When:

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 @ 7pm

Where:

Hotel Indigo. Use this link to get driving directions to the hotel to avoid a Google Maps bug or use these directions from the Arlington Park Metra station.

Schedule:

Show & Tell
We'll start out the meeting by going around the table and talking about what we're currently working on or learning about. Handouts are welcome, or bring along your Mac and we'll hook it up to the projector.

Book Reports
Bring along the book you're currently reading, or one of your old favorites. Hopefully the book would have some relevance to programming, but we're fairly open-minded. Just give us an overview the book's topic, and what you liked (or disliked) about it.

Topics
Victoria Wang will give an introduction to programming 2D animations and web-based games. She will focus on both the industry standard, ActionScript for Adobe Flash, as well as the hot open source alternative, Processing and its counterpart, Processing.js. Join us for some fun code and shiny demos!

Dinner
Please Bring Your Own Beverage. And food.

Looking for Presenters:

I'm always on the look-out for folks to want to give a talk for a meeting. The talk doesn't need to be long (10 minutes is fine if your topic is small or you just want to tease the group) and you don't need to be an expert (just tell us why you think your topic is cool or your experiences). Toss me an email and I'll assign you a chunk of time.

For C4[3] (September 25-27 2009 in Chicago, registration opening “soon”) I'm introducing a new feature: Blitz Talks.

The idea is simple: micro-presentations just prior to the normal, full length ones.

Blatantly ripped off from O'Reilly’s Ignite, the Blitz Talk format is constrained and predefined: you get 20 slides. Each slide is displayed for 15 seconds before I advance to the next slide for you. That adds up to five minutes, total.

A lot of really interesting topics just don’t need the full 45-minute treatment, and I think Blitz Talks are a great way to pack even more content into C4.

Another facet to the Blitz Talks are how they're selected. Normally I ask specific people to talk about specific things at C4. With Blitz Talks, that’s turned around.

Instead, I invite you to submit your proposed 20 C4[3] slides to me by Monday, July 13th 2009. Please send me a private URL to your Keynote file, PowerPoint file or 280 Slides presentation, with what you're going to be saying stashed in the speaker notes.

I'll select about 10 talks. Selected speakers get early access to registration, ahead of when I open general registration. (For now, I've abandoned the C4 attendee lottery idea and am going with this instead — my intent is to “reward” folks passionate enough to contribute to C4).

For your actual presentation at C4, Victoria and I made an app that will display your slides along with an on-screen timer: Blitz.app. The elapsed-time indicator takes up the lower-right corner of your slides, so be sure to test your slides against it.

For now Blitz.app only accepts PDF files, so eventually your slides will have to make it into that format. I'm looking into reading Keynote 5 files directly, but I don’t know if that feature will be ready in time for C4[3]. Patches welcome.

When:

Thursday, June 4th, 2009 @ 7pm

Where:

Hotel Indigo. Use this link to get driving directions to the hotel to avoid a Google Maps bug or use these directions from the Arlington Park Metra station.

Schedule:

Show & Tell
We'll start out the meeting by going around the table and talking about what we're currently working on or learning about. Handouts are welcome, or bring along your Mac and we'll hook it up to the projector.

Book Reports
Bring along the book you're currently reading, or one of your old favorites. Hopefully the book would have some relevance to programming, but we're fairly open-minded. Just give us an overview the book's topic, and what you liked (or disliked) about it.

Topics
Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch will talk about the modern generation of JavaScript frameworks: Cappuccino, JavaScriptMVC and SproutCore. There are considerable differences between these framework, and those differences are illustrative regarding the challenges for building Web Client-Server apps.

Dinner
Please Bring Your Own Beverage. And food.

Looking for Presenters:

I'm always on the look-out for folks to want to give a talk for a meeting. The talk doesn't need to be long (10 minutes is fine if your topic is small or you just want to tease the group) and you don't need to be an expert (just tell us why you think your topic is cool or your experiences). Toss me an email and I'll assign you a chunk of time.

When:

Thursday, May 7th, 2009 @ 7pm

Where:

Hotel Indigo. Use this link to get driving directions to the hotel to avoid a Google Maps bug or use these directions from the Arlington Park Metra station.

