my artwork instead of thorough. I am always impatient to see the end result, regardless of what... Read More
August 20, 2005 10:48 PM

VitalSource Store

One of our big projects at work just launched: the VitalSource Store. James Duncan Davidson and Mike Clark have posted about what it was like working on this project. My favorite posts include this one about the Rails development sandbox,... Read More
August 19, 2005 08:53 AM

Alison Krauss

Friday night we saw Alison Krauss & Union Station at The Backyard. At one time far outside Austin, suburbia has now claimed most of the land around this uniquely Austin venue. We parked outside what will shortly be a Bed... Read More
June 26, 2005 08:20 PM

Howl's Moving Castle

I saw Howl’s Moving Castle last night. When we showed up at the theater, I was surprised that they accidentally had the subtitled version, not the dub. It was great to see the original Japanese, and I look forward to... Read More
June 20, 2005 09:14 AM

Nintendo DS

Alright I gave in and bought a DS. The newly bundled Mario 64 was too much for me to resist. I justified it as an early father’s day present to myself. It became increasingly obvious after E3 that Nintendo does... Read More
June 19, 2005 12:32 AM

WWDC 2005 highlights

Briefly, highlights from WWDC include: great Automator, .Mac, and WebKit sessions; time with James Duncan Davidson, Mike Clark, and small chats with Brent Simmons and other developers; seeing the impressive work Rich Kilmer is doing on ActionStep; the Michael Johnson... Read More
June 16, 2005 09:41 AM

Decade

I saw three people I haven’t seen in over a decade last week. The first two from high school — Heather, at Magnolia Cafe in Austin before leaving, then Joel randomly on Market Street in San Francisco. I wondered who... Read More
June 16, 2005 09:41 AM

Collaboration and Goodbyes

The .Mac SDK session here at WWDC was interesting. First, it was forward-looking, not something we've seen much this year with the exception of Intel. Also, it wasn't covered under NDA (hence this blog post). The 2.0 kit will be... Read More
June 9, 2005 09:50 AM

Transitions

Even before I arrived in San Francisco, and even before the rumors surfaced of Apple switching to Intel, this WWDC looked to be a unique one. For the first time since I can remember, the conference was mostly going to... Read More
June 7, 2005 12:18 AM

Madagascar

Madagascar is easily the best of Dreamworks’ (or PDI’s) recent animated films. The animation is filled with great character poses, holds, and snappy movement, and the designs and composition are fresh in a way that makes Shrek look only mediocre.... Read More
May 31, 2005 08:37 AM

Re-evaluating the PSP and DS

After a colleague bought a PSP, I decided to re-evaluate the PSP and DS. I did some more research, looked at the available games, pricing, and features. I still enjoy my Game Boy Advance SP, and stand by what I... Read More
May 26, 2005 09:08 PM

Integrating web applications

We all use web apps. Google Maps or Mapquest, Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, Basecamp and FogBugz. The ubiquity of these services has reached the point where it is increasingly useful to point to them from other applications, web or native.... Read More
May 17, 2005 08:32 PM

WebTV in the trash

The other day I went for a walk and on the way back picked up a candy wrapper on the sidewalk, to throw away when I got home. If I pick up other people’s trash (not a frequent activity, but... Read More
May 9, 2005 12:04 AM

Respect to Dave

Dave Winer turned 50 today. I first met Dave over 9 years ago, back when the free release of Frontier ruled web application development and automation on the Mac. I ran the frontier-talk mailing list for a time, was... Read More
May 2, 2005 09:16 PM

Experience before animating

Kelly is studying in Paris. She writes about animating from your experiences after talking with Pixar animator Bolhem Bouchiba: "But it made me realize something about good animation. It dosen't come from studying other films. Or live action. Or acting.... Read More
May 2, 2005 12:38 PM

Tabs are a hack

I don’t like Safari-style tabs. Sure, I use them — and in NetNewsWire if you want to use the built-in web browser, there is no choice) — but I’ve always thought that there should be better ways to manage windows,... Read More
May 1, 2005 08:04 PM

The Animation Show 2005

The Animation Show’s 2nd year show came to Austin last weekend, and I was lucky enough to see it Sunday evening with Don Hertzfeldt taking questions afterwards. He discussed traditional animation, the dying art of shooting on actual film, and... Read More
April 20, 2005 11:19 AM

How podcasting saved RSS 2.0

Dan Cederholm asks the relevant questions about weblog syndication formats: “Will we forever continue to support multiple RSS formats as well as Atom? Is Atom succeding as a successor to RSS? Will this stop people from using the term ‘RSS’... Read More
April 15, 2005 07:59 PM

Where are the 2d animators

It’s always interesting to see where 2d artists have gone after the decline of traditional, hand-drawn animation for feature films. That might seem an odd thing to say considering that recently a hand-drawn Pooh movie opened in theaters, but also... Read More
April 14, 2005 12:19 PM

NetNewsWire unread count

Or: How I learned to stop worrying and ignore the blogosphere guilt trip.... Read More
April 14, 2005 12:11 PM

SXSW: Wrap-up

Leaving SXSW I think I noticed two major themes at the conference this year: Software development. Jason Fried’s talk on small teams set the tone here. Get close to your users, start building the real thing early, and keep it... Read More
March 17, 2005 01:56 AM

Podcast Shuffle

Discovering new podcasts is still an awkward process, despite some great podcast support in newsreaders such as NetNewsWire 2.0. I thought it would be interesting to randomly pick individual podcasts and aggregate their latest posts into a special feed. After... Read More
March 14, 2005 01:32 PM

SXSW: Simplicity, Ta-da, and XFN

Jason Fried has been talking a lot lately about keeping your product simple. His SXSW session on Saturday continued this theme of doing more with less — “constraints encourage creativity.” One example he cites is how Ta-da List’s lack of... Read More
March 14, 2005 12:44 PM

Year three

It’s now been three years since I started this weblog. Here’s last year’s post, the one a year before that, and the first post. I like that the anniversary date falls around SXSW. It serves as a convenient reminder, and... Read More
March 9, 2005 01:22 PM

Elements 7

If you’ve been wondering what all the podcast hype is about, Ryan’s latest Elements episode has a few of the things that make podcasts great: music, interviews, uniquely non-mainstream, and told with a fresh perspective that you can only get... Read More
March 7, 2005 10:15 AM

Staple!

For comics fans in Texas, the Staple! Expo will be held in Austin this Saturday. The Austin Chronicle has a story on it. Congratulations to Chris Nicholas for organizing the event since mid-2004. It should be a fun time. John... Read More
March 3, 2005 01:48 PM

The Ruby end-run

It was fun while it lasted, but PHP’s time may have come and gone. The benefits of PHP in the early days (extremely fast prototyping, embedded in HTML) outweighed the problems (haphazard function naming, poor object-oriented features, and difficulty designing... Read More
February 25, 2005 08:25 PM

Blogging full time, and Cartoon Retro

I hope Kottke’s decision to blog full time without advertising will be a success. He’s got a large reader base. I stopped reading Kottke for most of 2004 but have re-subscribed so I can follow his progress. The interesting question... Read More
February 23, 2005 09:36 AM

Ajax, Flash, and web standards

We should all be weary of new acronyms lest we promote and give significance to half-baked ideas and fads. But Jesse James Garrett’s Ajax essay is a good read — a concise, high-level look at how JavaScript and XML will... Read More
February 22, 2005 01:51 PM

The Great Scott

I’m not sure I ever wanted to “grow up” to be a magician, but I was pretty fascinated with it as a kid, and more serious about it than most. I knew the disappearing quarter tricks, had the special... Read More
February 2, 2005 08:21 PM

