Moral support for Six Apart
I read on Niall Kennedy’s weblog about a TypePad outage—and I just wanted to send the Six Apart folks a bit of moral support at a time when they might be able to use it.

You may not know that before I did NetNewsWire and MarsEdit I worked at UserLand Software where I helped write weblog systems. Much of my work was on Manila—not just writing code but helping keep the servers up-and-running.

There were lots of 4 a.m. nights for me. Lots. Not a few. Lots. We were hosting many thousands of free sites, and we were developing the software and learning how to make it scale as we were doing the hosting.

And we learned a lot and the software improved steadily.

However, after a while I personally couldn’t do it anymore, and I switched to writing desktop apps, vowing never to write weblog systems—or, really, host weblog systems—ever again.

It’s not just hard work, it can be tough on the psyche too—you’re talking about weblogs, which people feel are an extension of themselves. It’s not some boring abstract thing, not at all, it’s about people’s passions. Their lives, really.

It’s a high calling, and I had to stop after a couple years—but I applaud Six Apart and other folks who are willing to do this. So, when things go wrong—as they will—I think they deserve our thanks and support.
04:37 pm #

NetNewsWire wins Eddy
NetNewsWire won an Eddy in the Great Mac Tools category! This is actually the second Eddy NetNewsWire has won—NetNewsWire 1.0.6 won an Eddy two years ago. (The statue is on my desk about two feet away. Right next to some cat pictures and Ammo the Amoeba.)

One app that totally did not surprise me with a win was Comic Life. Any master of the obvious could have predicted it would win an Apple Design Award and an Eddy, and it has. I feel like I’ve spent the last six months saying to people, “Hey, have you seen Comic Life? It’s so cool!”

Lots of other cool apps have won awards too: Transmit, SuperDuper, TextWrangler, OmniOutliner, LaunchBar, and more. Check out the full list.

By my count, Seattle counts for three winners this year. (But it could be more: I didn’t look super-closely.)
11:28 am #

Indie Life in F?
Gus Mueller: “Gus starts a track he had prepared for this very moment and moves to his (music) keyboard to begin playing in the key of F.”

I identify with every part of this story—except the key of F part. F! No way! For me it’s E. Sometimes A or D. G in a rare blue moon. But F? Why oh why? The humanity!
10:50 am #