Solipsism Gradient

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!

By a happy coincidence, I was notified in time that tickets for WWDC 2011 had become available, and booked one – they were sold out in less than 9 hours! Even though Brazil now has an online Apple Store, as well as Mac and iOS App Stores, developers still must send a (gasp!) Fax to Apple in California – no paying over the Internet, as we used to do before the stores came online. I’ve complained to Apple Developer Relations, hopefully this will be updated to current technology the next time around.

My air tickets should be confirmed in a few days, so far it looks like I’ll arrive in SFO on June 2nd in the afternoon. WWDC will start on with the keynote on Monday morning, June 6th (my birthday!) and end on Friday afternoon, June 9th. I’ll leave town on the morning of June 14th. As usual, the actual conference days and nights will be extremely busy, but I’ll probably have time for a meeting on other days.

On Sunday, June 5th, I’ll be getting my badge at Moscone betewen 14:00 and 15:00 (that’s 2 to 3 PM local time ;-)) and there’ll be a meet-up for Brazilian developers afterwards. Keep an eye on the blog for any changes and updates.

I’ve also found an interesting place to practice some table tennis: the San Francisco TTC at 953 DeHaro Street. Should be fun… I’ll take my trusty old racket and the new one I got courtesy of the nice folks at CocoaHeads Beijing two years ago.

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…

Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced that in a few months, Apple will open an App Store for Mac OS X, following much the same model as the previous – and hugely successful – App Store for iOS.

Two things are immediately obvious: first, the Mac OS X App Store won’t be the only way for users to purchase, download and install applications on their Macs; the previous, time-tested ways will continue to be allowed. Second, the App Store (as the name states), is for applications only – and only for applications of a certain kind.

The long list of prohibitions and cautions exclude, often by definition, system preference panels (like my own Quay), kernel extensions or apps that use them, complex application suites that install background processes, and in fact, anything but a plain old-fashioned self-contained application would be hard-pressed to observe all the guidelines. In fact, as others have observed, most of Apple’s own applications are non-compliant.

The huge difference from the iOS App Store is that developers are perfectly free to write software outside the guidelines, and users are perfectly free to install them. What the new App Store is promising to be is, in effect, a fenced-in garden where a certain type of user can download and install a certain kind of application while getting the warm fuzzy feeling they know from the iOS app store.

In fact, my hunch is that Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) will have an interesting change to the “Accounts” panel in System Preferences. Today, you have four types of user accounts: Administrator, Standard, Managed with Parental Controls, and Sharing Only (aka Guest). I think that all but “Administrator” accounts will allow the user to install applications only via the App Store, and that the Managed and Guest accounts will have an option restricting that user to only run applications from the App Store.

Which may not be such a bad idea after all.

For the developer, it seems that it won’t be allowed to have the same application sold over the App Store and outside it; perhaps not even different versions of the same app. That also makes sense to me. In other respects, the same old arguments apply to both the old and new App Stores: price erosion must be avoided, marketing your app in the long term can’t be left in Apple’s hands, and so forth.

As for myself, I still haven’t had an idea for an iOS app compelling enough that hasn’t been done already, and so far that same argument applies to Mac OS X apps that would fit into the guidelines; my interests lie, still, in doing utilities that enhance the system – not allowed on iOS, still very interesting on Mac OS X.

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.)

And another dual-screen device, the Entourage eDge:

(also check my previous post on the subject.)

This one’s different in that the screens aren’t identical; there’s an e-paper display on the left, and a LCD on the right. Both are touch-enabled.

We’re officially back in Belo Horizonte, by the way. Texas was way too hot and there was no convenient cooler place anywhere nearby, so we went back a little early. However, our new place won’t be ready for another month or so; meanwhile we’re in a hotel. Feels weird to play the tourist, but now I’ve got my iMac set up and everything ready to get back to coding.