Delicious coding

Apparently I wasn’t the only person to purchase Delicious Library in the first week of release. They’ve had $250,000 in sales so far. For an app that no one really needs, this is pretty incredible. And no office space... Read More
January 18, 2005 08:44 PM

Back to politics

Thursday is the presidential inauguration, as well as Not One Damn Dime Day. Every year or so you hear about one of these attempts to effect the economy, and of course they usually have no noticeable effect. But you never... Read More
January 18, 2005 12:00 PM

Pat Smith's secret

From the journal of Pat Smith: “it's strange to start a new animated film. it seems so far away that i'll be sitting in a theater watching it. but there's a big secret about animation: it's a series of steps,... Read More
January 17, 2005 12:52 AM

New year gaming

Traci couldn’t find the GameCube games she was looking for (mostly Pikmin), so for Christmas she bought me a Game Boy Advance SP. This was a very unexpected surprise. I hadn’t really used a Game Boy since the original one... Read More
January 6, 2005 12:02 AM

The Incredibles DVD

Last week I received The Incredibles DVD screener in the mail through my membership in ASIFA-Hollywood, and Saturday a bound copy of the screenplay arrived. I’ll keep the screenplay on my shelf next to the rest of the Pixar... Read More
December 13, 2004 10:52 AM

Google and the great apps to come

Google Desktop Search is a neat app. The integration of local and global results is brilliant. But it’s not the future of desktop search. David Galbraith said something interesting in a post titled “Google lock in”: “Whatever Microsoft do, Google... Read More
December 10, 2004 08:57 PM

Tiger Tech Talk

I didn't know exactly what to expect when I signed up for Apple's Tiger Tech Talk. It looked like a sort of mini WWDC event, and since the first stop on their tour was here in Austin, it was a... Read More
November 11, 2004 10:43 PM

The Incredibles

I saw The Incredibles last night. I'm sure I had a big smile across my face from beginning to end. What a great film. If anything could get me to stop thinking about politics, this was it. There have... Read More
November 6, 2004 03:59 PM

After almost winning

See that little blue county in the expanse of red in the image on the right? That’s where I live. Back in January, I said: “It’s about bringing more people into the process. But to do that right, we... Read More
November 5, 2004 02:49 PM

What just happened?

Based on the exit poll numbers and the supposedly record turnout, I fully expected that we'd know within a couple hours after polls closed that Kerry was the decisive winner. I was bewildered when Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin still... Read More
November 3, 2004 05:51 AM

Election day

The daylight savings time switch has helped me get up earlier, so I easily made it to my voting location by 7am this morning. There was already a line of people (perhaps 50) stretching outside. It was cold, from... Read More
November 2, 2004 09:10 AM

Ghost in the Shell, Shark Tale, and a pumpkin

Today is International Animation Day. My membership in ASIFA-Hollywood provides few perks since I live a couple states away from the Los Angeles area. They still send me announcements for LA screenings and lectures, though, as if to taunt... Read More
October 28, 2004 11:49 PM

Polls, Dean, and how Kerry will win

In the 2000 presidential election, Gore was behind in all the national polls before election day. I remember that night, listening to the radio in a fast food drive-in lane when NPR called Pennsylvania for Gore. I cheered to no... Read More
October 27, 2004 05:09 AM

Voice recording

I bought a Griffin iTalk earlier this week. Not entirely an impulse buy, but I did drive over to the local Apple Store instead of ordering online. I’ve been wanting the ability to record on my iPod since I received... Read More
October 14, 2004 02:36 PM

Superman

The death of Christopher Reeve will hit a lot of people pretty hard. He worked with so much determination to regain movement and he stayed optimistic. It’s an inspirational story, and it’s a shock that the story is now over.... Read More
October 11, 2004 12:58 PM

Frank Thomas passes

Frank Thomas has passed away. His life-long friend Ollie Johnston is now the sole remaining master animator from the classic days of the Walt Disney studio. For more on this duo, watch “Frank & Ollie”, or read Canemaker’s book, “Nine... Read More
September 9, 2004 02:18 PM

Olympics, genetics, and giving everything you have

More Olympics this weekend. First the U.S. basketball team, ahead most of the game and playing well, then losing in the last few minutes. Next, the women’s marathon, the heartbreak for England’s Paula Radcliffe as she couldn’t finish the race... Read More
August 22, 2004 10:13 PM

Lowercase web

Wired News will no longer capitalize internet, web, or net: “But in the case of internet, web and net, a change in our house style was necessary to put into perspective what the internet is: another medium for delivering and... Read More
August 20, 2004 12:07 PM

Television feature request

I rarely watch TV anymore. When I do, like for the ongoing Olympics coverage, I quickly become frustrated with commercials (especially those not appropriate for 4 year olds, even if the main show is). I want a “visual mute” feature... Read More
August 16, 2004 01:59 PM

Timing notes

I sometimes work on my animated film late at night, when the family is long asleep and I've worked enough in the day that I can't stand the sight of a keyboard or mouse. Unfortunately in those times, I... Read More
August 10, 2004 12:52 AM

High School Reunion

Saturday night was my 10-year high school reunion (more specifically the Anderson High School reunion class of 1994 from Austin, which I say only for Google's reference, even if it dates me). As recent as two months ago I had... Read More
August 2, 2004 09:48 AM

Backyard Fireworks

The private park behind our house is owned by a local church, and they aren't afraid to spend money on fireworks every year. Last week was probably the best show yet. We brought some chairs out to the sidewalk to... Read More
July 13, 2004 03:56 PM

California Adventure

Yesterday I finally arrived back in Austin after 8 days in California. Last weekend started off with a trip to Los Angeles, where I met up with my old friend Justin and attended "2D Expo", a conference sponsored by ASIFA-Hollywood... Read More
July 4, 2004 11:24 PM

Work, non-work, and A Scanner Darkly

I’ve routinely been working past midnight the last couple of weeks as we make a final push to get our software finished. Although it’s just coincidence that we usually ship right before WWDC, it reminds me of the old days... Read More
June 24, 2004 03:19 PM

Comic Book Idol

I can't say that I'm a big comic book person anymore, at least not the way I was as a kid, eagerly awaiting the weekly shipment of comics to the local shop. Recently I've read books like Understanding Comics that... Read More
June 9, 2004 11:31 AM

Apple Design Guidelines

Last week Apple released the Apple Software Design Guidelines document. I’ve only just skimmed it, but it looks like the best document from Apple in years. Take this little bit of advice: “When saving files of your own document types,... Read More
June 1, 2004 09:50 PM

Lorenzo

If you'd have asked me last week whether I would see Raising Helen on opening night, I'd have given you a puzzled look and maybe said something about looking forward to Harry Potter. But that was before I realized that... Read More
May 28, 2004 02:03 PM

The Triplets of Belleville

I’m listening to track 3 of the Finding Nemo soundtrack on repeat. Something very soothing about that opening music. I finally got to watch the Triplets of Belleville DVD special features, and I only wish there was more (full director’s... Read More
May 21, 2004 12:59 PM

Flowdelic and Frontier

Mason Hale of frog design started a weblog last week, and already he's got some great posts and discussion. Mason and I worked together around 1995. You know, back when the Internet was still fun. At the time, Mason had... Read More
May 18, 2004 01:06 PM

iTunes follow-up

Not 5 minutes after I posted yesterday’s iTunes piece, Ryan tells me I’m asking for too much. “My fear is that too many features will render iTunes a useless and unusable app,” he writes, and he’s absolutely right to be... Read More
May 13, 2004 03:36 PM

The iTunes Platform

It’s no secret that iTunes is one of Apple’s best apps. Of all the iApps, iTunes remains the only one I have no critical feature requests for. With version 4.5, Apple adds to what was already a solid app, and... Read More
May 12, 2004 03:54 PM