Schedule:

Show & Tell
We'll start out the meeting by going around the table and talking about what we're currently working on or learning about. Handouts are welcome, or bring along your Mac and we'll hook it up to the projector.

Book Reports
Bring along the book you're currently reading, or one of your old favorites. Hopefully the book would have some relevance to programming, but we're fairly open-minded. Just give us an overview the book's topic, and what you liked (or disliked) about it.

Topics

Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch will talk about jQuery, the awesomest JavaScript library yet devised. jQuery is the new standard for navigating and manipulating a web browser's DOM. Small, focused and compatiable across all major modern web browsers, jQuery takes away most of the pain of writing dynamic HTML.

Dinner
Please Bring Your Own Beverage. And food.

Looking for Presenters:

I'm always on the look-out for folks to want to give a talk for a meeting. The talk doesn't need to be long (10 minutes is fine if your topic is small or you just want to tease the group) and you don't need to be an expert (just tell us why you think your topic is cool or your experiences). Toss me an email and I'll assign you a chunk of time.

When:

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 @ 7pm

Where:

Hotel Indigo (pic, directions from the Arlington Park Metra station).

Schedule:

Show & Tell
We'll start out the meeting by going around the table and talking about what we're currently working on or learning about. Handouts are welcome, or bring along your Mac and we'll hook it up to the projector.

Book Reports
Bring along the book you're currently reading, or one of your old favorites. Hopefully the book would have some relevance to programming, but we're fairly open-minded. Just give us an overview the book's topic, and what you liked (or disliked) about it.

Topics

Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch will talk about JSTalk, Gus Mueller's new interapplication scripting project that seems to be the result of JavaScript, Objective-C and AppleScript having a menage a trios. Wolf will intro the JSTalk language, its tools and demonstrate intergrating it into an existing application.

Dinner
Please Bring Your Own Beverage. And food.

Looking for Presenters:

I'm always on the look-out for folks to want to give a talk for a meeting. The talk doesn't need to be long (10 minutes is fine if your topic is small or you just want to tease the group) and you don't need to be an expert (just tell us why you think your topic is cool or your experiences). Toss me an email and I'll assign you a chunk of time.

When:

Thursday, March 5th, 2009 @ 7pm

Where:

Hotel Indigo (pic, directions from the Arlington Park Metra station).

Schedule:

Show & Tell
We'll start out the meeting by going around the table and talking about what we're currently working on or learning about. Handouts are welcome, or bring along your Mac and we'll hook it up to the projector.

Book Reports
Bring along the book you're currently reading, or one of your old favorites. Hopefully the book would have some relevance to programming, but we're fairly open-minded. Just give us an overview the book's topic, and what you liked (or disliked) about it.

Topics

Since we never got to it for PSIG 120, Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch will again attempt to talk about Sparkle, Andy Matuschak's open-source framework for self-updating Mac apps. How it works, how to integrate it into your app or plugin, and the up-and-coming tools for handling your appcasts.

Dinner
Please Bring Your Own Beverage. And food.

Looking for Presenters:

I'm always on the look-out for folks to want to give a talk for a meeting. The talk doesn't need to be long (10 minutes is fine if your topic is small or you just want to tease the group) and you don't need to be an expert (just tell us why you think your topic is cool or your experiences). Toss me an email and I'll assign you a chunk of time.

I've been laid the smack-down by The Northwest of Us, PSIG’s parent Mac User Group that actually pays for PSIG’s meeting space. Their contract with the hotel doesn’t allow me to bring in pizza for the group anymore.

However, individual attendees can still bring their own food and drink. So I suggest you do that.

When:

Thursday, February 5th, 2009 @ 7pm

Where:

Hotel Indigo (pic, directions from the Arlington Park Metra station).

Schedule:

Show & Tell
We'll start out the meeting by going around the table and talking about what we're currently working on or learning about. Handouts are welcome, or bring along your Mac and we'll hook it up to the projector.

Book Reports
Bring along the book you're currently reading, or one of your old favorites. Hopefully the book would have some relevance to programming, but we're fairly open-minded. Just give us an overview the book's topic, and what you liked (or disliked) about it.

