To start off, we have a new Lead Developer, Peter Hosey. Peter has been instrumental in the past in getting a lot of stuff done (along with other Developers), and just has a general understanding of the project, the codebase, and things involved with working on an open source project. He's an all around good guy and I'm glad he accepted the Lead Developer spot.

On to 1.2 stuff. We're basically going to be trying to take the stance of smaller feature sets make for faster releases. One thing we're probably going to have in 1.2 is GrowlTunesPlugin. This will replace GrowlTunes. Basically it's a plugin for iTunes, which does what GrowlTunes does now, and a few more fun things.

Another major thing we're looking forward to is the new TCP communications protocol. Basically we're going to be deprecating the old protocol at some point, and make this work. The end goal is to have a single protocol for cocoa, carbon, and networking. The spec is being worked on now, and there is a discussion going on right now in order to hammer everything out so that it works all cross platformy as well. We're even working to make it so that Adobe AIR can work with it, which would be a Good Thing.

As to 2.0 and beyond, Austin Sarner made a nice set of mockups that I think solve a lot of problems. However, we need Developers to help with this. Here's what it looks like (click the images to see them bigger):

Applications

General

Displays

Networking

About

If all of this looks interesting to you, we could use your help.

In general there's just not enough time in the day for everything I want, hence the stepping away. The Growl project itself hasn't been where I want it to be, and that's my fault due to the fact that I'm the one who's providing leadership for the project (along with the Lead Dev), so I'm going to work at getting that up to snuff.

So, that's what's happening with me and oss projects. I'm not totally gone from the others, but I'm only around when someone needs to ask me a question.

Now then, on to the subject. I'm getting married! She's pretty awesome (obviously, I'm marrying her), and funny too. Like last night, we registered for the wedding, and she just kinda took the gun and ran around scanning, I lost her for about 15 minutes in target, and 30 minutes in bed bath and beyond (you can see the Target bridal registry here and the Bed Bath and Beyond bridal registry here). Eventually I found her looking for me while I was looking for her, it was comical.

We've got most things planned out already. My cake is going to be pretty sweet, and hers is just plain awesome. The wedding is in the beginning of September, so if anyone happens to want to come, just shoot me an email and I'll get you the info.

Overall, I'm happier now than I have been in the last 3-4 years. People at work see a noticable difference that they comment on a lot. Life is great.

I took my laptop in to the apple store on Saturday, the Galleria one. I got in line quick, but the "genius" was a complete jerk. This is not uncommon for the galleria store, but they were the closest. They quoted me at around 650 dollars to get the laptop fixed.

This was surprising to me. I had purchased applecare, and I have previously had an entire laptop just replaced. I was less than happy, but I decided to leave once the guy kept repeating the company line.

I went to the Woodlands Mall apple store yesterday. Previously I had gone to the woodlands mall, shown the guy a picture there, and they said they'd fix it for free so long as I didn't mention dropping it. Since I don't know how it broke, this was not any ethical question or anything, so I did what he said.

They said it was a tier 2 or 3 repair, which is still pretty high. Somewhere between 650 and 850 dollars. That's practically a new macbook, and definitely a new mac mini. The frustrating thing is that if this were an acer or a dell and I had purchased the warranties, it would have been covered.

The laptop itself is fine, but I messed up the file system and don't have an intel machine to restore a file system onto it with, and as the superdrive is inaccessable and I don't want to buy an external dvd drive, I'm sort of stuck.

There are a few reasons I stick with the mac. There's a thriving community here, and the software is easier to find than other platforms. I have invested a lot into the mac, but I did switch before, twice.

So I'm pretty much out the price of a new laptop to fix this laptop, basically I'm at the crossroads of where I'm going to go with computers for the next 10-15 years. Do I stick with macs, all of which have failed on me in some way (with the exception of the imac), or go with some more reliable hardware, or at least hardware that isn't going to put me into a bind long term?

If so, how do I replace my apps?

If only I had read the fine print of applecare instead of trusting Apple. I realize that it's all legalese and that I should have read it, but it's also implied with the way that applecare is marketted that it covers stuff.

I will have to say that the technicians at the woodlands mall were all very nice people, even with delivering bad news, and that Apple really needs to retrain the people at the Houston Galleria store for how to treat customers. Being a jerk isn't cool.

So ya, I don't know why I should stay on os x. I like working on Perian and Growl, but is that enough to keep me on the platform? Everything I need to use, with the exception of Growl and quicksilver, are on the other platforms. I'd only be missing out on itunes for my phone really.

*sigh*

Today I have an interview with the guys working on UnThirsty. UnThirsty is a site dedicated to helping people find a good local happy hour. The cool thing about UnThirsty is that it has an iPhone version of the site. Read on to find out more about the guys and their project..

I have no idea how it happened, but that's my new macbook pro that I got this year.