Breadcrumb navigation

There has been a fascinating discussion among information architects and web designers about the usefulness of breadcrumb trails. Mark Hurst of Good Experience talks about the page paradigm, Peter Merholz mostly disagrees, and Christine Wodtke offers her two cents. Here’s... Read More
April 8, 2004 02:47 PM

Usable software, and just shipping it

A few loosely connected weblog posts I read today… John Gruber, “Ronco Spray-On Usability”: “UI development is the hard part. And it’s not the last step, it’s the first step. In my estimation, the difference between: software that performs function... Read More
April 3, 2004 04:09 PM

Eternal Sunshine

Saw Eternal Sunlight for the Spotless Mind tonight. An incredibly great film. Then I wanted to order Beck's song from the film soundtrack. I have an extra Pepsi bottle top that had been gathering dust in the kitchen for a... Read More
March 20, 2004 11:36 PM

Thank you Radio, and TypeKey

After two years of using Radio Userland, I decided to migrate this weblog to Movable Type. I wrote a UserTalk script to export my data for importing into Movable Type, and everything went about as well as could be expected.... Read More
March 20, 2004 11:27 PM

SXSW Day 4: Fun, fun, and designing for people

The last day of SXSW tends to be less about substance and more about winding down after the long weekend and leaving on a positive note. In the morning I listened to Gabriel Jeffrey talk about his success with Group... Read More
March 18, 2004 09:53 AM

SXSW Day 3: Design, user experience

Weather changes. The first two days of SXSW were marked with light rain, but today was a beautiful day. Leaving the EFF party tonight, we saw lightning off in the distance. Now, as I write this back at my house,... Read More
March 15, 2004 11:55 PM

SXSW Day 2: Ideas, Joe Trippi

One of the things I like about SXSW is that it's a time to just think about new ideas without necessarily trying to relate them directly to a particular work project. When I take notes, I write down interesting quotes... Read More
March 14, 2004 11:56 PM

SXSW Day 1: Web design accessibility, Frog party

I almost skipped the accessibility panel but I'm glad I didn't. As usual Jeffrey Veen did a great job of putting the current web practices into perspective with stories from the old school of web design. It used to be... Read More
March 13, 2004 11:56 PM

Almost SXSW

SXSW Interactive officially begins tomorrow. I met with Ryan and Damon this afternoon to discuss the design for a project at work, eat lots of food, and finish round 2 of my effort to convince Ryan that fixed-width layouts are... Read More
March 12, 2004 11:14 PM

Reading, ASCII, and PDF

I started reading the electronic version of Eastern Standard Tribe. Hoping to get through some of it by SXSW and pick up a hard-copy there. I've also been reviewing my Cocoa books, since I've been porting the user interface of... Read More
March 10, 2004 08:46 PM

Two years blogging

Today marks the two year anniversary of this weblog. It’s been a good experience, and even if the content is not always fresh it’s still a worthwhile endeavor and will continue. Expect the posts to ramp up to at least... Read More
March 9, 2004 06:11 AM

Kite Festival

The weather was perfect today for the Zilker Kite Festival. It's really incredible to see hundreds of kites flying overhead as you walk around. Homemade kites, children's kites, giant kites, colorful kites. Kites shaped like cats, boats, dragons, snakes.... Read More
March 8, 2004 01:00 AM

Oscars, Pixar, and Triplets

Happy leap day. I was a little surprised that Finding Nemo wasn’t nominated for the Best Picture Oscar this year. Clearly it was the most successful movie of the year, also a huge audience favorite, and arguably a near-perfect film... Read More
February 29, 2004 03:09 AM

Snow

It snowed a week ago, and I'm just now getting the pictures off my camera. Real snow, the first I can remember here in at least 15 years. I was up Friday until 2am as the snow began to fall,... Read More
February 24, 2004 04:13 PM

Fight for it

I've written a few posts about technology, and about the upcoming Oscars, but I can't bring myself to post them. They seem so insignificant compared to the political process in front of us. The Democratic Party has lost its way.... Read More
January 29, 2004 10:47 AM

Dean's comeback

I have no idea what will happen in New Hampshire tomorrow. The media slammed Dean all last week, but it's clear if you pay attention to the polls and the turnout for Dean's events that the winds are shifting again.... Read More
January 26, 2004 12:13 PM

Iowa Caucus

I was watching C-Span.org's live broadcast from the Iowa caucus in Dubuque County. Watching online because my cable went out today ("a fiber line was cut"). It's laughing at me because we're keeping cable primarily to watch the campaign! This... Read More
January 19, 2004 08:33 PM

Productive week

I think I do some of my best work when we first start development on a project. No one is paying particular attention, the user interface is flexible, and bugs are inevitable and okay. As we get closer to shipping... Read More
January 16, 2004 03:51 PM

Jakob Nielsen, Sun, and 3d interfaces

I like Jakob Nielsen. He was practically the lone voice of reason when Flash web sites, splash pages, and graphics-heavy design seemed poised to take over the Internet and render it useless. But lately I’ve been ignoring his Alertbox columns.... Read More
January 1, 2004 10:38 PM

Watterson and the New Year's Eve blog post

The way I blog, I gather bits of news stories or other blog posts and write up an opinion on them for later blogging. Then when I feel like posting something, I go through the queue of things I've written... Read More
December 31, 2003 10:38 PM

Control drag hidden constant

I'm blogging this so it will be indexed by the great search engine in the sky, and perhaps save some Mac programmer out there a little time. The new control drag-and-drop Carbon Events are only partially documented. In addition to... Read More
December 30, 2003 10:15 AM

XHTML Friends Network

After SXSW earlier this year, I posted that Tantek wanted a way to add meaning to blogrolls, something with less complexity than FOAF. Apparently he and others have been churning away at this idea since then, and the resulting specification... Read More
December 26, 2003 05:58 PM

Feed protocol

NetNewsWire 1.0.7 adds support for the feed protocol. Wes has suggested that MIME types and helper apps are the correct way to handle this, but modern browsers seem to have practically given up on good integration between MIME types and... Read More
December 24, 2003 12:08 PM

Stopdesign on CSS layout options

Doug of Stopdesign discusses fixed vs. liquid layouts in CSS: "Truth be told, table-based layouts are currently more capable of handling this issue than CSS layouts are. I'm certainly not advocating a move back to tables for layout. But unless... Read More
December 23, 2003 12:20 PM

Why Cocoa text drags are broken

Apple still hasn't fixed text drag-and-drop in Cocoa. In addition to going against how drag-and-drop has worked in previous versions of Mac OS for a decade, I believe it is based on a flawed concept. Has it seen any usability... Read More
December 22, 2003 08:32 PM

Running Mac OS X

Congratulations to James Duncan Davidson, whose Running Mac OS X Panther has gone to press just in time for him to enjoy the holidays. I had the opportunity to review the book, and it's a solid achievement. He covers many... Read More
December 12, 2003 09:14 AM

Independent comics

I've been digging back into comics lately, hence some of the comic-related posts. One of the things that fascinates me is the abundance of great web comics out there. Tons of artists who haven't quite found the right business model,... Read More
December 8, 2003 12:21 PM

Christmas lights

I've come to enjoy the yearly tradition of putting up Christmas lights: balancing on a wobbly ladder, hanging over the side of the roof, and searching for that elusive burned-out mini-bulb. This year we put our lights up in... Read More
December 7, 2003 11:54 AM

Roy leaves Disney

The New York Times covers Roy Disney's resignation: "Roy E. Disney, a nephew of the founder of the Walt Disney Company, said on Sunday that he was leaving the board of directors and called for the resignation of the chairman... Read More
December 1, 2003 11:02 AM

