NetNewsWire and Keynote
An interesting feature request for NetNewsWire appeared on Tom Bridge’s weblog today—creating Keynote presentations from RSS feeds.

Tom Bridge writes: “Imagine for just a moment with me. You wake up, and on the way to the shower flip open your powerbook, fire up NetNewsWire and go get clean. When you've come back, NNW has created a Keynote presentation for you.”

It’s a good idea!

But... I have a few things to do first—fixing some bugs, adding new features to the weblog editor—before I could work on this. It will be a few weeks before I can do much with this idea.
09:16 pm #

Greatest hits
Now and again, when I have time, I like to write little funny stories. I don’t actually have time to write one right now, but I figured I’d point to a few of them, in case you’re relatively new to my weblog and may have missed them.

Here’s one, probably the most popular, on doing bong hits with Bill Gates.

My personal favorite is on how it’s so hard to teach squirrels to play baseball.

Here’s my BBEdit song.

Here’s one on the inherent evil of that Three Dog Night song Joy to the World.

Then there’s my list of top ten really mean put-downs.

Though it’s not terrifically funny, I like it as a rant: how I don’t want wearable computers.

Here’s a post on how I like to say inappropriate things. I compare a part of my anatomy to a roll of duct tape.

Another personal favorite is Frank, a fable.
08:54 pm #

Not writing about war
My guess is that now and in the coming days some people will be looking for more news and opinion about the war in Iraq—and other people will be looking for less, they’ll be looking for other things to read about.

So, just so you know, I don’t intend to write about the war either here or on ranchero.com.
07:36 pm #

NetNewsWire 1.0.2 progress
In case you’re curious on how NetNewsWire 1.0.2 development is going...

It’s a four-step process:

1. Move low-level, relatively bug-free code into separate frameworks. The RSS parser, for instance, goes into a framework. (The main reason is that it makes code maintenance and testing easier, and it makes it so I can re-use this code easily in other software.)

2. Fix a bunch of small quick-hit bugs. Things like bugs with date display and keyboard shortcuts. A particular crashing bug in the weblog editor. That kind of thing.

3. Fix—or at least dramatically improve—performance and memory issues when one has lots of subscriptions and lots of unread headlines.

4. Add a few new features—mostly weblog editing features such as supporting more Radio and Movable Type options. (Some other things too.)

I gave myself a week to do step 1—but it’s already finished. I did it over the weekend. It was totally fun, by the way. If you’re a Cocoa developer, but you’ve shied away from building frameworks, you should know that it’s a piece of cake.

So now I’m in the middle of step 2, doing a bunch of quick-hit bug fixes. This is one of my favorite things to do, because it’s all about polish, getting the details right. With some good hours of brain-time you can knock off bugs by the anthill.

Later this week I’ll move on to performance and memory issues, then on to adding new features probably next week. Then I’ll release the first beta of 1.0.2.
02:49 pm #

XML-RPC and OS X 10.2.5
I’ve received email from people this morning telling me that OS X 10.2.5 will contain fixes to Apple’s XML-RPC code. Which I think is great. I had no doubt they would fix the bugs.

Now, I don’t get pre-release copies of the system, so I can’t confirm this. But, assuming it’s true, the obvious question for me is: why not switch back to the system-supplied XML-RPC code?

Here’s why I do not plan to switch back:

1. My philosophy is to always use system-supplied code whenever possible. My time can be much better spent in ways other than re-inventing the wheel. However, I already have re-invented the wheel in this case. There’s a value to being in control of the source code. If I want to or need to add features, I can.

2. My XML-RPC code runs on systems previous to 10.2.5. I don’t want to require that NetNewsWire users run 10.2.5.

3. The code is designed to be forgiving of things like unencoded ampersands and characters outside of the XML-RPC spec. It has to be forgiving, because not all of the various weblog publishing systems return perfectly valid responses all of the time. (That’s just a fact of life. It’s not my job to be an XML cop. I’d rather just have things work.)

4. My code is in the form of a set of Cocoa classes. Apple’s code is procedural. I prefer using Cocoa, since NetNewsWire is a Cocoa app. It fits better.

5. My code uses CURLHandle, which is what NetNewsWire uses to read feeds and so on. There’s a value to using the same HTTP client software throughout the app. For instance, once I fix the bug with authenticating proxies in the news reader, I can fix it in the XML-RPC code at the same time, since the fix will be the same.
10:07 am #