Category: Commentary

(noun) giggle-bit: the amount of laughter that ensues when you tell an investor how much money you need to buy the storage you want.

I would say that if you’re in the business of writing Mac software, that every OS release and every WWDC brings with it two feelings.

There’s the reaction from the non-developer (non-rational) side of the brain which really wants to see what cool things are there. We really want to ooh and aah over improvements to Dashboard or new and cool user interface improvements or a new and cool implementation of Quartz 2D Extreme. Okay okay, we want to see ACTUALLY cool things too.

Then there’s the reaction from the developer (rational) side which wonders if Apple has just released the thing that will kill your business model. I mean, if you made a photo organiser back in 2000, how would you feel when Apple released iPhoto.

I don’t subscribe to the theory that Apple goes out and looks at the small devs out there and tries to put them out of business. The furor around iTunes makes Apple (and SteveJ) seem pretty human (in the good sense). I mean – if not for serenedipity, iTunes might have been based on Audion. Likewise with Karelia Software, when I saw Watson I immediately thought “Man….I can see Apple doing this” and boom. Dan Wood, the main man in Karelia (I need staff for fact-checking!) just released Sandvox which puts in one interface, the stuff that Apple released last January in iWeb and Garageband for podcasting and blogging. I prefer Sandvox but man it’s possible to make a joke about Dan Wood being the unlukciest man in the world…

Some apps seem ripe for this however. Some people have asked that Growl be integrated somewhow. I dunno. PaulJHolden, artiste and thespian (….but especially artiste!) introduced me to Growl and it seemed kinda Windowsy. It looks lovely but….I don’t need notifications when things happen. I use a Mac. I just want them to have happened. I can understand the need for little pop-up status notifications and with my need for some monitoring tools this week, I may even eat my words in a few days 🙂

It’s entirely possible that Apple will release some sort of sharing with iCal in Leopard. That Mac OS X Server 10.5 will have some sort of built-in SyncBridge-alike. Others have said that you can duplicate every aspect of .Mac with services like Picasa, GMail – with the exception of the iSync stuff. At the end of the day, we provide access to the iSync stuff.. So Apple might eat us.

My prediction is that they might bring in iCal sharing, but if they do it’ll be part of .Mac. It could be part of Mac OS X server but then I’d have to ask myself why they would do that. Most of the services in Mac OS X Server are built upon established existing open source code. They dumped their own mail server in preference to Postfix. They use Cyrus, Apache, Tomcat and other technology to provide a prettified BSD-alike. .Mac has over a million subscribers but I’ll bet that very few of them are using it JUST for iSync. I know I don’t.

It’s hard to know how to feel. What seems certain is that iCal is going to get some sort of upgrade, and that’s exactly what we DO want. The PowerPage has this exclusive:

iCal 3.0:
- Brilliant new UI
- 25 different organization techniques
- 100's more options for each log
- Integration with more formats

Nothing about sharing there but “integration with more formats” could mean anything!

I am looking forward to it. Leopard is likely more than six months away and we’ll have some work cut out to test SyncBridge with Leopard.

Aidan: It rocks because other people get to use it and help us improve it. It rocks because other people *want* to use it. It rocks because it’s an accomplishment: we made this. It rocks because we thought about it, we planned it, we designed it, we built it and we launched it — and there it is. It just rocks.

MJ: It rocks because people tell me they’ve been waiting for this for years and it exists now – and back in January it was just an idea. Turning ideas into “real things” rocks (the whole debate on whether software is a “real thing” the way a brick or a clay pot is a real thing is not covered here). It rocks because people are using it now and we can see the statistics. It rocks because it makes you think about iCal in a different way. It’s not a case of “who wants to see my calendar”, but more of “who do I want to see and edit my calendar’. There’s a semantic difference there. Other people, in your company, in other companies, in your community groups, in your friendship circles, can all see and edit the calendars you choose to share with them. This information is not made public, it’s shared selectively. There’s conscious choice. It rocks because it changes the way I think about my daily schedule and my time is precious to me.

Next week brings us Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) and even ex-Microsoft blogger/cheerleader, Robert Scoble, has said:

“Speaking of Apple, they are readying a dizzying amount of new products. I wish I could camp out at an Apple store during the World Wide Developer Conference on August 7th. I wish I could say more, but that’d get me sued by Steve Jobs and I don’t need that kind of heck right now.”

Add to this that we have all sorts of speculation on what will be shown next week

• Leopard (tabbed finder? resolution independence?)
• The Mac Pro (PowerMac replacement)
• New Developer Doohickeys (RubyCocoa bundled? Cocoa GC?)
• DashCode (Dashboard widget development app)
• Some sort of VMWare-type environment (very unlikely)
• The iPhone (eh?)

Of course, I have no idea. I am looking forward to the show (if there is one) and also CocoaHeads which will be held on the 15th this month so we will have time to digest everything.

