Solipsism Gradient

Back from our 2-month trip - Valparaíso to Sydney. There’s a 13-hour jet lag to get rid of, so for now, here’s just our updated world map:

A full status update will be posted soon.

Herewith a much-delayed status update.

Our cruise has been quite interesting, there still are two weeks to go. To make a long story very short, we’ve visited Robinson Crusoe Island, Rapa Nui (a.k.a. Easter Island), stopped off Pitcairn (but were unable to go ashore), then Raivavae, Papeete on Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora (all in French Polynesia), Rarotonga and Aiutaki (Cook Islands), then Nuku’alofa on Tonga, Levuka and Suka on Fiji, and finally Norfolk Island (which belongs to Australia).

After that, the ship stopped at a variety of ports on New Zealand: the Bay of Islands, Auckland, Tauranga, Napier, Wellington, Picton, Lyttelton (the port for Christchurch), Dunedin, and (today) the Stewart Islands. Soon we’ll be on our way to Tasmania, visiting Port Arthur, Hobart and Devonport, finishing off with two days each in Melbourne and Sydney, both of course in Australia. From then on it’s a long flight back, with a two-day layover in Buenos Aires. We should be safely home by the end of January.

Whew.

On the app development front, much progress has been made. The generic app framework is mostly ready for prime time – it works well with two of the three application types that I plan to release, and I’ll start testing the third type tomorrow. The architecture looks very plug-in like. However, the current incarnation of the Mac App Store doesn’t allow selling plug-ins, so the generic app is a static library linked to what would otherwise be the plug-in; there are some standard nib and graphics files, and specific files for each application. I’m quite satisfied that this will make it easy to implement new apps down the road.

Details on the apps themselves are still not ready for release, as I first plan to do a short but intense private beta program as soon as I get back home – the on-ship Internet has download speeds very like in the old 28800-baud modem days, and the upload speed is almost zero. If you’re an interested fellow developer, feel free to email me and I’ll be in touch.

This appeared on xkcd a a few weeks ago: (click to embiggen)

many other developers will sympathize.

So, I’ve been developing a system to pass you, gentle app user, arbitrary applications. Since, as I said before, a group of Mac utilities is in the works – with the first four even having icons and all – of course I thought to “save time in the long run”.

It’s been more than 20 minutes though, for which I apologize. Things have been unusually complex for me this year, not to mention a couple of recent health scares (all solved, I hasten to mention).

Returning to the condiments apps. My intention is, of course, to write an ever-expanding suite of small utilities, though Apple still hasn’t published details on how to pass info from between apps in such a suite if they are on the Mac App Store. (And there’s the upcoming app sandboxing deadline to consider – an added complication.)

Anyway, all apps will work in a similar manner: file(s) are dropped onto the app’s icon, or selected from the standard Open Panel. Then something will be done to those files – information summarized, files counted, permissions checked and optionally changed, whatnot; all expected functions should be reasonably obvious from the UI.

So we have a host of common functions, namely, implementing the App Store receipt checking, sandboxing considerations, receiving dropped and opened files, scanning over them (and perhaps over their contents, if they’re folders), showing the About Box and some help, and doing all that in a consistent manner.

I’m happy to report that everything along those lines is now working perfectly, and with the new workspace facility in Xcode 4, expanding from one to several apps will be a piece of cake. Let’s leave the culinary metaphors aside for the moment and ponder how I’ll can deliver – considering that my record regarding past deadlines has been not so good. (OK, abysmal.)

The answer is obvious: take a cruise. In recent years, everything significant I’ve released had been mostly written and polished on a cruise ship. No distractions, no phones, almost no Internet, no relatives (haha)… and I can impress my fellow passengers by saying “well, I’m making money for the next cruise here on board!”.

So, for over a year we’ve been planning a major cruise – it might be our last long cruise for the foreseeable future, even. And I’m very happy that we leave early tomorrow to return in the last days of January 2012. (Should give us time to prepare for the Mayacalypse, anyway.)

I’ll be posting from underway without saying too much about destinations, to add to the suspense. We should have occasional – though expensive – Internet onship, so email etc. should work. Our next stop should be Santiago del Chile. Stay tuned!

In the same vein as A Kerning Game, this test makes you drag around bezier control points to make characters look optimal:

Shape Type

This is trickier than the previous one, since you have to consider what the style of the font might be like. (They tell you the name of the font but I suppose looking it up would be cheating…). I scored only 81 out of 100.

Been some time since I posted a test and this one is rather specialized:

KERNTYPE a kerning game

You must drag the middle letters into the optimal position – the leftmost and rightmost won’t move. It’s been many years since I played around with font design, and so I scored only 85 out of 100.

A couple of friendly publications have asked me to write about the very recent passing of Apple’s former CEO, Steve Jobs. I refused. While some of the stories published in the past 24 hours are moving, interesting, informative and even funny, some are also inappropriate, self-serving, offensive, vapid, or overly sentimental. (And few people agree as to which are which!)

I also have, in the past, refrained from writing about personal stuff here. There are people (both living and deceased) who I admire for certain personal qualities, but it would be unseemly for me to publish a “fanboi” list of these people, much less directly address the departed ones or their families. What I can mention about Steve Jobs is:

• I’ve been a few feet away from him twice at trade shows, but that’s it. No conversations.
• I’ve been an Apple customer, almost exclusively, since 1977, a Mac developer since 1984, and a (very modest!) Apple stockholder since the beginning of the millennium.

As often happens with such public figures, a good part of the public’s perception is shaped through anecdotes and legends which may not closely correspond to what really happened. While I’m as happy to repeat such tidbits in personal conversation as anybody else, there’s only one that I feel completely comfortable to express here: all agree that Steve Jobs really cared about building better things – hardware, software, but mostly better systems.

Which happens to agree with my personal philosophy here – if you’ve looked at my products page, the header says “finely crafted software for the Macintosh”. So, the best way to do something that Steve Jobs would agree with is to go on building better stuff.

I have been remiss in mentioning my current work here, and I decided it’s time to give at least a hint. So, here are the icons for four forthcoming Mac utilities:

The top two should come out first. They’ll all be on the Mac App Store, if all goes well. Details, prices and so forth are still in flux but should be available soon. Some of their functions are intended to replace parts of my defunct XRay application, but Quay will also be updated afterwards to work in concert with the new apps. Current customers of both applications will get free updates within the (unfortunately) narrow conditions imposed by the Mac App Store.

More details will be published as things develop (hehe). Stay tuned. I’m working hard on better stuff.

By the way, the icons are by Sergio Bergocce.