Topics
Earl J. Wagner will give a talk about creating richer user interfaces for reading news on the web.

Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch will also talk about Sparkle, Andy Matuschak's open-source framework for self-updating Mac apps. How it works, how to integrate it into your app or plugin, and the up-and-coming tools for handling your appcasts.

Dinner
If you want pizza, bring along three dollars and we'll all chip in.

Looking for Presenters:

I'm always on the look-out for folks to want to give a talk for a meeting. The talk doesn't need to be long (10 minutes is fine if your topic is small or you just want to tease the group) and you don't need to be an expert (just tell us why you think your topic is cool or your experiences). Toss me an email and I'll assign you a chunk of time.

Well, the word is finally out: I'm very pleased to announce Textcast 1.0.

hg log proves Dave Dribin and I have been working on it for the past year (first commit on Dec 10 2007), which is rattling since I remember pitching the app concept to Dave as “a two-week app”. Uhm, our schedule slipped a bit…

Textcast was born while Dave and I were plotting what we thought would be our first app. We wrote some experimental code and did some planning. It became clear that this app would be a great deal of work, so I pitched Textcast as a “simpler” app to get out the door first.

Textcast is a deceptively simple app. It’s aim is simple, but it unifies many disparate technologies and applications which leads to lots of complexity under the hood. It’s one of those projects where you can get the basics working inside a weekend, but it takes months to make it a real Mac app.

Which is worth it, since I'm probably Textcast’s heaviest user. I primarily listen to podcasts generated by Textcast while commuting (by foot, train and car) and exercising. But sometimes I use it for weird stuff like listening to legal contracts which would normally make my eyes cross. I use Textcast practically every day. Indeed, it became increasingly weird to tick off the months using this app that I loved that I couldn’t tell anyone about.

What follows is a potpourri of Textcast-related developer topics. Most of it addresses 10.5-only technologies we used in Textcast:

• Alex: Of course Textcast relies on Alex, 10.5’s new high-quality voice. Alex makes a world of difference when listening to lots of text, and Textcast probably couldn’t exist unless we cut a deal with Cepstral to bundle their high-quality voices or something.

• PubSub: Initially I used Textcast exclusively on one-off article basis. I'd spot a long blog posting or feature-length article and use Textcast’s “Import from Safari” feature to pop it into podcast form so I could listen to it later. Dave’s the one who pushed on adding real feed support with 10.5’s new PubSub framework. There were some weird behaviors we needed to work around, but overall I'd say that PubSub was a win. Certainly better than rolling our own feed parser.

• 10.5-only yet no GC: Textcast isn’t garbage-collected — we use the old explicit retain-release model. Interestingly, Textcast was garbage collected for a short time — I have a commit message from Jan 17 2008 “Turn on garbage collection”. But twelve days later we turned it off for reasons Dave and I can’t remember. I think Dave and I were scared of a rumored conflict between GC and NSOperationQueue, which we were just integrating at the time. Speaking of NSOpQ…

• NSOperationQueue: I'd call our use of NSOpQ a win, but it did bring definite pain. We definitely wanted to multithread Textcast since converting text to audio using Alex can be considerably processor-intensive. Spreading the load across many cores Just Made Sense. The main pain points were integrating NSOpQ and its worker threads with Core Data, KVO in general and NSSpeechSynthesizer (which is non-thread safe in a very specific manner).

• Core Data: Mostly a slam-dunk when coupled with mogenerator. Core Data is Standard Operating Procedure around these parts — you need a reason not to use it. The biggest pain turned out to be handling our undo model, which doesn’t fit into Core Data’s model and is thus Very Hard to get right.

• Unit Testing: It’s official, Dave is test infected. And that’s a good thing. While there’s considerable pain (some undocumented) in getting Xcode set-up optimally, it’s well worth it.