Mac files, volumes

While looking for something else the other day, I ran across this Apple technote. I think it illustrates quite nicely the kind of sacrifices that were made to put Mac OS on top of unix. In the end the rewards... Read More
November 24, 2003 02:23 PM

HorseBack Salad

The Austin Chronicle profiles HorseBack Salad Entertainment: "In February 2001 -- working out of their homes -- the four formed HorseBack Salad, a 'ground up' animation and multimedia firm whose chief claim to fame was and is its ability to... Read More
November 22, 2003 04:01 PM

Peppercoin and web comics

It's been a few years since Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics was published. In that time, a couple digital cash companies have probably closed their doors, and thousands of web comics have been created by artists with little expectation of even... Read More
November 18, 2003 04:07 PM

VoodooPad

Something interesting is going on with VoodooPad, winner of O'Reilly's Mac OS X Innovators Content. It's the best front-end to a Wiki I've seen, but more than that, the implementation for talking to servers is XML-RPC based and open (overview... Read More
November 17, 2003 09:36 AM

G5 vs. Power Mac 9600

My new G5 arrived last week. This machine replaces (supplements) my old TiBook, which was really showing signs of age even with Panther. It is an understatement to say the G5 is a fast machine, and it makes programming a... Read More
November 15, 2003 09:36 AM

New York City and Al

After visiting family in Louisiana last week (wait, 2 weeks ago), we took a trip to New York City for a few days vacation. It was great New York City weather: cold, and a little rain one night. We did... Read More
November 14, 2003 09:39 AM

Porco Rosso

Earlier this week, the brand new English dub of Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso was screened at the Paramount Theater as part of the Austin Film Festival. I bought a full pass to the festival to make sure I wouldn't get... Read More
October 17, 2003 09:32 PM

Apple and Pepsi

Today: Apple and Pepsi to Give Away 100 Million Free Songs Two decades ago, Steve Jobs to John Scully of Pepsi: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come... Read More
October 16, 2003 06:27 PM

Rustboy book

My copy of the Rustboy book arrived the other day. It is an incredible achievement, one of the best "making of" books I've seen. Like the upcoming film, it was put together by one guy, a Mac with off-the-shelf software,... Read More
October 13, 2003 09:09 AM

Hackers and Painters

Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters essay surprised me. I put off reading it for months, because I assumed I knew what it was about -- that programmers are artists, that their work today is just as important an art form... Read More
October 7, 2003 03:11 PM

Dreams quote

Andy Murdock, of Lots of Robots: "If you sit around waiting for permission to follow your dreams then you are just sitting around waiting to die."... Read More
October 6, 2003 11:45 AM

Old life drawings

The human figure is complicated and beautiful and impossibly hard to draw well. If you can master it, the quality of the rest of your work will improve. When I have time, I go to an open life drawing session... Read More
October 3, 2003 09:20 AM

Me as an animator

Most people who know me know that I'm a big fan of animation. There's a great potential in animation to create stories and characters that move the audience in ways that are impossible in live-action. Many considered it the art... Read More
October 2, 2003 06:05 PM

Doubting Cocoa

TidBITS, iMovie 3 Tips and Gotchas: "Although the program introduced a number of welcome new features, performance was sluggish, the program crashed for no reason, and exporting data was problematic. iMovie 3 had become the new Word 6 (for those... Read More
October 1, 2003 11:04 AM

Kali

You always think that these are the kind of things that happen to other people, until it happens close to you. I went to the funeral service for Kali Sansone today, someone I saw practically everyday from kindergarten to 8th... Read More
September 27, 2003 04:34 PM

New and old web standards

Jeffrey Veen argues for the practical advantages of new web standards: "Huge interfaces squeezed through plodding modem connections have been a plague since the Web's inception. The increasing dominance of broadband has only helped a bit. A hotel phone line... Read More
September 19, 2003 11:14 AM

Futurama over

The series finale of Futurama aired last month. It was a great show that ended too soon (thanks Fox execs). I had only seen a handful of episodes until last month, when I rented the first season disc 1 on... Read More
September 15, 2003 09:30 PM

Fragments

I just received my copy of Fragments in the mail. It's a great collection of sketches and paintings by Pixar story artists Ronnie Del Carmen and Enrico Casarosa. (Pixar, for those not paying attention, is the new Disney --... Read More
September 12, 2003 02:37 PM

Whale Rider

We saw Whale Rider last night, and I was pulled into it from the very beginning. There were few big surprises, but the story was moving, especially for all of us with daughters. It was told in a uniquely honest... Read More
August 31, 2003 09:10 PM

Austin Sketch Group

A new sketch group officially started up yesterday, led by local artist John Rubio. The first meeting was at Opal Divines. We passed around sketchbooks and discussed art, comics, animation, and how the digital world has effected independent artists.... Read More
August 18, 2003 09:34 PM

Carbon and Cocoa sitting in a tree

John Gruber counters anti-Carbon arguments from Andrew Stone, again: "Apple's original plan more or less boiled down to replacing the Mac OS with NextStep; Mac developers had the crazy idea that it should be replaced with a new version of... Read More
August 5, 2003 02:14 PM

Veen and cycling

I often subscribe to a weblog because I trust that person's opinion on a certain subject. I know that they worked at a company I have respect for, or wrote software that I like, or created some art or film... Read More
July 25, 2003 12:01 PM

The Animation Show premiere

Friday night's premiere of The Animation Show here in Austin was a lot of fun. An excellent collection of shorts. Many of them I had never heard of, and most I had never seen. Afterwards Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge... Read More
July 22, 2003 10:22 AM

What would Dumbledore do?

I finished the fifth Harry Potter book last weekend. It was easily the best so far, and as usual a lot of fun to read. Here are two pictures from the bookstore party last month. I picked up my copy... Read More
July 16, 2003 05:56 PM

Fireworks

I meant to blog every day from WWDC, but the network was just too flaky, and all my free time was spent coding. I wrote up a few things and will post them over the next week. I hoped to... Read More
July 2, 2003 10:47 AM

Email mistakes

John Gruber: "The elephant in the middle of the room, of course, is Apple Mail." For a while now I have regretted switching to Apple Mail. But this is not unusual, because I have regretted switching to every single email... Read More
June 23, 2003 01:38 PM

2d animation in a Pixar world

I believe in traditional (2d) animation. But watching Nemo, for a moment I almost believed the hype -- that 2d just can't compete with 3d anymore. To remind myself that it's not true I looked at the great drawings in... Read More
June 16, 2003 09:37 PM

Nemo box office

Happy Father's Day! Finding Nemo -- about a father, among other things -- set a new record for biggest animated film opening with $70 million, and another record for fastest animated film to $100 million. Now, in its third weekend,... Read More
June 15, 2003 11:18 PM

WWDC coding frenzy

It's appropriate that I'm in a coding frenzy for the next few weeks. WWDC e-ticket in hand, and at work we go GM on a major version of our software just a week before the conference. This will be my... Read More
May 28, 2003 10:08 AM

Reloaded and Animatrix

The Matrix double-feature last night was fun (thanks Damon). Five hours of movies and food, yikes. I enjoyed the movie, and my only complaint was when they started replacing Keanu with a CG character in some of the fight scenes.... Read More
May 15, 2003 10:06 AM

The battle for RSS

At SXSW I told Mena Trott that RSS 1.0 was dead or dying, because it was too complicated. Turns out I was partially wrong -- it's very much alive, but perhaps only because it's the default in Movable Type. Six... Read More
May 10, 2003 09:42 PM

Time for a better Finder

A few weeks ago John Siracusa wrote a great summary of the Finder, with specifics on why the OS X Finder is a step back from the OS 9 Finder. In the second half he provides suggestions for improvement that... Read More
April 22, 2003 01:43 PM

