I have an old Apple Extended keyboard in my office closet. I can’t throw it away—it’s so much better than any other keyboard I’ve ever used.

But it’s ADB, not USB, so I can’t use it without an adapter—and I’ve read enough to know that using an ADB adapter with one of those old keyboards has enough problems to make it a bad idea.

So today I ordered a Matias Tactile Pro keyboard. I’m so looking forward its arrival.

But I still can’t toss the old Apple Extended keyboard. I’m no packrat—quite the opposite—but that old keyboard was quite the thing of beauty. I just went and pressed some of its keys. Still sweet.

If you make your living by typing, you know what I’m talking about. A great keyboard inspires great affection.

Here’s an idea for an app I’ve had for about a year. But we’re not going to do it because we can’t make the economics work (for us, that is—it may work for you).

Also: it’s possible there’s an already an app that does this, but I just don’t know about it. (If such an app exists, please let me know what it is!)

The problem

If you’re in an office or at a conference, making files available to other people can be a pain. Yes, you could use the built-in file-sharing or Apache, but there are too many steps for setting this up—and there are too many steps for people who want to download your files.

(I was reminded of this idea at Daniel Steinberg’s session on Rendezvous at the OS X conference. He mentioned at one point that someone emailed him a file just to get the file 20 feet across the room. I’ve done this many times myself. It’s dumb, but it’s easy.)

The solution: user interface

The problem here isn’t that we lack file-sharing or web servers or networking: the problem is purely user interface. It’s just plain too difficult to access machines that you don’t access all the time.

So I imagine something very much like iChat’s Rendezvous buddy list. It would list people—people with files you can download—who are available via Rendezvous. When you select a person, you see a list of files that they’ve made available. Double-click a file to download it to your desktop. (You might also have a file-centric view instead of a person-centric view. And a search field, of course.)

You might also add some kind of special thing for URLs—because how many times have you tried to spell out a URL to the person sitting next to you, or pasted it into an email and let it fly around the country before coming to the person sitting next to you. It should be easier!

Under the hood

Whether this is just a front-end to standard file-sharing or Apache or something custom is something you’d have to work out. It’s the least interesting part of the application, but it should be done well, of course, with security very much in mind. (I’d make the file-sharing read-only, so you can’t put anything on someone else’s machine.)

Economics

Something like this is useful only if pretty much everybody has it.

It would have to be free for use at conferences, and you’d probably want to make it free for home and non-profit use, too. You could charge for business-office use—but the problem with that is some people just wouldn’t pay, or it would be a popular app everywhere except for in offices.

However, my take on the economics could be all wrong—or someone might like to do it as a for-glory thing. (It might make a cool open source project, and it could be an app about which people say, “Look, sometimes open source projects do have great user interfaces.”)

What are the coolest desktop organization/launcher utilities—DragThing, LaunchBar, QuickSilver, PathFinder, etc.—for OS X right now?

What do you use and why?

Red Sox! Wow!

The curse of the Bambino is over, and now the Yankees have to deal with the curse of A-Rod.

Niall Kennedy posted an audio file of the How to Run your Own Software Business panel at the OS X conference.

When talking about getting started as an OS X developer, certain subjects often get more time than they need: dealing with piracy and legal issues get an unrepresentative amount of time. (Maybe because these are easy to talk about?) If you’re a developer, you spend more time working on your software than you do anything else. Then there are other very important issues such as customer support, marketing, figuring out pricing, building a website, and so on.

If worrying that your software will get cracked prevents you from taking the plunge, don’t worry. Your software will get cracked. But you can have a successful business anyway.

(If your software doesn’t get cracked, then that’s probably something to worry about. It means you either spent way too much time making it uncrackable—or it wasn’t interesting enough to crack.)

A panel is too short to talk about everything, so (when I have time) I’ll elaborate on some of what was said and mention some things that didn’t get covered.

Ryan Wilcox: “About 30 minutes later, with thanks to PyRSS2Gen I had my todo list items in my newsreader.”

This is one of the cool things about adding scripting support to an application—people find ways to use it that you never expected. I can’t recommend enough to other developers that they look seriously at adding scripting support. (And then keep adding more.)

It doesn’t make sense for every app, but for things like browsers, email apps, aggregators, databases, editors, Usenet newsreaders, outliners, and so on, it’s very important, because it lets people put things together in new ways that make sense for them.

iPod—with pictures. What do you think? Buying one? Upgrading?

O’Reilly’s Mac OS X Conference starts Monday. See you there?

In case you’re going, but haven’t been to a conference like this before, here’s a tip: turn on iChat and log into Rendezvous. It’s a great way to find people you’d like to meet. You see that so-and-so is logged in, so you say, “Hey! I’d like to meet you—where are you?” It works.

Update 11:23 p.m.: Dori Smith elaborates on iChat privacy settings and adds a bonus tip about using SubEthaEdit.

It’s become fairly common to state that one of the problems with the professional news media is how they cover things: they report what both sides say but (often) skip reporting the truth.

One candidate says, “Two plus two equals four, but just barely. I used to think it equaled five before I decided it equaled four. However, for large values of two, or small values of five, it could still conceivably equal five. Or, if you redefine five as the sum of two twos, then it would equal five, yes. I performed addition for my country as a young man and I will perform it now.”

And another candidate says, “Two plus two equals five. Simple as that. To say that it equals four is to have a pre-9/11 mindset.”

How do you report on that? You can report what the candidates say. You could also report that two plus two does indeed equal four, but then you have the whole critique-of-objective-reality thing to deal with, so you skip it.

During my own journalism training (college newspaper, early ’90s) I was taught to discard the idea of an unbiased, objective reality. I was taught that there was no such thing as truth: there are only points of view, and it was my job to present the points of view. Forget objectivity, it’s impossible, was the lesson. Instead we had “fairness.”

In other words, there is no truth, there is only what people say.

Here are my questions:

1. Is this wrong?

2. How did we get here?

3. How can we fix it?

Noticed in my referers: Darrel E. Knutson’s list of Macintosh Web Browsers.

Lots of them I’d never heard of, but some of them—NCSA Mosaic, MacWeb, CyberDog, Spyglass—I remember using.

NCSA Mosaic, even though it lacked the features of Netscape 1.0, was probably my favorite.

I was never that big a fan of OpenDoc, or else I might have liked CyberDog more.

But the first web browser I ever used was Lynx. My Internet connection was by dialing into Eskimo, a local ISP. (I used ZTerm to dial in. I think.) You got a UNIX shell account, so you could run lynx and pine and whatever.

I remember, at the time (1994), debating with people which would be bigger: Gopher or the World Wide Web. I thought it would be the web. But I did like Gopher quite a bit.

And I still like Lynx. I even use it sometimes.