Luckily we finally hit upon the right timing for a great guy, Dan Deming-Henes. He's come up with an awesome design that so far everyone loves. I'm posting here to get some feedback about the design itself, so make a comment if you love it, you hate it, or whatever.

Just for comparison, I'm posting two screenshots:

The old one

The new one

Fresh on the heals of my interviews with Alex Schaefer and Rudy Richter is this interview with Jamie Hardt. Jamie is the author of a bit of Ruby magic which is rather useful, called calllog2ical (formerly iphonelogd). Read on for more on Jamie and his cool bit of software for the iPhone.

Next in the series of interviews I'm doing with people who work on iPhone related projects is Rudy Richter. Rudy works on iToner, and works for Ambrosia Software Inc.. Click on through, and definitely check out both iToner and all of Ambrosia's products (personally I like SketchFighter)...

So here's the first in a series of interviews I'm going to be doing with people who work on iPhone related projects. This first one with with Alex Schaefer of ApolloIM. Click on through, and be sure to check the project out when you're done reading...

It's very strange, so I'll be posting some iPhone related things on the blog until I figure things out with it. Yes, I realize that the web is full of iPhone stuff, so it won't be the normal stuff you're seeing out there. Or at least I'll pretend that it hasn't been done.

The strangest part of all of this is that I've grown to like the phone almost more than my mac, but in different ways. They're both products that are at their core very utilitarian, but pretty at the same time. I just find it easier sometimes to browser on my iPhone than on my mac. Neither are perfect machines, only my rice cooker is perfect, but they do indeed get the job done.

So I spend 5 minutes finding it on the logitech website, download it, and reboot the machine since that's required. So far, so good.

The machine comes back up, I log in, and the keyboard works. Awesome!

Ten minutes later I started working on something with the keyboard. As you all know based on my previous post about my use of capslock, I'm pretty heavy on using that key.

It looked something like this screenshot

Every time I hit capslock this notification would come up. EVERY. TIME. It was god awful annoying. Then I remembered a recent discussion regarding the mouse plugin event for a logitech mouse (that screenshot is from the affected user).

Long story short, this is annoying. For instance, up until this point in this blog post, I've pressed the capslock key 23 times. That'd be an enormous amount of notifications, just for this short post.

The solution is actually quite simple, and very much what was suggested on the list. Basically, it's 2 steps:

1) open /Library/Application\ Support/Logitech/LCCDaemon.app/Contents/

2) Move NotificationSquareWindow.nib and NotificationSquareWindow.nib somewhere else. I moved them to my desktop to test with.

That's it, this annoyingness goes away.

This may be weird coming from the guy who started Growl, but holy wow, I have no control over this, there's not even a silly checkbox for this. Isn't that nutty?

I can't watch the video right now, but the way he describes it, I simply cannot use this new keyboard. The reason being is that I utilize capslock, rather than shift, to type.

I actually find this to be superior. Instead of something awkward like holding down a key while pushing another key, I can just toggle a key, hit the other, and toggle back. This means that I can already be in midstrike for another key rather than have to move my hand. Maybe this isn't how people use shift, but it's how I end up using shift on the number row keys.

I've even tested this theory against a diehard dvorak guy once. He'd been using dvorak for years, claimed it was better than qwerty. I don't think I care about that. However, he did say he could type faster than I could. I certainly kept up.

I tell this fact to people from time to time, and most people get shocked by this. I'm shocked people still use shift to be honest, it just seems rather strange to type a capital I by holding down one key and contorting your hand to type the i, and then releasing.

Old unix hands are probably the people I get the most shock from. The guys who had ctrl and capslock switched on sun keyboards typically think the key is useless. Luckily they don't make my keyboards. :)

So if what Wolf says ends up being the defacto for apple keyboards, I won't be able to use any new apple keyboards. Luckily, I can just plug in another keyboard. Until they do this on a laptop, then I may have to rethink using a mac. *sigh*

Command
Self-Assurance
Activator
Individualization
Achiever

Reading this list, I start to wonder if they are trying to say "You are a cocky S.O.B." Off to read the meanings.

So I've been working on Adium for what, 4 years now, as a Project Manager (part of that time was not as a PM). In that time, I've always tried to pin down what the next priorities are. In general these items would be really chaotic, and would require consulting all of the development team. Priorities for Adium were based on the needs of the development team, and more important, significant others of the development team.

For instance, when Evan's girlfriend (at the time) wanted a specific feature that we had said no to for years, he made it the next day. And thus, priorities change. Evan is the Lead Developer, and true Project Lead for Adium, for those who need to know.

This has worked well for years. There aren't too many people working on Adium at any given time, roughly we hang around 5-7 dedicated folks working on Adium, in their spare time, doing whatever it is that they feel is necessary. This could be for themselves, or it could be for someone else.