NetNewsWire as a platform

There's an opportunity for Ranchero if they act soon. We are still in the early stages of RSS readers and aggregators, both web-based and desktop apps. Over the next year, we are going to see even more tools for managing... Read More
March 27, 2003 10:33 PM

Spirited Away to get new theatrical release

I was out of the house Sunday night so I set the old VCR timer to record the Oscars. Unfortunately I programmed it with the wrong channel. I guess that's an argument for Tivo. But it was probably just as... Read More
March 25, 2003 11:32 AM

Google UI

After SXSW I made a point to seek out new blogs. One is Micah Alpern, who writes about Marissa Mayer's talk, "The How and Why of Google UI": "Marissa is involved in UI, Usability, and Project Management at Google so... Read More
March 20, 2003 10:34 PM

scriptingNews format to RSS

Dave Winer from 1999: "Compare RSS with scriptingNews format, which is richer, it includes enough information to do an elegant syndication-based search engine (coming later today). Netscape's and Slashdot's formats are basically equivalent, neither is as rich as our format."... Read More
March 17, 2003 07:41 PM

Flash vs. web apps, again

Macromedia is fortunate to have two things going for it: Kevin Lynch, who seems like a smart guy, and Dreamweaver, which won't let the company forget about HTML. My expectations were very low for the Macromedia.com beta report, but truthfully... Read More
March 16, 2003 11:34 PM

Implementing TrackBack

After the panel Tuesday I commented to Mena that TrackBack is still sort of Movable Type-only and maybe needs simplifying if it is to gain acceptance in other tools. Turns out I was wrong, in part. TrackBack is a pretty... Read More
March 12, 2003 11:41 PM

Simple friendly formats

SXSW has wrapped up for me, although many others will still be out partying long after I post this. I've had the chance to meet some interesting people. Some of them I have names and URLs for, some just faces... Read More
March 11, 2003 09:29 PM

Still at SXSW, 2 links

Mike Clark is thinking about blogging: "My weblog is still relatively new, and yet once in a while I find myself reading through some old entries just to see where I was at mentally (and physically). Indeed, I use this... Read More
March 10, 2003 11:48 PM

At SXSW thinking about weblogs

I turned this web site into a blog one year ago today. More on that in a few paragraphs. This afternoon I was sitting in the hall at SXSW trying to organize some notes, and charge up my PowerBook battery.... Read More
March 9, 2003 09:57 PM

Almost ready for SXSW Interactive

SXSW Interactive kicks off tonight. Wes, against his better judgement, is going to the Linux Top Gun contest. I decided to skip out on the opening night for a variety of reasons, mostly to stay home with family, and because... Read More
March 7, 2003 11:06 PM

To the crazy ones

There has been some excellent critique of Apple's UI experiments on Irate Scotsman, Daring Fireball, and NSLog. While moving some books last night I found the following, which you may recognize from Apple's Think Different ad campaign. Reading it I... Read More
February 20, 2003 09:38 AM

Al Hirschfeld

A follow-up to yesterday's post. Many people contribute to a film, and not all of them are given direct screen credit. Last month, legendary illustrator Al Hirschfeld passed away. His lines graced the pages of books, magazines, and newspapers... Read More
February 19, 2003 02:08 PM

Andy Serkis, animators, and the Oscars

Slashdot points to a Salon article about Andy Serkis (voice and motion reference for Gollum in The Two Towers) missing an Oscar nomination: "In the end, the answer is no, not because his talents are less significant than those of... Read More
February 18, 2003 04:53 PM

Reading list

I've added a list of books I am reading or have recently read to the right column of this web site. Just a friendly reminder to stick your head over the walls of RSS-land every once in a while.... Read More
February 12, 2003 12:12 PM

Konfabulator

Of all the things I should be doing, staying up late hacking Konfabulator widgets is not one of them. I started building one to display select headlines from NetNewsWire. It wasn't until this morning that I noticed there were already... Read More
February 11, 2003 12:00 PM

Snow in Austin

It snowed when I was about 5 years old and when I was maybe 10, so I assumed it would snow every 5 years. When you're young, it's easy to jump to conclusions and see patterns that don't exist. Of... Read More
February 8, 2003 02:31 PM

Inductive vs rich user interface design

Boxes and Arrows article by David Heller: "Ultimately, I don't see a long term future for HTML as an application development solution." Meanwhile, there has been a steady integration of HTML interface behavior into traditional applications. Two years ago, Microsoft... Read More
February 4, 2003 11:10 AM

NASA loses shuttle

Oh no. AP: NASA Loses Touch with Shuttle Columbia: "NASA declared an emergency after losing communication with space shuttle Columbia as the ship soared over Texas several minutes before its expected landing time Saturday morning." CNN: Columbia shuttle breaks up... Read More
February 1, 2003 09:02 AM

Understanding Comics

For Christmas I received a copy of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. I was familiar with his work only from his web comics (the I Can't Stop Thinking series is particularly good), but never read his books. Turns out, it's excellent.... Read More
January 30, 2003 08:16 PM

Parenthesis s

It wasn't long after I started programming that I developed a pet peeve with other programmers who don't feel the user is worth the time to put an extra "if" statement into their code. Here's an example: "There were 5... Read More
January 30, 2003 12:34 AM

Long time no blog

It's been two weeks since I last posted, and with every passing day it becomes more difficult to post something. Why? Because with such a delay I feel that I need to somehow justify it with a great blog post.... Read More
January 29, 2003 02:47 PM

Final Safari UI comments

Safari puts the classic SSL "lock" icon in the window title bar. Here's a screenshot: Turns out this is easy to do in Jaguar with Carbon's HIView system. Since the entire structure of the window (not just the content area)... Read More
January 15, 2003 08:56 AM

Macworld and new apps

Macworld was a week ago today. A few fun quotes from Steve Jobs: "This jacket is wicked.""We put the antennas where they belong.""You only use what you understand." Almost every weblog I read has been buzzing about Apple's new web... Read More
January 14, 2003 11:04 AM

HTML 3.2 forever

In My Experience: "I still use html tables": "Fully abstracting your UI from its content takes skill and time. If you don't follow thru, you can negate much of the benefit you seek to create. Now stop and think. Do... Read More
January 13, 2003 10:56 AM

Pepys Diary

A great new blog to start off 2003: The Diary of Samuel Pepys. What an innovative use of the weblog format. "This site is a presentation of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the renowned 17th century diarist who lived in... Read More
January 3, 2003 02:40 PM

Still digging

Wow, Dave Winer is applying for a new job: "As I've been talking with people about this, it's been hard for them to separate me from UserLand, but that's what I want to do. I'm going to get a new... Read More
January 2, 2003 08:58 AM

Video games for a new year

Salon has an article on Tolkien-inspired video games: "'Immersion does not necessarily require photo-realistic rendering at 60 frames per second and Dolby Surround sound,' says Singleton. 'Imagination can play a huge part, too. Witness how immersive Tolkien's books themselves are.... Read More
January 1, 2003 03:04 PM

Awaiting The Two Towers

A couple of hours from now I should be firmly planted in my seat with popcorn and drink for The Two Towers. I didn't get to finish re-reading the book this week as I had planned, but from what I'm... Read More
December 20, 2002 05:08 PM

Apple's UI playground

Steven Johnson for Slate, "Is the Computer Desktop an Antique?" "Now that Microsoft has largely caught up to the Mac in terms of basic file manipulation tools -- thanks to Windows XP's elegant user interface -- the iApps have become... Read More
December 19, 2002 09:16 AM

