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August 01, 2005
What I've been up to
So in the last couple of months, I haven't posted much. This has more to do with the fact that the server was changed (and I did not backup my database because I wanted to sorta start new) than anything else.
So with this in mind, this post is going to be long.
Growl
Growl is doing really well. We have had about 40,000 downloads of .7 now, so this gives a form of validation. I'll be pushing beta 5 out tomorrow, and hopefully .7.1 next week sometime.
Growl .8 is going to take a while. A lot of stuff is being refactored, so that in the long run Growl should hopefully be easier to code on. This is being done, and hopefully Growl .8 will be out by Christmas.
Chatkit
So in the long run, Adium, Fire, and Proteus (the 3 main chat clients on os x) are all reimplementing the same things over and over. If you add it up, we all probably fix the same problem different ways with over 100 man hours wasted a year.
My thoughts on this for a while had been that we could all work together on some things. My previous entries regarding emoticon standards (which I gave up on) show this to some extent. For about 3 months, Adam and I have been discussing this indirectly. We ended up naming the idea Chatkit, then getting ideas going on it, involving people from multiple projects. We just started the project last week actually, and so far it's been slow going but fun. I'll talk about this more later though.
Coal
About 3 weeks ago I started thinking of something new as well. Every time I was talking with someone over im for a one week period, I would continually need to open up log files/search something on google/find something on amazon/use spotlight.
Then I remembered dashboard (later became beagle), and thought we could use a splash of something like it on os x. jfro is going to investigate this further, and has a working way to get at the data we'd need to get to. The general idea is that this is data mining, hence the name Coal. If it doesn't work out, we can still have a nice gui to do spotlight+internet all at one time. That in itself would be convenient.
Adium
I've been working less and less on Adium. My initial goals were only known by the two team leads. Overall though, the idea is to help the project in the eventual case where developers drop out of wanting to work on it. Keeping people interested has been my thought process on a lot of it, and so far it's worked out pretty well. My need to work directly with developers in order for this goal to be achieved is pretty much gone now, so folks are probably seeing me less and less.
Myko Games
So apparently I started something called Myko Games inadvertently. Basically the idea is to have a game system that works with multiple clients on os x, in order to allow mac users to play games such as chess and tic-tac-toe. Long time Adium users might remember tic-tac-toe, which this evolved from (somewhat). Here is the real story though:
Skyler (otherwise known as freakman) decided he wanted to have an easter egg inside of Adium. Skyler finally landed on wanting to put a 10 mb movie file hidden inside the "About Adium" dialogue.
Yes, I said that. He wanted to put a 10 megabyte file in Adium. And he wanted it to only be activated when people went to the About panel, and only for some weird key combination. Guess what we said..
Anyhow, in order to keep him interested in it, I suggested that he put games into Adium instead. Eventually we landed on the idea that other clients would like to have this too, and hence IMGames started. Unfortunately the name IMGames is taken, so Myko was chosen (lord if I know what it means). And so, apparently I helped to start Myko Games and save Adium from the 10 movie monster.
Randomness
Oh, and to address this blog entry by Peter and why I revived my posting grounds. I was not worried. Rather, at the time I just was not going to use something that the folks who do jep wrangling did not recommend implementing. Also, dragging up one of my posts from last year wasn't such a great idea either. But since it's been brought up, the initial work I've done will probably make its way into Chatkit, in a much simpler format than described in that jep.