About 2 years ago I started to question this whole line of thought. The then Project Lead, and Co-Lead Dev, Adam Iser, also questioned this, so we started discussing things. What would it take to change Adium in such a way that it would make us truly happy again. I've said this a few times, but I've been happy with Adium since before .50, everything else since then has been icing. If you follow that analogy, we've got about 5 miles of icing put on top since then.

So what did Adam and I discuss? A lot of things, but we kept coming back to the 80/20 rule, and how it applied very well to what we were wanting. Later on I found out that the Trac project goes so far as to do a 90/10 rule. Basically this means that anything you add or change should be relevant to 80 percent, or in the case of Trac, 90 percent, of your audience.

I hadn't really thought about this for about six months or so. Previously I had been discussing this with David, I would try to explain it, but I wasn't doing a very good job. He asked me to type something up. A discussion I had on #macsb on freenode with Daniel Jalkut, maker of MarsEdit 2 (what I'm using to type this post) about this very thing. His stance is that he'd prefer that people in general try using desktop applications for blogging, but that'd he'd prefer to make MarsEdit polished, and not win on features. I believe this is the same sentiment that Adam and I were expressing to each other, but not in so few words.

Rawr

Adam went so far as to make some mockups, which I critiqued. We went back and forth, him showing me a png, my commenting, his refining. We nicknamed it Rawr. The results were the following:

Chat Window

Buddies Pane

(ignore the unified buttons in the toolbar)

Some concepts just won't die

During this period Adam and I both believed that the contact list/buddy list is a very old concept that, well, sucks. My opinion of it hasn't changed much in recent years. So why is that?

At least with Adium, people are constantly constantly changing their contact list so that it blends into their desktop, hiding it in plain sight. Other people need it to look like a standard contact list, like this one:

Standard Contact List

To me this was just something that people with smaller contact lists would use. If you become what is referred to as a heavy instant messenger user, with something around 300+ buddies, then it starts to become unwieldy. You can tack on things like search fields and status sorting, but in all reality this just feels like a kludge.

The Nitty Gritty

So what did we think was important to people? Well, a few things. Hence:

So how would I change Adium, I've always wondered that.

Here is my short list of things I would change about Adium:

1) We would no longer have a contact list. Period. A long thin list of contacts is hard to manage conceptually beyond 50 contacts. I have trouble finding the person I want to IM right away. For the five or six people I want to know about all of the time, I'm more likely to open a tab with them in it than to do anything else.

2) I would change the focus. I would emphasize the developer/SO thing more, actually. I would ignore requests from anyone except for this small sample audience. Bug reports, fine, fix the bugs, but don't implement things that your core audience does not need.

Believe it or not, this wouldn't be so bad.

3) Scrap everything. I don't mean throw away code we have, I mean remove any non-essential functionality. Come back to the core of what IM'ing really is. Everything that someone wants that doesn't fit what the devs/SO's need would be put into a third party plugin.

Trac does something similar to this with their trac-hacks website (it's currently down or I'd link to it). They have a huge list of add-ons that make Trac work better in general, and only implement the functionality that they believe 90% of everyone would use. Some people find this weird, but it's not hard to install a plugin.

4) I'd work on polish more. We recently dropped 10.3 support, with 1.1. To me that means we can finally start adding functionality that is 10.4+ without having to maintain 10.3 failure checking code, and all sorts of other stuff.

This also means that we get to move to 10.5+ only as quickly as possible. If none of the devs have 10.4, why support it?

5) Change the UI to match up more with the Rawr mockups. Keep a buddy bar of some kind for the 5 or 6 people you typically care about, and then put the rest of the contacts into a bookmarks looking UI. Setup smart groups, and you have a winning combination for finding contacts easily.

6) Go prefsless. Seriously. Get Adium down to not requiring any preferences whatsoever. After this is done, keep it that way.

7) Move stuff out of the menus that are no longer applicable. Remove stuff in the menus that could be confusing.

Now, this would never happen, because what we have now is what makes Adium awesome. However, what if we had an Adium-Lite? Basically the same back end infrastructure, but really parred down to the nuts and bolts of things. This is what I thought would be useful about 4 months ago, but I have since changed my mind in that it may just be a distraction. I don't know if that'd be useful or not. It'd be interesting to try it though.

It's an interesting quandary to think about, and to be in. About 2 years ago we changed away from our featureset being ruled by "so many features you'll crap your pants" to "a good balance to be the most awesome IM client, period". I think we've achieved a lot of the latter in the last 2 years. Yes, Voice and Video are coming, sooner or later (I get so much crap for this one at work, they think it's funny!).

Anyhow, so what do you folks think? Would an Adium-Lite be something that would be useful? Maybe the IM client for your mom type situation? I've gone over and over on this, and I'm not sure where it would fit, but I think it'd be useful.