Solipsism Gradient

Wow, today is the 10th anniversary of this blog; at least that’s the oldest post still preserved in my database. Most of the pieces were already in place in early 2002, but it took me some time to get everything running. At the time, I based the blog on phpbb, but a few years ago I migrated to WordPress; only the support forums, which get very little use these days, still use phpbb. Here’s a screenshot of the early days:

The cringe-inducing title was patterned after several similar ones I saw at the time; later on, no doubt under the influence of Iain M. Banks, I changed to the current “Solipsism Gradient”, which I still think quite descriptive. I’m still working up the nerve to ask him to use the name in an upcoming book, though…

But earlier versions were still more cringe-inducing, look at this one, from mid-2000:

At least I can safely say there’s no <blink> tag, and the animated GIF for the visitor counter was actually well-received; can’t really use it again as there are too few digits to be future-proof, but here’s what it looked like:

Well, life goes on. In a few days we’ll take a month off, flying in to Denver and driving around the parks between Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, Salt Lake City and Bryce Canyon. If all goes well, I’ll be able to work and post from underway. To coin a phrase, “we have cool things in the pipeline”…

While I’m busy finding the very last bug in the forthcoming Quay for Lion update…

…here’s a new vocabulary test. Here’s my result:

My flight to San Francisco and WWDC 2011 leaves tomorrow night and I should arrive early in the afternoon on June 2nd.

Friday and Saturday are mostly reserved for taking care of some private business, but if anybody wishes to meet with me before WWDC, please drop me an email (rainerbrockerhoff.net), Twitter direct message (I’m @rbrockerhoff) or AIM:rainerbrockerhoffmac.com.

Early Sunday I’ll switch hotels and soon after lunch I’ll be at Moscone to get my badge. There was supposed to be a meet-up of Brazilian developers in the early afternoon, but apparently not everybody will be able to show up; at any rate, I’ll hang out at registration for a couple of hours. Later on, and all week, things will be quite hectic and I’ve no idea yet which parties I’ll be able to attend.

After the conference I’ll have a couple of days for resting and reading, and I should be back home on June 15th.

Things are looking up development-wise. I’m well along implementing my ideas of transitioning most of my products to the Mac Apple Store. While this means that all the new stuff will only run on Mac OS X 10.6.6 and up, the old versions will continue to be available, though mostly unsupported. No time to post details yet, and some of those are bound to change depending on information gathered at WWDC – but I’m optimistic that everything will work out.

More as it happens!

With the new apartment mostly ready (though the external/common areas are still unfinished), a return to blogging and coding may now be possible.

While I’ve pondered about the general direction that I wish to take my software, details are still a little unclear. Yes, the Mac App Store does figure in my plans for updating/replacing XRay, but System Preference panels are not accepted – so Quay and Klicko will continue being distributed over this website.

The developer preview release of Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” was a surprise to me. My expectation was that it would be released at (or just after) next June’s WWDC, which I hadn’t planned to attend. I’ve just installed the Lion preview and had a fast look; it’s farther along than such previews usually are, and there are sufficient new UI details and API changes that I decided to study those first, before commiting to design details on my own software.

A surprising amount of detail about Lion has already been published, NDAs notwithstanding, with only token sallies from Apple Legal. I’ve been somewhat out of touch with the developer community, so I can only speculate. Reducing the price of developer access to $99 – 20% of what it cost the last time around – may be a factor.

One aspect which will impact me immediately is that PowerPC support over Rosetta will no longer be available. There are some PowerPC apps I still use a lot: among them are Resorcerer, DMG Maker, Plain Clip, my own XRay, and – the one that’s open all the time – Eudora; as well as a bunch of utilities and games that I open very rarely. I suppose I’ll have to relegate them to my old Mac mini Core Solo, which – being a 32-bit machine – will also not be supported by Lion.

The exception is Eudora; I’ve used it since 1.0b5 or thereabouts. I suppose I’ll finally have to try out the Eudora OSE version; some fellow oldsters tell me it’s not too bad. None of the other email clients seem attractive, especially Apple’s Mail, which I actually tried out last year and didn’t like.

Yes, that was a rather busy period – months without posting, and I haven’t been online much, except for checking email now and then and fighting spam (would you believe 3579 spam comments since I activated Akismet? Highly recommended).

Things have settled down a little and I now have consistent broadband again. To make a long story short, our new apartment (not the one that was new September last year!), which should have been ready Real Soon™ after our return from Texas in July, has been much delayed. The builder ran into serious snags, both technical and bureaucratic. We’ve mostly moved in, though unofficially, and all my time is being spent with unpacking, fixing stuff, installing shelves and lighting, and general setting up. All in all, we spent about 6 months in various hotels.

In about a month everything should be done, and the garage and other public parts of the building should also be ready for less adventurous tenants to move in.

In the meantime, very little has happened on the development front – I haven’t even been able to stay current with the mailing lists. If all goes well, that will change soon…

This is just to assure you, faithful reader, that I’m alive and well. (And also to make a test post, since I’m twiddling with the underlying software.)