• Scripting Bridge:. iTunes needs a real API. Badly. But until we get a high-quality API for this increasingly integral app, we have its poor AppleScript support. At least Scripting Bridge mostly allowed us to pretend iTunes has an Objective-C API, easing integration into our app. We also use Scripting Bridge for the “Import from Safari” functionality. It was on my TODO list to also move our NetNewsWire integration from its current AppleScript form to Scripting Bridge, but I screwed up when I sent Brent Simmons our NetNewsWire scripting dictionary patch, which means we can’t use Scripting Bridge straight-up with NetNewsWire. But that patch deserves its own bullet:

• NetNewsWire Integration: Most of the text I feed into Textcast probably comes from NetNewsWire, so we definitely needed some nice integration with Brent’s fine app. I reached for NetNewsWire’s AppleScript support. That worked fine for importing text from the currently-selected item when in list view mode, but didn’t work if you had a web view frontmost.

  So I did what you'd probably expect from the likes of me: I reverse-engineered NetNewsWire and added the feature. I sent the resulting source code to Brent and kindly asked that he roll the new feature into the next version. He was very cool about it and rolled it into NetNewsWire 3.1.7b4. Thanks, Brent!

  Anyway, the ability to execute Javascript via AppleScript against the currently-selected web view allows me to extract the selected text, covering both avenues of textual input.

  A little polish that I'd like to call out since it’s not obvious: if you don’t have NetNewsWire installed, we don’t even show the “Import from NetNewsWire” toolbar item to reduce clutter+confusion.

• Open Source: We used a bunch of open-source packages in Textcast. Thanks Mac indie community!

  • AMIndeterminateProgressIndicatorCell
  • CToxicProgressIndicator
  • DBPrefsWindowController
  • KSExtensibleManagedObject
  • Potion Store
  • Sparkle
  • SubviewTableViewTester
  • UKCrashReporter

  And speaking of open source, since you've read so far, here’s a treat:

• JRFeedbackProvider: Early in Textcast’s development, I knew it would be important to capture user feedback. I raided my ~/Applications folder and searched out the best in-app feedback mechanisms. I found two winners: Things.app’s slick-looking multipurpose feedback panel and Acorn’s useful feedback panel with its pre-populated text. So I created my own version which combines both into one nonviral open-source version you can easily drop into your own app (and website!): JRFeedbackProvider. Patches welcome. Thanks to Gus and the Things.app crew for the inspiration.

Phew, long posting. Instead of reading it, how about you listen to it?

I'm an engineer because of my dad.

He gave me my appetite for understanding how things work.
And my healthy disrespect for apparent limitations.

He encouraged me in everything I tried.
And had genuine interest and excitement in my projects.

He was a living illustration that you could be smart and sociable simultaneously.

I am who I am because of my dad.

Due to a family medical emergency I'm rescheduling PSIG 120 from its usual bat-time of Thu Dec 4 2008 to Thu Feb 5 2009 (sadly, the next usual slot falls on New Year’s Day).

My Dad’s doing pretty OK, but I'm still firmly in overwhelm mode.

Radar is Apple’s internal bug tracking system. How Apple views Radar and how external third-party developers view Radar causes a bit of a conflict.

Apple heavily uses Radar internally. Thousands of Apple employees' work-days are defined primarily by what’s in their bug queue.

Also factor in how Apple is an incredibly secretive organization. There’s lots of juicy stuff in Radar, so it’s important to Apple little-to-none of that info escapes into the wild.

External, third-party developers tend not to view Radar as Apple views Radar. They look at organizations and projects with more-open or totally-open bug tracking systems and wonder why Apple isn’t like that.

External developers want an more-open bug tracking system so when we run into problems, we can easily check to see if we're bumping our head on a known issue. Or reference an existing bug so we don’t have to spend the significant period of time to write up an excellent bug report when all we want to do is “vote up” an existing bug we just ran into ourselves.

Apple encourages developers to file bugs, even those we know are probably duplicates, in order to “vote up” individual bugs and hopefully give them more priority when it comes time decide schedules.

This duplicate bug-filing encouragement never sat well with external developers, because Radar is completely opaque to us. It’s never clear whether we should spend the considerable time+effort to write up a great bug report (doing so can easily take an entire work-day or two) or if we should just do the minimum since it will just be immediately flagged as a duplicate and then mostly ignored.

Because Radar is opaque, we can’t look at an existing bug report we think is probably a duplicate and realize ours is actually an altogether different bug or that we have a critical piece of information that’s not in the existing bug report.