Metadata seven years later

Aaron Swartz talks at the Creative Commons launch party: "Right now you can only ask a search engine one question: 'What pages have these words in them?' When pages include RDF metadata, you will be able to ask more advanced... Read More
December 18, 2002 10:37 AM

Reading and typography

The weather turned cold here yesterday, and that just contributes to my blogging apathy after the Thanksgiving weekend. I'm just too lazy to blog, and the backlog of unread items in NetNewsWire was over 150 this morning. Time to trim... Read More
December 5, 2002 03:01 PM

Being a generalist

John Lim of PHP Everywhere: "I'm actually a generalist. I can code a bit in Javascript, I know some C++, PHP and a thousand other useless languages. A generalist is pretty good thing to be in technology, because computers and... Read More
November 27, 2002 11:39 AM

Personalization vs. customization

Adrian Holovaty describes the BBC's 'intelligent' design personalization. By keeping track of what links you follow, sections of the home page are given darker backgrounds to draw your attention to those you visit most often. Sounds like a great idea,... Read More
November 25, 2002 11:16 AM

Amazon usability

Odd that I had never heard of Good Experience, a newsletter by Mark Hurst. Just discovered it today via Tomalak's Realm. Here's an excerpt from an interview with Maryam Mohit of Amazon: "For example, quite awhile ago we developed the... Read More
November 22, 2002 03:46 PM

Peter on IA

Peter Merholz, "Thoughts on AIfIA and Information Architecture": "As information architects know, explaining what they do, even to smart people in related fields, is difficult. Once given a clue as to what user experience is, folks can understand that improving... Read More
November 18, 2002 11:29 AM

Late night with user interface web sites

Best of chi-web and sigia-l: "Using the archives for each mailing list, I've compiled a list of the summary postings from useful threads, and a few personally selected favorite postings." [via WebWord] Also on UIWEB, Reasons ease of use doesn't... Read More
November 16, 2002 11:36 PM

Morality for and against war

From the BBC: "The international community has a 'moral responsibility' to avoid war with Iraq, the Catholic Church has warned." Meanwhile, Bob Kerrey (former Democratic senator) makes the moral case for war in Iraq: "We know what a terrible thing... Read More
November 15, 2002 08:17 AM

Zopey OpenDoc

Jeffrey Shell is building an OpenDoc-inspired framework on top of Zope.... Read More
November 12, 2002 09:29 AM

Leaky Abstractions

Joel on Software, "The Law of Leaky Abstractions": "If a large UFO on its way to Area 51 crashes on the highway in Nevada, rendering it impassable, all the actors that went that way are rerouted via Arizona and Hollywood... Read More
November 12, 2002 09:28 AM

Futurama, Oscars, and Ward Kimball

I haven't seen Futurama since it first aired -- the time slot doesn't work for me, but I wonder why I haven't been taping it. The fourth (and final) season started last night, so I finally made time to watch... Read More
November 11, 2002 12:59 PM

Election Day

Today is the big day, and you should vote. Even though you can't stand all the negative ads. Even though it's hard to tell who's the Democrat and who's the Republican because they all move to the center for their... Read More
November 5, 2002 02:03 PM

Crufty interfaces and file paths

Matthew Thomas' "When good interfaces go crufty" is a fun read. It's nothing we don't already know, but sometimes it's helpful to be reminded that some of the interfaces that we are so used to are still confusing for new... Read More
November 1, 2002 09:28 AM

There and back again

Out all last week, vacationing around the Gulf coast. It was good to unplug for a week and forget about the email, the blogs, and the constant hum of a noisy FireWire drive. I think we went three whole... Read More
October 28, 2002 12:14 PM

Cocoa/Carbon opinions from Applelust

Brent Simmons responds point by point to the misinformation in the Applelust.com article, "Going Native: The Attraction of the Cocoa Interface." Although the article is a mess, there are a couple of valid observations in it: "Still, at this point... Read More
October 16, 2002 11:08 AM

Spirited Away

Last night I saw Spirited Away. I first heard about the film shortly before its release in Japan, and finally it is getting a limited release here. It opened in Austin at 3 theaters, which is more than I expected.... Read More
October 14, 2002 10:10 AM

Cocoa, Carbon, and iDVD

The comments for Slashdot's "Which Coding Framework for Mac OS X?" are frustrating. I have been experimenting with Cocoa lately, and I really like it. Objective-C is slick and the UI frameworks are good. But I'm so tired of seeing... Read More
October 13, 2002 03:18 PM

Nobel Prize to Carter

The first thing I saw when I woke up this morning, from the BBC News: Former US President Jimmy Carter wins the Nobel Peace Prize for "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy... Read More
October 11, 2002 08:19 AM

Mr. Swartz Goes to Washington

Aaron Swartz has an excellent write-up of his trip to Washington for the Eldred case. Also covered is Brewster Kahle and the Bookmobile: "Brewster talks about how he sat down with book industry executives. He points out that they have... Read More
October 10, 2002 04:23 PM

More Lessig v. Ashcroft

Every week or so the tech weblog world (or at least the portion that I view) aligns on one issue. This week it's the Lessig arguments in the Eldred case before the Supreme court. Matthew Haughey, "Copyright and the Commons":... Read More
October 10, 2002 08:06 AM

Electronic Voting

Slashdot reports on Brazil's electronic ballots. Early voting here in Austin this month will use the eSlate system, which has already been tested in some surrounding counties. It will be used by everyone in Travis County for the general election... Read More
October 6, 2002 10:19 AM

Mirror Project

Peter Merholz writes about his first contribution to the Mirror Project: "I went to the mirror, and saw I could frame myself in between the two brothers talking, and snapped the photo you see on the site. My dad is... Read More
October 4, 2002 11:08 PM

Mac OS X Conference blogs

It's fun watching the posts come in to the Mac OS X Conference "Trackback" feed. Hopefully more people will hook into it before the conference is over. It's a good way to learn about other blogs that share a common... Read More
October 1, 2002 10:42 PM

Falling asleep over RSS

James Duncan Davidson echoes a complaint I have also raised: "The most annoying thing from a user perspective is the different ways that RSS feeds work. Some provide just a few sentences of the post. Others a paragraph, and yet... Read More
September 29, 2002 10:59 PM

Jason's day

Kottke.org, "A Day": "A small chat on the phone with my mom, birthday wishes, etc. Then off to the store for dinner supplies. Meg has offered to cook whatever I want for dinner. I decide on some fettucini with roasted... Read More
September 28, 2002 04:12 PM

iSync and Yahoo RSS

Apple releases the iSync beta. I've never seen an Apple software release with so many warnings. Must still be buggy. Speaking of buggy, Yahoo's RSS finance feeds were pulled just a week after Jeremy Zawodny announced their availability. Maybe Yahoo... Read More
September 28, 2002 03:46 PM

Moving to NetNewsWire

I finally made the jump from Radio Userland's news aggregator to NetNewsWire last night. It's good software, and it's been fun watching how quickly it has matured. I have about 40 RSS subscriptions, but I migrated to NetNewsWire in just... Read More
September 26, 2002 10:55 AM

Web browsers on the Mac

Web browsers on the Mac since Mosaic have stored bookmarks in an HTML file. Chimera apparently breaks this long tradition and uses it's own simple XML format. Is this progress? No. Sure, they do fun things like type="toolbar", but the... Read More
September 22, 2002 03:00 PM

Last week, Joel wrote about

Last week, Joel wrote about Mac software developers: "There are very few conditions under which it is actually the right business decision to develop software for the Macintosh. Developing for the Mac is not a whole lot different than creating... Read More
September 20, 2002 10:49 AM

Dave Winer, on his health

Dave Winer, on his health and the RSS 2.0 flame wars: "I want to keep working, but if the choice is between my health and work, health is going to win. If your body is healthy here's a chance for... Read More
September 18, 2002 11:16 PM

Bill Plympton has started work

Bill Plympton has started work on his next animated feature film, "Hair High". You can watch him draw live from a webcam pointed over his desk. Great idea, especially for an independent filmmaker with a limited/non-existent budget for promotion. It... Read More
September 16, 2002 11:18 AM

Here are some sketches from

Here are some sketches from one year ago by New York animator Pat Smith. Everyone finds there own form of comfort. For some, it's a doodle.... Read More
September 11, 2002 12:55 PM

John Siracusa has an excellent

John Siracusa has an excellent Jaguar article over at Ars Technica. A long read, but worth it. One highlight: "And forget about any truly forward-looking features akin to Copland's saved searches or BeOS's metadata-powered custom views. Put simply, the Finder,... Read More
September 6, 2002 10:37 AM

Jeffrey Veen: Standards Still Matter.

