I’ve finally cleaned up the last of my Radio UserLand life. I’ve unsubscribed from all of the websites for their products and the owner’s weblogs. Jake Savin’s long since moved on to Microsoft and Lawrence Lee is the only one steering the ship at this point. I’ve unsubscribed from his weblog because it’s only a shadow of it’s former self.

I’ve stopped using the software and it feels very good. NetNewsWire is good for news aggregating and most of all, it runs well on almost any Mac. This aging G3 iBook will load and use it without complaint. The switch to WordPress was a breeze, but I’m still missing some content from the old days I’d like to have.

The best part about the whole thing has been the utter lack of issues. I write more often because my tools don’t get in the way. For example, in MarsEdit, I have a custom layout for attributed posts set in my prefs. In NetNewsWire, when I selected some of the body text of a post I wanted to quote, NNW only sent the selected part to MarsEdit–exactly what I would have hoped. It’s a silent feature, one that you won’t hear much about, but it shows that the programmer was a craftsman.

Radio UserLand has always been slapdash–hurry up and write it and move on. Now that I’m learning more about software programming, it’s errors are more obvious and more disappointing.

It served me well for years, but I’m glad I finally killed my copy of Radio.

Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger: “And why Six Apart’s Vox product is doomed to fail (Mena, why did you give a product pitch when asked on stage ‘what do you think the future is going to look like?’ That got you scorned by women at dinner afterward that I, and my wife, talked to)”

jwz:

Pita bread is not a PITA–it’s actually quite easy. I’m using a Cook’s Illustrated recipe that involves 2 parts white and 1 part wheat flour, with honey, salt, yeast and water as the binding ingredients. So far it’s turned out well and I’m waiting for the last rise to go before forming and cooking.

Since I don’t want to turn on our main oven and heat the whole house, I’m doing the baking on the Weber Q200 I bought about a month ago. It heats up to over 500 degrees and it will make two at a time a snap.

I’m not a professional software programmer. I don’t have years of Apple or Macintosh programming experience. That said, I’d like to offer some predictions of things we’ll see at Apple’s upcoming Worldwide Developer Conference. I base the predictions on hours of reading writeups of the Apple/NeXT merger and my recent foray into learning Objective-C:

1. Xcode 2.4/3.0 with the ability to compile for Windows.
2. Dashboard widget development environment.
3. MacPro desktop announcement.
4. Mail.app gains a tabbed interface.

The first one on the list is easy since NeXT had a library of code for Windows years ago. You can bet hard cash that if they’ve been running MacOS X on bastardized Intel motherboards for 5 years, they’ve got Cocoa libraries for Windows. Add the defacto endorsement of Parallels Workstation you have a developer’s wet dream: Mac and Windows apps using roughly the same code base all developed and tested on a single piece of hardware.

The second one on the list is easy to see: the WebKit open source project has been compiling a javascript debugger for about a month and distributing it in nightly builds. The only thing left is a unified app with that code and a good user interface.

Third is obvious too–Intel announced new processors recently and that’s similar to what happened when the iMac with Core Duo was announced.

Fourth is more of a stretch because you have to read the tea leaves of the descriptions of WebKit code commits. When the developers upload new code, they generally put a note of some kind in the code management system that will help them remember why they did it. I’m having trouble finding the right one or two that said this, but the gist was fixes concerned tabs opened in Mail.

Comments?

From the article in the Springfield Business Journal:

“Battlefield Mall’s lifestyle center now under construction will include a Banana Republic store, a spokesperson from the clothing retailer confirmed today.”

Tammy rats us out…

“Confession time here. Last night I had the most nutritionally void dinner on the planet. I had a pint of craft beer, 4 potato skins and a 3 Musketeers bar. Yes, that was my dinner. What am I, in college? I don’t think I ate that badly when I was in school. Guess sometimes, you just have to eat crap and enjoy it – which I did!”

I had two beers, the same potato skins and a Butterfinger Crisp bar. Tomorrow night–pizza!

I’ve been reading the code commits for the WebKit project and they hint at two things: tabs in Mail.app and Safari and Mail.app will merge.

You heard it here first, folks.

Update: I’m trying to find the notes for the code commits that put this together.

Since the last one was for Tammy, here’s one for [zarah](http://beautyschooldropout.net)…

MAKE Magazine Blog: “LEDs are illuminating everything these days including knitting needles and crochet hooks.”

For [Tammy’s](http://tammykirks.com) benefit…

MAKE Magazine Blog: “Although there’s no geek girl this season on Project Runway 3, Katherine Gerdes, a graduate of RISDI (just like Diana Eng), has put up a tutorial on her blog on how to draw a basic croquis and create a portfolio of poses you like.”