It's been awhile since we've had a nice chewable interview on the site, and I'm pleased to offer up a special treat: Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster, makers of Delicious Library. Mike Matas was going to sit in also (the couch comes with an ottoman), but as we'll get to, he has recently left the company for another opportunity.
If you've never heard of Wil, he has an interesting pedigree. He co-founded and helped lead The Omni Group for almost ten years, which originally developed software for the NeXTSTEP platform and now develops apps for Mac OS X. Omni Group is known for porting games, and apps like OmniWeb, OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner. After leaving Omni, he joined forces with another ex-Omni employee -- Mike Matas -- to start Delicious Monster.
Their first product, Delicious Library, billed itself as "The greatest media cataloging software in the world", and enjoyed an astonishing level of publicity and sales. It's features are too numerous to go into here, and are best seen via downloading the demo. If you don't have a Mac, the below screenshot should give you an idea...
Fair warning: This is a long interview, and it's all over the map, but there is another delicious treat waiting at the end...
posted on July 21, 2005 at 04:04 AM
Every developer community has its "Doctor Who's". Faces who show up at all the conferences, always seem to have their hands in the cool stuff, and everyone in the know knows their name but not a whole lot of others do.
Jonathan Rentzsch is one of those people, and is a guy who wrote his own preemptive multitasking engine for the Classic Mac OS that benched in 400% faster than Apple's built-in Thread Manager for copying files. For Mac OS X, he created a solution to allow developers to do things they couldn't otherwise do called mach_inject and mach_override -- similar to Unsanity's APE -- and released it under the BSD license to be incorporated by anyone.
As a special easter treat, Rentz agreed to do the blog and let me pick his brain about a whole range of subjects including, but not limited to: mach_inject/mach_override software, WebObjects, Apple and enterprise, code optimization, programming languages, Core Data and even the rarely-discussed Mac software casting couch...
For DrunkenBlog's 500th post, I have an extra-special treat for my loyal readers: a chat-to-end-all-chats with Brent and Sheila Simmons of Ranchero Software.
Just about everything you could think of is covered, and just about everything you'd never think of is covered, too...
On December 21st, C-Net broke the news that Apple was filing suit against three people for posting a developer build of MacOS 10.4 via BitTorrent, seeking a jury trial and damages. Soon after, a Mac website started posting their names and relative whereabouts online.
As it turns out, someone involved in the situation was a reader of the site. They got in touch with me, one thing led to another, which led to this interview. Our participants:
Desicanuk
One of three defendants named in the suit, with the rest being "John Does".
Nessence
One of two administrators of MacTKA, a Macintosh-oriented BitTorrent tracker where the initial leak occurred.
I had to include the above screenshot, both because I love O'Reilly and it was awesome to see the site on it... and they misspelled DrunkenBlog. Highly amusing.
I didn't quite understand how the category was chosen, and when I emailed Derrick Story to inquire I was notified that I was blocked by their spamfilters.
*picks his ego up off the floor*
Either way, the roundtable got some attention, and I meant to have the redux out a few days after it went out. Obviously that didn't happen, but I was listening, and the redux is now in danger of getting itself lapped by a month so I wanted to bang it out.
Where appropriate, I'm going to aggregate and paraphrase some of the questions I got more than three of, as I'm taking care of the others via email.
Another special treat for my 13 14 loyal readers: Christopher Forsythe, the creator of Growl for OS X was gracious enough to sit down for another lengthy chat about the project and where it's heading.
Chances are, this'll be the first time many of you have heard of Growl, and there'll be linkage at the end to get you started.
At first glance, it might be easy to dismiss Growl as superfluous eye-candy. However, once you spend a bit of time with it, you realize what it's trying to do and just how much it can help you.
I'm a big fan of RSS, and while ago I decided I wanted to do one of my chats with the author behind one of the RSS aggregators for Mac OS X, and hit a conundrum: there were too many cool apps to choose from. I know, I know, what a lovely conundrum as far as conundrums go.
To that end, I have an extra-special treat for my 13 loyal readers... the first DrunkenBlog Roundtable, with five of the best RSS aggregators available for Mac OS X.
To review a bit about RSS if you're unaware:
If you take a look to the left, you'll see a little box saying "Subscribe" and within it a link to an RSS feed. If you just click on the link, you'll see what appears to be gibberish.
But if you drag the link to an RSS news reader, or copy and paste the link to one, you'll be able to see when this site is updated with new content whenever it becomes available. Your news reader does all the heavy clicking for you at whatever timed interval you set it for, and then lets you know.
It may sound trivial, but keep in mind that the only difference between a Post-it Note and a piece of paper is a small strip of adhesive. Sometimes a small catalyst can make a big difference in how you use something, and many would argue RSS is seriously changing how people use the web.
