Thursday, January 9, 2003

New Blog at Right. Oh, one last thing. Added the guy who's keeping a blog on Safari to the right navigation bar. David Hyatt wrote the browser, actually. So his blog "Surfin' Safari" is now featured at right. Hooray for developers at Apple reaching out to the community and getting responses. Of course, that could be because the browser's pretty damn near open source. 10:34:20 PM    comment [] Rendezvous Session Notes While I realize I will have to cut out early, here are my initial impressions from the Rendezvous Session: They've moved their presentation from PowerPoint to Keynote for this presentation, having migrated it over for this session. Keynote's great in practical value. Scott Sheppard and Adrian Mayo from OSX FAQ are running the presentation. What is Rendezvous from the User's Perspective? Three Macs, two printers and an Airport. Now what? Automatically form a network, no manual config iChat is configured for Rendezvous network use. Will discover all local iChat services that are running on a local net. Rendezvous in Printers: Printer manufacturers are incorporating Rendezvous. ALl Macs connect will see the service, as its advertized, either in color or B&W. Being adopted by Epson, HP, Lexmark, Canon, Xerox, etc. Mobile phones will work w/ Rendezvous to access a network and sync. Consumer devices like TiVo and Stereos will work with iTunes eventually. Sybase and WorldBook have both adopted stuff to work with their suite. You can surf via http://another-computer.local if that other computer has rendezvous enabled file-sharing or web-sharing turned on. On to the "geeky" stuff... ZeroConf runs on top of the existing TCP/IP stack in order to be chatty like AppleTalk was in OS 9. We see ZC for the first time in 10.2 Jag. What is ZC networking? A tech to enable plug and play networking. Doesn't require special servers, or manual config. It's cross platform. Things automatically locate each other and automatically share files and printers, nothing you need to do to set things up to talk to each other. But the problem is that it's a work in progress. Apple's leading the pack, but others are joining along, including Philips and TiVo and others. Not yet been employed yet to build nets as much as they'd hope. But what's the scope? Not aimed at really large network structures. It's all aimed for within a subnet currently. Really aimed for an impromptu network. Like a LAN party. <insert boring ass over-simplified history of TCP/IP here> this can be simplified by saying the Mac used to run two protocols: TCP/IP and AppleTalk. This is bad, twice as much can break. So, Apple dropped AppleTalk. Why? Well, some apps had to handle two protocols, which sucked. So OS X moved us to Unix, which meant TCP/IP is the native tongue, AppleTalk is worthless. TCP/IP is built for massively large networks, but not without some attention to details. But we want things to be easy when it comes to little Impromptu networks. The Goals of ZeroConf. To enable Zerconf and casual networks Run over TCP/IP Run alongside configured Networks Must be secure Must not break existing applications The services of ZeroConf Address allocation - unique Host name allocation - unique Host name to IP address resolution Service discovery Multicast This is where I had to go...more later when I find the PowerPoint on their website. 5:10:22 PM    comment [] Gah. Crappy Session Sessions that Suck. I just got out of Disaster Relief. You'd think they'd have prepared us for actual disasters... No such luck. Disillusioned. In search of shiny crap on Expo Floor until 4:30 for Rendezvous Session. 2:58:48 PM    comment [] Pictures! Pictures from the party last night. 12:05:11 PM    comment [] Expo redux Been a good morning here. We said goodbye to Neil about 9:30 this morning, he headed off to the airport to try to catch an earlier flight back to Chicago. Got ourselves checked out of the Villa Florence, which overall was nice, if very very cramped. The room was pretty but there was maybe 10 sqft of real floor space beyond the beds, and yes that may include the closet. Worth it at $70/night on Priceline though, although I heard that several people got into the Marriott at that price, so I suppose we didn't get the Killer Diller deal. This afternoon I've got three more sessions and then we'll pack up and head back for Davis at 6pm this evening to arrive just before 9pm, having combined a bus trip to Emeryville and a train ride back to Davis from there. It's been a good Macworld. The keynote was incredible and the new iLife suite promises to do for creative integration what Office did for productivity. Apple's aligned themselves perpendicular to Microsoft at the moment, with some