Sharing bug reports is very important for the indie community, and is the motivation behind things like Apple Bug Friday. We toss around radr:// urls so we can easily reference them when talking to Apple friends and include them when we know for certain we're filing a duplicate.

For over a decade, external developers have been imploring Apple to open up Radar. It’s nearly a rite of passage for new Mac developers.

But just how the request is phrased — “please open Radar” — shuts down the lines of communication and ensures Apple will never open Radar.

As we've seen above, Apple views Radar as an internal system that just happens to have a protected web form that allows outsiders to post things into it. Apple parses “please open Radar” as “please expose your internal secrets”.

Seen that way, you can understand why Apple is reluctant to “open Radar”.

External developers obviously see it differently. I've long advocated that Apple add a checkbox to Radar requests that would flag them as “public” — anyone with a Radar login could search+see them. I would love to make most of my bug reports public, and I suspect most of my fellow developers would as well.

But that was yesterday.

Kicked off by a tweet from Dave Dribin, Tim Burks created a new Google AppEngine site named Open Radar. It’s already being populated as I type this by different folks, so it looks like it’s taking off (Open Radar also has a twitter account and a lot of this is happening over twitter).

Dave Dribin wrote an app called RadarForwarder that accepts those radr:// urls I mentioned before and opens an Open Radar page for them.

And I just wrote OpenRadar.app, which allows you to file your Radars normally, but captures the information and saves it locally. I'll be adding auto-upload of that information to Open Radar soon. It’s the next-best-thing to a “make public” checkbox.

I'll announce it here (and on twitter) when I feel OpenRadar.app is ready for general public usage.

We won’t be getting that “make public” checkbox I've long requested anytime soon, but thanks to a little effort across a few talented people, it looks like we'll finally get that “open” bug tracking system we've been wanting for so long.

When:

Thursday, November 6th, 2008 @ 7pm

Where:

Hotel Indigo (pic, directions from the Arlington Park Metra station).

Schedule:

Show & Tell
We'll start out the meeting by going around the table and talking about what we're currently working on or learning about. Handouts are welcome, or bring along your Mac and we'll hook it up to the projector.

Book Reports
Bring along the book you're currently reading, or one of your old favorites. Hopefully the book would have some relevance to programming, but we're fairly open-minded. Just give us an overview the book's topic, and what you liked (or disliked) about it.

Topics
Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch will talk about PDFKit, Apple's framework for creating, viewing and modifying PDF files. Introduced in 10.4 and enhanced in 10.5, PDFKit is remarkably sane. I'll show you how easy it is to display PDFs in your application and dynamically generate your own.

Dinner
If you want pizza, bring along three dollars and we'll all chip in.

Looking for Presenters:

I'm always on the look-out for folks to want to give a talk for a meeting. The talk doesn't need to be long (10 minutes is fine if your topic is small or you just want to tease the group) and you don't need to be an expert (just tell us why you think your topic is cool or your experiences). Toss me an email and I'll assign you a chunk of time.

When:

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 @ 7pm

Where:

Hotel Indigo (pic, directions from the Arlington Park Metra station).

Schedule:

Show & Tell
We'll start out the meeting by going around the table and talking about what we're currently working on or learning about. Handouts are welcome, or bring along your Mac and we'll hook it up to the projector.

Book Reports
Bring along the book you're currently reading, or one of your old favorites. Hopefully the book would have some relevance to programming, but we're fairly open-minded. Just give us an overview the book's topic, and what you liked (or disliked) about it.

Topics
Celebrating the death of the iPhone NDA, Tom Swift will present "iPhone Development: Zero to Sixty". Tom will walk us through all the steps of creating a new app, including the tricky parts of actually getting it loaded on your iPhone/iPod Touch. Brace yourself, it's a bumpy ride.

Dinner
If you want pizza, bring along three dollars and we'll all chip in.

Looking for Presenters:

I'm always on the look-out for folks to want to give a talk for a meeting. The talk doesn't need to be long (10 minutes is fine if your topic is small or you just want to tease the group) and you don't need to be an expert (just tell us why you think your topic is cool or your experiences). Toss me an email and I'll assign you a chunk of time.

