The Web 2.0 logo generator amuses me.

(Nothing against Yahoo, Google, or Red Dwarf fans. ;)

I can admit it—I’m addicted to Rock Star: Supernova.

Last night I thought they should have dropped Patrice. She smiles way too much, and she looks a little like Maria Cantwell. (Who I like as a senator but probably not so much as a rock star.)

I’m pulling for Dilana, of course. She’s pure magic. But I like Toby and Magni quite a bit too.

I’m in San Francisco at WWDC, having fun! But too busy to blog! More later…

If you’re in or near SF, come to Buzz’s party tonight!

Papa dreams of WWDC.

It might be kind of silly to make any cosmetic changes right before WWDC—and I leave open the possibility that I’ll reverse the following change or change it again.

NetNewsWire 2.1:

NetNewsWire 3.0d7:

I’ve been working toward making NetNewsWire higher-contrast. The trend (as I’ve written about recently) is to make the control areas at the top and bottoms of windows dark, to contrast better with the content area.

So NetNewsWire’s status bar went from the glass look to a darker gradient. I think it fits in better with the unified title-and-toolbar window style. (I could have made it even darker, but then it wouldn’t have fit with the window style.)

But… will we get new or changed window styles at WWDC? Will we see a new convention for status bars? I don’t know! There’s an excellent chance that what we’ll see this week will affect the look of NetNewsWire and lots of other apps.

The new Combined View—I’m tempted to call it a bug fix rather than a new feature. The performance bug (and some sizing bugs) couldn’t be fixed with the old version. This was a case where only a complete re-write would fix the problems.

To re-iterate… the problem was that each item had its own separate webview, which meant tons of overhead. If you had 100 news items displayed, that was literally the same as having 100 small web pages open all at once.

So the obvious choice was to make it one big webview—a single web page—to get rid of that overhead.

But then there’s a whole other challenge: how do you make it so that you can still navigate with the keyboard? How do you have the concept of a selected item? It can’t just be the same as an online reader—it needs to have the features desktop app users expect.

The key to the whole thing is JavaScript. When something happens in the page—you click on a news item, for instance—the page calls back into the app, and the app tells the page how to update.

It’s kind of like Ajax in that way, except that the communication channel is not http and it’s synchronous (which it can be, since it’s right there on your machine).

Similarly, if you choose a menu item or click a toolbar button (such as Mark All As Read), then the app calls into the page to run some JavaScript. It doesn’t have to generate a new page—it just changes some classes, swaps some images, whatever it needs to do.

I’ve found that being able to do this two-way communication—page-to-app and app-to-page—allows for all kinds of clever stuff. You can add some nice touches. For instance, check out these two details:

In the first detail, the Combined View has focus. In the second, the subscriptions list has focus. (The Combined View also dims when the app is no longer frontmost.)

To get the dimming effect, the app calls into the page to tell it it’s inactive. The page then uses JavaScript to swap some CSS classes, which changes the display.

Anyway, I liked working this way enough (getting to exercise my JavaScript, HTML, and CSS chops) that I also did the same thing for the new Attention Reports feature. (Lifted straight from FeedDemon, by the way.) Those are also HTML pages—but with rollovers and all that. And when you click an unsubscribe button, it calls into the app, and the app displays the standard unsubscribe sheet.

This is all definitely a benefit of WebKit—it makes possible this kind of hybrid, a mix of desktop and web technologies. I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface.

PS In the screenshot above, how did I get the rounded corners in the current selection? CSS, plus four little graphics for the round corners. I’m not drawing on top of a webview or anything nutty like that—it’s pure CSS.

PPS The old Combined View—one item gets one webview—sounds bizarre. Why would I have done that in the first place? Well, the Combined View actually came before WebKit. Originally, each item was a separate NSTextView—recall that NSTextView had (probably still has) some basic HTML display. This was much, much faster than using WebKit webviews, mainly because the HTML feature in NSTextView was so very basic. Once WebKit came out, the natural thing was to switch from NSTextViews to WebViews. That’s how it ended up being the way it was.

PPPS I’m partitioning the hard drive on my laptop and re-installing OS X so I have a place to install Leopard (assuming we get Leopard disks at WWDC). Hence all the writing tonight. ;)

I want to try something a little different—I want to work on NetNewsWire 3.0 a bit more out in the open than I usually do. I’m not sure it’s wise, exactly—but it’s more fun for me. ;)

So I put up a super-early sneak peak release. It’s not a beta, it’s not even an alpha, it’s at 3.0d7.

You can download it here. (But I warn you with big red letters that it’s a work in progress, and you shouldn’t try it out if you’re not comfortable with it.)

The big new thing—the thing I’m personally excited about—is the brand-new, totally rewritten Combined View.

The old Combined View (like a newspaper or river-of-news view, for those who don’t know) had some performance issues because every single news item was a separate webview. If you had 100 items, that was like 100 mini-web-pages.

The new version uses just one webview—but, even though it’s a single web page, you can still navigate with the space bar and arrow keys, you can still expand and collapse. It still has the concept of a selected item.

(Or you can just scroll and point-and-click. It works with both styles of reading.)

Here’s a screen shot of the new Combined View. Here’s another screen shot.

As I say, it’s a work in progress, and feedback (especially on the new Combined View) is definitely welcome. There will be a bunch of other new features and lots of bug fixes. (If you were hoping to see ____, and it’s not there, consider that it’s still early in the process. That doesn’t mean ____ is not on the list.)

Also—NetNewsWire 3.0 will be a free upgrade.

Dan Wood on resolution independence: “Think of how you read a printed map (compared to a Web-based map), for instance… the detail is there if you want it; you can get closer to the map to see the tiny printing, or step back and get the big picture.”

I’ve been wondering when Leopard will ship.

My guess is that it’s farther along than you might think and that it will ship in October or November of this year. (If I had to pick a day, I’d guess October 27.)

The main thing is to get it out there before Vista, which is scheduled (still?) for January. So, if it’s going out before January, might as well get it out before Christmas, no?

Recall too that the timescale would be a bit like Panther’s: there was WWDC in the summer and then a release in late October. So there wouldn’t be anything unprecedented about an autumn release. Also recall that last year’s WWDC was all about Tiger, even though Tiger was already released—which means Leopard has been under construction for a while.

Here’s Fraser Speirs’ WWDC Hopes and Dreams: “It would be nice if someone at Apple could recognise that their 3rd party developer base are wasting time playing catch-up with the visuals instead of innovating on Apple’s platform.”