Leopard: Preparing for disappointment

May 31, 2007

Don’t get me wrong, Leopard is shaping up as a great release… for developers. Xcode 3, Objective C 2, Interface Builder 3, and Xray and a huge improvement over the current generation of developer tools, but these aren’t things that will have a direct impact on the average user. And while Core Animation is neato, it also has the potential to become to Mac software what the blink tag was to web pages some time ago.

For the average user, Leopard adds Time Machine, Spaces and assorted enhancements to existing applications and OS functionality. These things are nice, but $129 nice? <shrug> But wait! Jobs spoke of “Top Secret” features that could not be revealed during his keynote at WWDC 2006. I expect we’ll finally find out what those top secret features are during the next WWDC keynote on June 11th.

With that in mind, I turned to the WWDC07 schedule and noticed something a bit odd. It seems to me that there aren’t so many TBA/TBDs in this year’s schedule. These holes usually indicate one of two things: a topic on a feature that hasn’t yet been publicly announced, or a repeat of a popular session. The repeats typically are scheduled later in the week. Usually Friday afternoon. This year there are 20 sessions that have not yet been announced. 11 of those are on Friday.

Now it just so happens that I still have my WWDC 2004 conference guide. You may recall that Tiger was introduced at that conference. WWDC 2004 also marked the final appearance of Jamba Juice at WWDC. <wipes away a tear>. Anyway, the schedule was riddled with 31 sessions to be announced. Only 9 of those were on Friday.

Given the scarcity of unannounced sessions this year, versus years past, it seems probable that the most of Leopard’s big features have either already been announced or will be unrelated to the Mac developer community. I really hope that I’m wrong and Leopard has a lot more tricks up its sleeve that developers will be able to take advantage of, but I’m not going to get my hopes up. At the very least I hope there are a few more really compelling features to encourage users to upgrade so we can take advantage of all the improvements made to the development process. Hopefully much more than a coat of paint to the GUI. If the GUI is updated, new guidelines with lots of sessions would be great. Oh, and I really hope there’s Jamba Juice… and backpacks… and a pony! I want a pony!

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A Man and His Dog

May 25, 2007

Bill and Sandy

Yesterday there were some videos posted on NiT which showed a man riding a scooter with his dog (Sandy) riding pillion. The post is titled Someone Call PETA and included the phrase “another video of that same awesome dog riding on the freeway with his boneheaded owner”. Well it turns out that I know this “bonehead”, or more accurately, I know of him. He is an active contributer to the BurgmanUSA forums and we’d exchanged a couple emails awhile back. Now I figured I’d let him know about the post so he could tell his side of the story and leave it at that. But, I was so impressed with his (Bill Meek) and Phil’s response, I just had to repost them here.

Bill’s response:

The only boneheads are the ones out of the road endangering us while riding. In over 23,000 miles, the only time Sandy’s came off the bike on the road is when some idiot hit us while trying to take a picture with a cell phone looking out the passenger window. If I notice anyone driving and trying to take a picture at the same time, I WILL move away from them. If you want a picture, flag me over and I gladly stop to let you safely take photos.

Sandy’s riding abilities are beyond what you might imagine. She uses the passenger backrest (with a specific position to place her butt) to allow us to accelerate and uses my back or shoulders to brace against during hard braking. And “yes”, we’ve done MANY panic stops in her 23,000 miles of riding. Sandy also leans into curves just like any good passenger should and it was pointed out to me by another rider that she watches the road ahead and switches sides before we reach the curve to be in the correct position to lean.

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Sandy the Motorcycle Riding Dog

May 24, 2007

Sandy is a Golden Retriever that has logged thousands of miles riding pillion on his owner’s Suzuki Burgman 400. He started riding as a pup in various containers mounted to the bike but has since left the container behind and now rides directly on the seat behind his owner Bill.

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Sad Little Game

May 22, 2007

For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking of chess again. If you’ve read my about page you’ll know that it’s one of the few hobbies that has held my interest (on and off) for any appreciable amount of time. Also, I wanted to introduce my kids to the game in hopes of helping them cultivate problem solving skills and maybe increase their attention span to something greater than 30 seconds. The only drawback being the slight chance of driving them completely bonkers.

Since chess has been on my mind, I’ve found myself browsing chess related sites and was surprised to discover that the United States Chess Championship is going on right now. In Stillwater, Oklahoma! (Stillwater could really use a web developer by the way). Apart from a few viewings of Searching for Bobby Fischer, I have no experience with the operations of the chess world, nevertheless I was surprised that the countries greatest chess minds are gathered together in Stillwater to compete for the national title. I would’ve expected, New York, Chicago, San Francisco or someplace along those lines for what I imagined would be a prestigious event. And therein lies the problem with my reasoning.


Hanging out at the Stillwater Laundromat:
IMs David Pruess and Irina Krush

After about 5 minutes of research I discovered that the U.S. Chess Championship is anything but prestigious. The tournament is being held this year at the Quality Inn in Stillwater. It’s a 4 1/2 star hotel according to Yahoo, but still. I next wondered what the champion of this grueling 10 day tournament would be taking home for their efforts. Turns out the lucky(?) winner will earn $12,000 in prize money. To put that in perspective, Roger Clemens will earn about $9000 per pitch playing baseball with the Yankees this year. And, finally as I read the synopsis of yesterday’s results I noticed the picture with the caption: “Hanging out at the Stillwater Laundromat: David Pruess and Irina Krush”. That’s International Masters David Pruess and Irina Krush. Irina is, according to wikipiedia, the 11th best female chess player in the world (Wikipedia fails to mention that Krush has the best “sports name” of any player male or female).

Obviously if you take up chess as your primary vocation you’re not in it for the money. These people obviously love this game or are incapable of finding another means of supporting themselves. I expect the former is the case. It’s a shame they aren’t compensated at greater levels. I expect even the PBA is a more lucrative career path.

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Grounded

May 16, 2007

Yesterday I asked for your help in choosing the final entrant in the Nashville Flugtag. At the same time, a group of folks at work decided to make a last ditch effort to push us over the top. Some were refreshing the page after voting using a regular web browser with cookies disabled, others used an app which refreshes the page for you after voting and also allows you to hit return to enter the verification code as opposed to clicking the button on the page itself.

You might interpret these actions as cheating, but take a look at this email sent to all the wild card entrants from the Nashville Flugtag flight control:

Hey Wild Cards!!!

Here is a link that you an send to friends and family to vote for you!!!!

http://redbulli.com/flugtagNashvilleWildcard/wildcard.html

Also- I found a sneaky way for you to vote for yourselves more! There are cookies that are enabled in your computer which is how Red Bull can tell if you’ve voted that day or not. If you clear your cookies you can vote over and over again for yourselves!

Let me know if you need anything else!

Good luck guys!

All of the other teams are using this information to their advantage, and so no one was worried that they might be casting any illegal votes.

At the time I posted yesterday, our total stood around 13%. Shortly before lunchtime today we were threatening to overtake the 2nd place team with around 24% of the vote. Thanks to you all that made that happen… however, the folks running the show over at Red Bull have decided to eliminate all of our votes from yesterday plus hundreds more for good measure. Our percentage dropped all the way down to 9%! In addition it seems they’ve blocked votes coming from certain versions of Firefox running under Mac OS X. Obviously Griffin is pretty big in the Mac world so this is a pretty big handicap to overcome.

Despite Red Bull already having crowned the New York team as the winners, I’m not quite ready to concede just yet.

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