interested?

www.dublinpubscene.com

2. A Cross Platform Cocoa.
I would like to port my Cocoa apps to Windows. I know you do too. (Or maybe you have already. How did CoverFlow get to Windows? Will the iPhone sync with IE/Firefox on Windows, or will it sync with Safari on Windows?). You can be very altruistic (mainly because you know what’s best for people, not because you want what’s best for them), so I know you won’t mind just a few more Mac apps being available for windows, just a few more glasses of ice water. Please make sure this works with my new .Mac too, so I can sync everything.

Google may soon have a monopoly on the world’s data, but wouldn’t it be fun if Apple had the monopoly on the world’s interfaces?

Update. Should the rumors of his imminent unveiling be true, I’d like to retract this idle wondering. Besides, it shouldn’t have stayed as the current article for so long.

That’s all I wanted to say.

Sunrise was announced as “a CRM-ish tool for small businesses“, and is the next generation of 37signals applications. It aims to bring the simplicity and elegance of their other apps to customer management which arguably the most important piece of software a small business uses.

The current generation of 37signals apps, which includes products like Backpack, Campfire and Basecamp, were created with 37signals’s philosophy of “Getting Real“, which is similar to Agile methods of software development. It suggests an approach to building software that emphasizes building the simplest form of an application now, and then continually improving and changing it until it’s ready. This approach has let them create great apps very quickly.

Now, while these apps have been pretty successful, to date they have been pretty simple. Which is kinda the point, but perhaps there’s a limit to the complexity of the applications that Getting Real can build. And it’s with Sunrise that I think 37signals has reached this limit. There is a minimum level of functionality a CRM needs, and I reckon this level is significatly higher that the level of functionality in current 37signals apps. Even more difficult, each business’s needs require a different subset of a CRM’s functionality.

Their current apps excel at building all their functionality into the user interface, which equates to having only one level of abstraction, the UI represents reality. What I haven’t seen is more than one level of abstraction, and this a the key weakness of Getting Real.

While being a rapid development method, I don’t Getting Real can reach the escape velocity required to make it to the next level of functionality, ironic as that may be.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no love for the monsters that most CRM apps are, and I have no wish to build any application that would sit at the “Enterprise” level of functionality. But I do think that Getting Real has limits, and becuase of these limits it won’t scale to build a CRM.

Code Search’s main advantage is that it lets you use regexps for searching. To be more accurate, it defaults to regexps for searching, it takes a little effort not to use them. I can’t even speculate as to how they made regexp searching fast enough for the user and practical enough for the data center. A quick estimate puts the number of files search at 40 million (wave to Gary who found the search term with the most results - 32.4 million for “x“), which is about 1/1000 the size of their main web search index, so we might regexp searching on their web search sooner than I would have thought possible.

I do have to ignore the fact that Code Search has a much smaller audience and hence a much smaller load. If I was to guess, I would say it would get about one ten millionth of the searches web search gets. I’d also have to ignore the possibility that Code Search might have a very different index structure. Then I’d have to find a reason to use regexp for a web search. Before Google perfects their natural language queries, which is probably more important to them then giving us regexp search. But I digress.

Code Search also has a license filter, which is a nice bonus feature. It might save me a little time, but I like it more as an example of Google’s intent parse and understand the world’s data, regardless of structure. adopting this approach removes a significant mental barrier to understanding what you can and can’t do.

In among this goodness are a couple dangers. Will spammers run a search with an email regexp? (a very simple one - 3.9million, or a slightly more complete one - 7.9million results) They may know that programmers are among the least susceptible to spam. Then again, knowing your audience is a pretty big advantage for a spammer. Will it be easier for hackers to attack sites, when it’s so much easier to search for vulnerabilities? (username file:wp-config.php, from kottke) Will programmers start copying and pasting code, regardless of license? Will normal people learn the truth about programmers? (wtf, damn, hack)

Like many other Google products, Code Search shakes things up a bit, by entering other companies’ markets and by making once hard things easy, which removes existing barriers (albeit artificial ones) to abuse of other people’s data.