With that out of the way, it's my turn to get out of the way and introduce you to those who graciously agreed to participate:
Brent Simmons
Brent hails from Seattle, and is the author of NetNewsWire and other great software through his company Ranchero Software with his wife, Sheila. Considered to be the godfather of RSS on the Mac.
David Watanabe
David hails from Australia, and is the author of NewsFire when he's not working towards a masters in environmental policy. It's known he's originally from Canada, but why he fled is not.
Rory Prior
Rory hails from the UK, and is the author of NewsMac. A Java programmer turned Cocoa fanatic, Rory has recently left his position with a UK firm to devote all of his energies behind his Mac software company.
Erik J. Barzeski
Erik recently returned to cold PA from Florida to marry his high school sweetheart, and as the owner and founder of Freshly Squeezed Software is responsible for PulpFiction and other great Mac-only software.
Graham Parks
Graham also hails from the UK, and is the author of Shrook. He's known to be a Cocoa maven, but little else is really known. I think he prefers it that way, and I'm not going to go fudging his mystique.
Without further ado...
So it's been awhile since I've been able to sit down and have a real drink with my fellow drunkers, but I do have a treat for my 13 loyal readers: Pieter Van den Abeele of Gentoo Linux PPC and Gentoo MacOS was gracious enough to sit down for a weighty chat on both the projects.
It's worth warning that this is a bit of an odd chat, primarily due to the language barrier. I tried to dilute the sheer geek factor where I could, but it's still pretty concentrated. Where things got lost in translation should be obvious and amusing, but still worthwhile.
Before you ask why I didn't clarify more: getting this chat out was even odder behind the scenes and would qualify as a post of its own, and I'm fairly sure there's the Belgian equivalent of a restraining order with my name on it. Special thanks to Pegasos Systems who ended up doing the last phase of stalking for me and who I'll be doing a chat with in the future.
Another special treat for my 12 loyal readers: Evan Schoenberg, co-lead developer on AdiumX was gracious enough to sit down for another lengthy chat about a whole range of topics.
As a quick primer, AdiumX is a multi-protocol, multi-user instant messaging client for OSX. But wait, you say you already have iChat for instant messaging, so why should you care?
iChat is fine, but what if you want to use more than AIM? AdiumX allows you to access all the networks at once from within one application. If you have more than one AIM name, you're screwed in iChat, but AdiumX allows you to have them online at the same time. If your iBooks' tiny screen is overwhelmed with 10 chats, AdiumX has tabbed windows (draggable!) and a compact contact list and much, much more.
If you've never heard of it, it's really worth checking out. If you've tried an earlier version, chances are you'll be surprised with how far its progressed. It's most assuredly been slapped with the coveted DrunkenBlog Seal of Approval™, so I hope you enjoy the chat and send these guys some love for their hard work.
For DrunkenBlogs' 300th post I have a special treat for my 12 loyal readers: a chat with Rich Wareham, the creator of Desktop Manager for OSX. I also couldn't resist the gentle irony of putting this up on the 4th of July. Remember kids, cultural differences are meant to be bridged, and the sharing of alcohol and pejorative phrases are generally a good start.
As a quick primer, virtual desktops are a way of organizing open windows on your screen instead of constantly hiding or minimizing windows or applications. You might have one virtual screen for emailing, one for web browsing, and another for your design application. Switching between them usually involves either a key combination or a graphical pager which holds icons representing open windows. That's a really lousy way of explaining something that will become obvious once you've downloaded it and tried it, so I'd encourage you to do so.
Just about every *nix desktop comes with them, so switchers from that side of the fence often lament on their absence in Apples' OSX. There are other virtual desktop solutions for OSX, but Desktop Manager has garnered much praise for being high-quality, free, and open source. It hasn't won any awards that I'm aware of, but it sure as hell gets the coveted DrunkenBlog Seal of Approval™.
Rich was gracious enough to sit down for another lengthy chat covering a whole slew of topics, everything from iBooks to the GPL to hacking Quartz. Keep your eye on this guy.
If you're not aware, SubEthaEdit is a Rendezvous-based, collaborative and distributed text editor, built using Cocoa and available for Mac OSX only. It's garnered rave reviews since it's release, including an Apple Design Award and an O'Reilly Innovators Award, and was hailed as flagship application of Rendezvous.
Martin Pittenauer of TheCodingMonkeys graciously agreed to go slumming answer a whole slew of questions about SubEthaEdit along with a whole lot of other stuff that's only loosely related. Cocoa, WWDC, Obj-C, being a Mac user in Germany, topless women... it's all there.
Which prolly means that after this no other company will ever, ever agree to answer my questions again... so savor this one.