I’m such an OS junkie, I just want to see Leopard.

• We’ve had over 200 beta testers sign up. Thanks!
• We’ve released three new beta versions to add minor enhancements (and fix one minor bug)
• One final beta version is in the works which will fix support for storing the password in the keychain (and ensure non-English letters (e.g. ???) display properly on the website)
• We’ve had interest from a number of companies in the SyncBridge Enterprise Edition (where you can run your own server)
• No-one has reported any data loss
• We’ve managed to upgrade the service pretty seamlessly 4 times in ten days

Overall, I’m really happy with how things have gone to date. I expect the final release will follow a few days after the next beta fix, which should be in a few days time.

Loads of things…

• New Server for SyncBridge (yay for EXIST, and boo for 123-reg and dedicatedNOW)
• Syncbridge.com is ready to go, but not live.
• We got the SSL certificate up and running on the new server.

It’s ALMOST ready to go. So close I can taste it. We’ll have a formal announcement once we’re sure the new server is running fine.

Today, July 17th, also happens to be iCal Day. It’s the default date for iCal before you launch it because it was introduced to the public on July 17th, 2002.

Other news…

Andrew Gribben has his blog up for his new artistic lifestyle experience caf??? CreatiV. I must say – the combination of caf??? and art technology shop has me intrigued and he promises me that Aidan and I have a seat reserved for our Bedouin activities. I’ve given him a few ideas here and there on stuff he should be doing and I’m glad to see he thinks they’re good ideas!!!!

Tomorrow night (Tuesday 18th) hosts the first Northern Ireland Cocoaheads meeting in Roast on the Lisburn Road in Belfast 🙂 I’m going to be so out of my league, it ain’t funny.

We’re also going to be migrating the blog to a new server to make it a little more responsive.

Wil Shipley is crazy.

He’s still someone I totally respect – though I’m not up there on the “man love” thing. Jobs is still my role model but Wil is such a good writer that I think it’s terrible for the rest of us that he can write prose as well as code.

Today, he’s displaying his crazyness by challenging Bill Gates to a bet. Call me picky, but the bet is a bit of a sure thing and I don’t reckon that Wil will have to pay out a single dollar of the $10000 bet that Vista will not ship by January

Vista is a shambles. Downloading the beta LEGALLY and using it for a wee bit just showed me how much of a shambles it is. Already they’re tweaking the UI alone just so that if you don’t have a kick-ass graphics card it doesn’t look like mud splattered your screen.. The new theme isn’t much better to be honest but then again when have we ever turned to 4000 engineers to ask them what constitutes good UI design. What did they do to fix it? Turned the grey to blue. Whoop-de-doo.

I don’t have $10000 to wager and to be honest, that’s a kind of vulgar way of making a point. Vista may ship on time but it’ll be awful. We know this.

On the other hand, in true retaliation for calling him out, BillG could just redirect all of his daily spam for a single day to Wil’s main email account. Can you imagine?

I spent the last week on vacation with my family (mostly in Disneyland Paris) and arrived back yesterday. I’m hoping that over tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday we’ll get our server organised and everything set up ready for the SyncBridge beta. As long as we announce before Omni announces their new product I’ll be happy 🙂

A sobering thought allows me to riff on Scoble when he talks about what he deleted when he left Microsoft. Thousands of emails – knowledge that a successor wouldn’t have to time to sift through. It’s kinda cool that I still have some mbox files from when I was in Nortel and we moved from COCOS to Netscape Mail – we had the choice for a couple of years to go to Outlook and that would therefore mean that old mail was simply lost. After those couple of years, the choice was removed. It was Outlook or nothing. Of course, those of us in the know made sure we could still use Mac OS X Mail….(which brings me to an argument that PC admins are more likely than UNIX admins to be lazy….but that’s a blog for another day.

I wondered aloud the other day about the knowledge in my head that wouldn’t transfer if I was hit by a bus. What passwords do I keep in there and not share with the team. What knowhow is exclusively mine and isn’t replicated by the other guys. When you consider the value of such information and the damage it could cause to the company if the worst happened, then I guess it’s time to start doing things about it. Business Continuity Planning is not just for big companies which have too much budget and not enough consultants wandering around.

Anyway.

Scoble and his wife Maryam each have a post about their new gig at Podtech. Both of them comment about how Patrick, the mini-Scoble was a little surprised at the Podtech offices (2000 sq ft in a office park) when he was used to the massive Microsoft campus.

Maryam spent a little time talking about her sleek silvery love – no, it’s not Robert in a futuristic catsuit – they gave her a new MacBook Pro.

Robert blogs about how working at a startup is exciting. I couldn’t agree more. He mentions using GMail and Google Calendar (because it’s smart to outsource functions like that which aren’t your core business) and also mentions running out of places to sit because their people have now exceeded their space for seating.

He should try being Bedouin 😛