I idly intend to post a review of any of these sites that I think you might want to add to your blogroll, criteria being a) it’s worth reading and b) it’s obscure enough that it’s possible you haven’t seen it, or at least haven’t seen it often enough to consider adding to your blogroll.

It’s also a partial admission that I’m lazy and slow, and that more of my time is spent reading the internet, instead of creating the internet.

Anyway, before I do get around to actually writing these feed reviews, here are a couple sites and posts I really want to share now:

1. randsinrepose
   Go read Trickle Theory, one of his most entertaining and relevant posts. He doesn’t post very often, so he makes an excellent guest in your blogroll.
2. The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
   Sometimes crude, sometimes wildly offtopic, always funny (very funny, crazy funny), and, perversely enough, always has tidbits of tech news I haven’t seen anywhere else yet. He’s pretty prolific, but an easy read. You have to believe though.
3. Waiter Rant
   You do read him, don’t you? The ultimate “my daily life is interesting” blogger
4. Dwindling in Unbelief
   A regular reminder of how fallible the Bible is. It might eventually become monotonous, but right now, it’s pretty entertaining.

When you update an iPod with iTunes, it handles the software download itself, just like an iTunes Store purchase. Slick.

When you connect a new iPod (or a freshly formatted one) you get this page, encouraging you to start buying songs for your new iPod. Apple tends to be pretty good with first use user paths. There tends to be a bit of debate over how much effort should be spent (wasted) on these, so it’s nice to see someone pushing the status quo.

The Album Artist field, for all those pesky compilations. I hope all those people who’ve been putting “Various Artists” in the artist field will finally come to their senses. Now all I need is a “Featuring” field. Maybe support for multiple artists too.

It looks like the song has too be in the iTunes Store for iTunes to be able to retrieve cover art, which makes perfect sense, but leaves me chasing covers for my Radiohead albums.

iTunes now has rudimentary backup management for purchased items, which is something that I’ve idly intended to write. It could be a little more intelligent, by grouping purchases by show or artist and then prompting you to backup when it has a full cd’s worth of items to burn. It’s a tradeoff between more regular backups or more organized backups. I’d personally prefer to have my Battlestar episodes on one set of cds, and my music on another set. Then again, it’s not like I’ll be using these backups regularly, and it’s not like I couldn’t fit an entire backup onto one DVD.

Another thing I played around with is a way for using skip to affect a song’s star rating. No need anymore, as iTunes now has a skip count. There’s no easy way to combine that with the play count, though it should be pretty easy to write a script to use these two counts to set a song’s star rating.

Apple’s decision to purchase CoverFlow rather than recreate it is good news for Mac developers, and it’s pretty cool to see it being used in the store as well.

I sometimes fantasize about porting the Cocoa framework to Windows. So, while there’s no real connection, I did get a little excited when I saw Apple Software Update on Windows. John Gruber would probably considered Cocoa on Windows a non-runner, he’s is adamant that Apple is a hardware company, and putting more Apple software on Windows won’t make Apple hardware anymore compelling. I’d disagree, I think it’s important to make Apple the company more compelling, and bringing iLife to Windows would certainly do that. It’s the inverse of the Google OS argument, which is, if Google’s applications are the most important applications to people, then these people would switch to a Google OS. In Apple’s case, they have the OS and they have the applications. They just need to get these applications into the hands of Windows users. An even more interesting scenario is what might happen if 3rd party Mac developers had a cross platform Cocoa framework. Would their apps be successful on Windows? Could Mac developers eventually become the most important developer group on Windows?  Would the world be a better place?

P.S. It should really be noted that a lot of the improvements to iTunes are already in Windows Media Player.

Where was I? I was in work, in our slightly cramped new office, getting my first headlines from the BBC desktop ticker, and trying to find a news site that wasn’t overloaded. It was finally sinking in when my boss ran in, actually jubilant at the time, thinking that it was nothing but small, symbolic blow against American superiority.