obvious overlay with Keynote. Microsoft obviously doesn't understand creativity, while Apple does. Apple doesn't have a huge grasp on office productivity, and while I won't say that they "understand" it, I will say that they are doing a better job. However, Apple understands the market better than their 5% market share suggests. I think this is where we see Apple succeed. Want to do stuff with those photos, those home movies, those goodies that are coming along with being a person with a camera and an opinion? Great. iLife says "You Can Do This!" *sigh* I think Steve's Distortion Field is still in play. Oh well. I can live that way. 11:39:19 AM    comment [] AppleScript Basics User Group Session Change of Plan. This morning I decided I might be better served by a presentation on the beginnings of AppleScript, so here I sit in Room 305 instead of the Secrets of MacOS X presentation. Weather in San Francisco this morning is more murky and foggy, making for a more shady feel to this city that sometimes is as rundown and homely as I feel. Wandering about last night, a little bit in the bag from the good beer on the C|Net Party Trolley, I remember why I liked San Francisco. Pizza at midnight next to the Hotel. Buildings tall enough to be imposing, but unique in their architecture enough to be fun. Okay. Time to take notes!! Safari is indeed Scriptable, and is part of this demo! Eeeeeexcelllent. AppleScript was implemented back in System 7 as an open architecture. You could build systems that were built on it, a la QuickKeys or Frontier. Commands go into "tell" blocks. For Example: tell application "Finder" empty trash end tell Safari being applescriptable means that you can create a daily surf run that includes a bunch of sites, their positioning and such. tell application "Safari" activate make new document at beginning documents set the URL of front document to"http://www.apple.com" end tell or something like this that grabs the properties of a webpage from within Safari...source code and all. tell application "Safari" activate set y to properties of document 1 end tell activate me y or you could grab all the text of just the article to send it via another scriptable app like Mail or Eudora and such. Like perhaps sending URLs to my weblog in certain fashions. Sounds good to me! What would be really kickass would be...scripting Rendezvous. Say, for example you've got your alarm clock. Script it to go off at a certain time as given by your controller. Say you want to wake up to music instead. Script your radio. This is the kind of integration I'm looking forward to. Moving on. The Program Dictionary. It brings up the whole "You can Script me!" list. From within the dictionary, you can look at the various classes, elements, properties and all that jazz for specific applications. So, I've got mailbox and message classes in Mail and those in turn have properties as well, etc. Recordable applications have the ability to write the code for you as you perform actions within the program. There aren't a ton of these. None of the Apple apps seem to be recordable, nor is the finder. Resources. AppleScript Website AppleScript Resources Join the AppleScript Users List. There's an Apple Script Language Guide in HTML out there (links of course to follow when I have real web access) Don't be shy about adapting other peoples' code if they've been posting it openly. It's all fair game. Apple Script Source Book Macscripter.net 11:32:22 AM    comment [] Some Parties Are Just Good Fun! What a night. Thanks so much to David Lawrence and his lovely producer Lily for the awesome party they threw tonight. We met over at Gordon Biersch on Harrison tonight over at the Embarcadero. They had waiting for us some serious appetizers and a great big surprise: Our Own Trolley. We got on the trolley, having met the guys from LockerGnome (Chris and Lori and Gretchen and Jake, as well as their friends Courtney and Mike) as well as a bunch of other people who were there, having heard about the party from the expo floor or from the website. We wandered about the city, getting free Gordon Biersch beer on the trolley (their Märzen is really high quality) and shooting a potato gun and heh, even mooning random strangers and getting boxer shorts for it. Look for my pictures to come tomorrow at some point. We're all exhausted, but we had great pizza on Union Square and wandered around in the gorgeous city that is San Francisco. What a wonderful place this is. What a great party that was, and I think I may come out of it with some great contacts (like the folks at Lockergnome) and some good friends. Thanks a lot everyone!! 12:36:07 AM    comment []

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