Jeffrey Veen: Standards Still Matter. "Will there ever be a day when we can just assume that browsers will render our code correctly? Can we imagine a future in which we don't budget an extra 40 percent to ensure our... Read More
September 5, 2002 01:31 PM

PHPeverywhere: "When things turn sour,

PHPeverywhere: "When things turn sour, Open Source is not about open minds, but naked egos and pride. That's why the key to really successful Open Source projects is leadership, not merely technical skills. And this holds true in life too."... Read More
September 4, 2002 02:04 PM

James Duncan Davidson, author of

James Duncan Davidson, author of the upcoming Learning Cocoa (2nd edition), has a new blog. He's already started rolling with thoughts on preserving his blog posts: "As long as I can make sure that my data migrates to long lasting... Read More
September 3, 2002 10:54 PM

Last night I finally saw

Last night I finally saw Michael Dudok de Wit's short film masterpiece "Father and Daughter", as part of Spike and Mike's classical animation festival. It's a beautiful film, well deserving of its 2001 Oscar win. Not needing dialogue, each shot... Read More
August 30, 2002 10:36 AM

My WWDC 2002 DVDs arrived

My WWDC 2002 DVDs arrived yesterday, just in time to be useful.... Read More
August 29, 2002 12:54 PM

Aftering ignoring Mozilla for

Aftering ignoring Mozilla for 6 months, I took the latest version out for a spin a few nights ago to try Pie Menus. Although Mouse Gestures worked okay for me, I couldn't get Pie Menus to work (maybe it... Read More
August 28, 2002 09:55 AM

News.com: "More than 100,000 copies

News.com: "More than 100,000 copies of Apple Computer's OS X 10.2 operating system were sold worldwide during its first weekend, the company said." Back in 2001: Microsoft Windows XP sold 300,000 copies over its weekend launch.... Read More
August 27, 2002 11:06 AM

No Sense of Place points

No Sense of Place points to a great collection of early 20th century animated films at the Library of Congress. Includes Krazy Kat and The Katzenjammer Kids, among others. But no Mickey. The movies section at Internet Archive also has... Read More
August 25, 2002 03:41 PM

Kottke has the same NetNewsWire

Kottke has the same NetNewsWire gripe that I do, and a mockup to go along with it. I submitted this as a feature request in Ranchero's bug database earlier this week. The software is maturing quickly, but the 3-pane approach... Read More
August 23, 2002 04:49 PM

Brent Simmons: "If you're not

Brent Simmons: "If you're not syndicating your site as RSS it might as well not exist." So true. The non-RSS sites I read now can be counted on one hand.... Read More
August 22, 2002 08:44 AM

While skipping around through my

While skipping around through my MP3 collection, it's easy to forget why I don't run out and buy CDs frequently. But I bought one a few days ago, which brought back the memory. It's not that they are too expensive... Read More
August 21, 2002 08:17 AM

Kottke.org increases the text in

Kottke.org increases the text in RSS files to around 80 characters per post. Excellent. It's as if he read my mind.... Read More
August 20, 2002 11:01 PM

This site was down for

This site was down for a server move over the weekend... Thanks to David and the Interactive Ensemble gang for their generous help and bandwidth.... Read More
August 20, 2002 12:05 PM

I hate what smileys have

I hate what smileys have become. Just look at all these from the latest Yahoo Messenger! What's the point? Give me the :-) and ;-) and I'm fine.... Read More
August 15, 2002 04:40 PM

Doug Baron points to an

Doug Baron points to an article on Schlotzsky's plan for free wireless around their restaurants. They're also looking into providing access for other areas such as libraries and schools. There's a Schlotzsky's about a mile from here, so I'll have... Read More
August 10, 2002 01:16 PM

I registered on BlogTree. Hey,

I registered on BlogTree. Hey, everyone else was doing it. :-) In other blog news... There are very few sites that I read now that don't have RSS feeds. Two on that short list were PeterMe and Kottke.org, which in... Read More
August 6, 2002 10:21 AM

Hey Apple, can we use

Hey Apple, can we use those fancy colored checkboxes from iCal in our apps, too?... Read More
July 22, 2002 10:57 PM

Yahoo Mail reset

I have used Yahoo for almost a decade. It wasn't long ago that I pointed to Yahoo and Google as great successes -- sites based on the idea that a simple, functional interface is what users want rather than some... Read More
July 18, 2002 04:41 PM

I love Amazon Light already.

I love Amazon Light already. Great for when you want to lookup something quickly. I wonder how long it will be before native apps start providing features that use Amazon's API (or Google's, for that matter). I'd love a simple... Read More
July 17, 2002 04:35 PM

Ward Kimball, one of Disney's

Ward Kimball, one of Disney's legendary animators, passed away today. Tom Sito sent an email out that reads: "Please pause to recall one of the giants of Animation who passed away this morning. WARD KIMBALL- artist, animator, designer, filmmaker, trombone... Read More
July 8, 2002 04:01 PM

From a thoughtful Kottke.org post:

From a thoughtful Kottke.org post: "Elastic sites work well because they embrace the 'Webness' of the Web...they allow people to interact and communicate with each other as they prefer to do in the real world. Human relationships are elastic in... Read More
July 8, 2002 03:26 PM

37signals has a beautiful mockup

37signals has a beautiful mockup for what the future of a web-based car interface might look like. But unlike 37signals usual stuff, it's not grounded in reality. Car companies need to focus on real innovations like cars that get 100... Read More
June 25, 2002 05:32 PM

I got sucked into mc.clintock.com

I got sucked into mc.clintock.com for 30 minutes today. Oops.... Read More
June 25, 2002 05:24 PM

As most bloggers on the

As most bloggers on the planet know by now, Dave Winer has been in the hospital this week. Rogers Cadenhead organized a quick passing of the PayPal hat to buy Dave an engraved iPod. I have to admit I got... Read More
June 20, 2002 02:04 PM

Last night, Traci stayed up

Last night, Traci stayed up late researching a question on Google Answers about Disney's use of television and what influence it had on the other major studios. It was an interesting question, and she was able to look through books... Read More
June 13, 2002 01:45 PM

Mark Pilgrim has a great

Mark Pilgrim has a great idea for RSS auto-discovery: use the <link> tag to point to the XML version of the page. I've made the change on the template for this site. Hopefully it won't be long before we see... Read More
May 31, 2002 02:04 PM

A few days ago I

A few days ago I took Paper Dreams off my bookshelf and read a few chapters that I hadn't looked at before. One was on Bill Peet, storyman from Disney on some of their classics, including most of Song of... Read More
May 29, 2002 06:02 PM

I saw Enigma a week

I saw Enigma a week ago. We've seen many movies about technology come and go, but so far only Enigma deserves a place next to Sneakers as one of the best ever. Some may be bothered that the characters are... Read More
May 23, 2002 10:03 PM