It’s here. I’ve added three speakers since C4[2] sold out:

• Ross Boucher on Objective-J+Cappuccino.
• Andy Finnell on Indie Contracting.
• Tim Wood on OmniDataObjects, an CoreData-like framework that also works on the iPhone.

Representing well over eleven-thousand dollars worth of software, I’m pleased to present the incredible list of software C4[2] attendees have donated as prizes that will be preloaded on Iron Coder winner’s shiny new MacBook Air.

As I expected, the sum total of the donated prized dwarfs the value of the MacBook Air itself. But I’m floored by just how far you guys have gone. Deep thanks to all the donators.

Remember this year the API is Core Location and the theme is paranoia. Also keep in mind if your app is cool enough, you can ignore the API and/or theme and still win. Unlike “normal” Iron Coders, it’s encouraged that you have your submission prepared ahead of time. C4 is to cool to spend locked in your hotel room with gdb. If you want more details, most of what I wrote about Iron Coder Live last year still applies.

Without further ado, here are the prize donations (presented in order of donation).

Update: I’ve finally added Justin and Scotty’s donations to the pot, which is rather generous of them since they didn’t even attend C4[2]. I’ve also sheepishly added Philippe Casgrain’s donation of Corel Painter X, which somehow slipped through the cracks. Sorry, Philippe.

I also have another gift in the queue, but this one goes out to all attendees. Watch your mailbox.

When:

Thursday, September 4th, 2008 @ 7pm

Where:

Hotel Indigo (pic, directions from the Arlington Park Metra station).

Schedule:

Show & Tell
We'll start out the meeting by going around the table and talking about what we're currently working on or learning about. Handouts are welcome, or bring along your Mac and we'll hook it up to the projector.

Book Reports
Bring along the book you're currently reading, or one of your old favorites. Hopefully the book would have some relevance to programming, but we're fairly open-minded. Just give us an overview the book's topic, and what you liked (or disliked) about it.

Topics
Against my Doctor’s recommendation, I’m holding PSIG 117 the night before C4[2]. But I’m not worried, since Ben Gottlieb will be giving the big presentation.

Ben writes Newton Palm PocketPC some-new-fangled-PDA software and has some great hard-won experience to share. I would say more, but the walls have ears.

Dinner
If you want pizza, bring along three dollars and we'll all chip in.

Looking for Presenters:

I'm always on the look-out for folks to want to give a talk for a meeting. The talk doesn't need to be long (10 minutes is fine if your topic is small or you just want to tease the group) and you don't need to be an expert (just tell us why you think your topic is cool or your experiences). Toss me an email and I'll assign you a chunk of time.

Folks are wanting a little more detail than ”Strive to arrive at the hotel by Fri Sep 5 at 5:30 pm. It all comes to an end Sun Sep 7 around 4 pm” so I whipped up a C4[2] beta schedule that has a little more detail about what’s going down.

Sorry that schedule doesn’t have detailed speaker times, but since C4[2] sold out I’ve added additional speakers and I’d rather not tip my hand just yet.

I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of an awesome prize for C4[2]’s upcoming Iron Coder contest. I didn’t want to just go around begging random vendors for prizes, and I wasn’t feeling last year’s Golden Dogtag again. (Turns out bling and hackers don’t really mix.)

I’ve come up with something that I feel really good about, a prize that feeds back into the community.

I’m going to award a shiny new MacBook Air to the 1st place winner of C4[2]’s Iron Coder competition. Right there’s a swell prize.

But I’m much more excited about the next part: the winner’s MacBook Air will be preloaded by C4[2] attendees’ own software.

I’m sending out an email asking C4[2] attendees to donate two licenses of the software they’ve written to add to the prize. The first license will get loaded onto that MacBook Air. The second license will be part of the Runner-Up’s software-only prize.

C4 is all about celebrating the indie community, and I can’t think of a better prize than the results of our own handiwork.

Better get crankin’ on your Iron Coder entry. I bet this year’s competition will be stiff.

This one’s a quickie: the deadline for C4[2] scholarship applications is this Monday, Aug 11th.

Students: apply by sending your name, email address, website if you have one, and why you want to attend C4 (in Markdown format) to c4@redshed.net. Please put “scholarship” in the subject line.