WWDC 2002 was a great

WWDC 2002 was a great week. Apple has a lot of great stuff coming. It's real, it works. Now that the migration to X is behind them, they are really firing on all fronts. Very focused.... Read More
May 13, 2002 07:03 PM

Yesterday I finished reading Steven

Yesterday I finished reading Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. It was one of those rare books that leaves you with a dozen different things to think about. It's a fascinating book, and the... Read More
May 3, 2002 11:29 PM

Mac OS X users have

Mac OS X users have yet another browser choice in the works: Chimera, based on Mozilla but with a beautiful interface that removes the clutter and extraneous features of the full Netscape browser. David Hyatt, one of the main people... Read More
April 29, 2002 02:40 PM

Jeff Veen from Dec 1999:

Jeff Veen from Dec 1999: "My prediction remains as it always has: The fastest Web sites, regardless of end-user bandwidth, will be the most successful... I'm looking for a page loading experience of under one second. Period." [From EVHEAD] Google... Read More
April 24, 2002 06:47 PM

Everyone's talking about web services

Everyone's talking about web services this week. Megnut: "All this talk about APIs and web services warms my heart. We've passed the nadir of the dot-com hype and we're coming back to the Web in interesting and important ways." Kottke:... Read More
April 19, 2002 01:57 PM

Hack the Planet has a

Hack the Planet has a long thread on publish and subscribe, OpenDoc, Microsoft, and the new Apple. From Paul Snively: "It's a commonplace among folks I know that Microsoft doesn't get anything right until it's at 3.0, but implicit in... Read More
April 16, 2002 09:58 AM

Joel Spolsky, on Picking a

Joel Spolsky, on Picking a Ship Date: "Generally, people who buy "off-the-shelf" software don't want to be part of a Grand Development Experiment; they want something that anticipates their needs. As a customer, the only thing better than getting feature... Read More
April 15, 2002 08:18 AM

Alan Cooper's "The Inmates Are

Alan Cooper's "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum" had been gathering dust on my bookshelf for a couple years before I finally picked it up again. I finished it last week, and I only wish I had read it sooner.... Read More
April 9, 2002 09:21 PM

Until now, most sites creating

Until now, most sites creating their own UI widgets in DHTML have been slow, not to mention distracting -- the non-standard scrollbars and buttons clash with the rest of your system. Oddpost.com changes that, creating an incredibly dynamic application that... Read More
April 5, 2002 05:14 PM

Peter Merholz: "I believe the

Peter Merholz: "I believe the degree of security folks are forced to place on their own system is far too draconian." Jacob Nielsen, from November 2000: "In reality, users simply write down difficult passwords, leaving the system vulnerable."... Read More
April 4, 2002 02:06 PM

From the Six Degrees weblog:

From the Six Degrees weblog: "Disorganized or Just Disorderly?", on the mess that we're in with email filters and the hierarchical file system. I've been eagerly awaiting a look at their product since I heard Joel mention it, but it's... Read More
March 29, 2002 10:43 AM

Anyone care to guess what

Anyone care to guess what the difference between the OK and Cancel buttons is?... Read More
March 28, 2002 10:39 AM

Meg talks about her experience

Meg talks about her experience using personas at Pyra in a new article on Boxes and Arrows. Evan Williams, from Jan 31 2001: "And Then There Was One", on the breakup of the Pyra team.... Read More
March 27, 2002 09:53 AM

I saw Revolution OS at

I saw Revolution OS at the Alamo Drafthouse here in Austin on Saturday. A really great film, and very approachable -- it doesn't matter if you've never heard of Richard Stallman or don't know what a kernel is. Certainly the... Read More
March 25, 2002 09:36 PM

Dave Winer mentions some of

Dave Winer mentions some of the thought his team put into making Radio Userland respond quickly to the user. Thank you. The thing that makes this possible (that most other apps don't have, whether they are web-based or not) is... Read More
March 24, 2002 06:38 PM

Every so often a web

Every so often a web site will add something small that makes all the difference. Today the example of this for me was the Sample Code section of the Apple Developer site. A new popup menu allows quick viewing of... Read More
March 22, 2002 05:38 PM

Martijn van Welie has some

Martijn van Welie has some concise descriptions of web design patterns and types of navigation that have become common over the years. They are things we intuitively know from building and using web sites, presented together in a clean way.... Read More
March 21, 2002 05:02 PM

Slides from the Veen and

Slides from the Veen and Lynch SXSW keynote are up. Also includes links to sites mentioned in the keynote and to Jeff's notes. Very useful -- more panelists should do this sort of thing, especially since its unclear whether video... Read More
March 19, 2002 10:41 PM

First in a series of

First in a series of new Megnut columns for the O'Reilly Network: Attendee-Centered Conference Design.... Read More
March 19, 2002 10:10 PM

Went out to Home Depot

Went out to Home Depot this evening to get paint supplies. On the counter was a hand-written sign that read: "Can't do paint color matching because of computer death."... Read More
March 18, 2002 09:25 PM

Notes from the Simplicity in

Notes from the Simplicity in Web Design panel at SXSW are now online. "Someone suggested that tooltips were always useful, but someone else shot that down because of the time required." I was that someone else. After the session I... Read More
March 17, 2002 02:43 PM

In the latest CRYPTO-GRAM, Bruce

In the latest CRYPTO-GRAM, Bruce Schneier weighs in on the factoring breakthrough covered recently on SlashDot. While reading all the SlashDot posts -- that could best be summed up as "everyone update their PGP key sizes, quick!" -- I knew... Read More
March 16, 2002 03:36 PM

It turned into a really

It turned into a really beautiful day in Austin. I'm sitting outside on the deck with my TiBook. No cars, no phone -- just the wind chimes and a few birds. To everyone who was in town for SXSW: You... Read More
March 15, 2002 05:29 PM

A few years ago, a

A few years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. For some reason I never finished it. I saw it recommended yesterday and dug up my copy. A great book on... Read More
March 15, 2002 10:33 AM

At the SXSW keynote the

At the SXSW keynote the other day, Jeff Veen pointed at his slides and said that they'd all be online by the next day. I smiled, thinking to myself there is no way those will be online within a week,... Read More
March 13, 2002 10:17 PM

Cam writes: "The cool thing

Cam writes: "The cool thing is that Kevin was very receptive to my concerns and actually echoed some of them, which tells me that Macromedia is very aware of how their products, especially the Flash Player, are perceived among both... Read More
March 12, 2002 10:20 PM

In the weblogs panel Doc

In the weblogs panel Doc asks: "How many people are blogging this live?" At least three or four hands went up.... Read More
March 12, 2002 12:41 PM

I brought my PowerBook to

I brought my PowerBook to the conference today. A big thank you to Wes Felter and Cory Doctorow for the AirPort connectivity. Cory mentioned that an extra hub and power strip will make things easier, so I might bring my... Read More
March 11, 2002 09:50 PM

SXSW was a mixed bag

SXSW was a mixed bag today. Although it's always good to hear Mike Erwin talk about security, the first panel really wasn't so useful as a technical discussion (despite my lame attempt to steer it that way with a question... Read More
March 10, 2002 09:52 PM

Ernest Kim and Jason Fried

Ernest Kim and Jason Fried of 37signals ran a great panel yesterday: "Simplicity in Interface Design: A Game Show." A lot of fun, with some good discussion at the end on icon design and designing for speed. Ernest and Jason... Read More
March 10, 2002 08:39 AM

SXSW Interactive started today

SXSW Interactive started today. Seems an appropriate time to start a weblog, as if there weren't enough in the world already. Welcome, and enjoy.... Read More
March 9, 2002 10:27 PM

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