Comments on: C4 Abridged

By: Adam Lindsay

Adam Lindsay — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 10:22:20 +0000

@blake (re: “ask a doctor”): That’s interesting–I spent a year’s project essentially doing that with researchers in the arts and humanities (and I largely spoke to mac-centric, computer friendly academics). Their wishes fell into two camps: software that already existed (e.g., “try handbrake”), or (much less often)software that was so individual to their needs that it just wasn’t goping to happen.

By: Andy Satori

Andy Satori — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 02:08:06 +0000

Ok, because it's been percolating, and I'm not going to be able to do anything about it, I've written up a rough draft of what I'm talking about. On my Blog

By: Andy Satori

Andy Satori — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:50:03 +0000

LOL, maybe one of these days I’ll have an app I can enter into one of these things, but to be honest, I don’t expect it. I’m too busy solving business problems to be able to write a ‘fluff’ code.

I mean seriously. Let’s take an example of a desktop app that could sell well. Look at Altova’s XMLSpy on Windows. It’s the best there is, and it sucks (and I think I’m being generous). If one of the Cocoa UI wizards were to apply their skills to a good, robust XML/XSL editor with debugger and an innovative & usable UI, they could easily sell the thing for $199+. I know I’d pony up. Just because I *can* edit XML in BBEdit or SubEthaEdit doesn’t mean that I should.

Come to think of it, there’s another example of an app that has an obscenely cool feature that could readily be applied to solve many business solutions, SubEthaEdit’s sharing / multiple users editing the same content, live, instead of passing the doc’s back and forth. Quite interesting in say a print shop, or a marketing shop collaborating on ad copy.

That last one even works in the aforementioned real-estate market, where you might have your custom Real Estate application, where you need several people collab prepping the MLS listing, that also generates the Web Page and interactive Virtual Tour leveraging iMovie, iPhoto and Pages to generate the output content and then do automated post of the FMLS listing.

By: Conor

Conor — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 22:06:14 +0000

I never did understand why cookbook won; we were going to develop a similar application ourselves a year ago, having a collection app oriented framework, but the market is full of them and MacGourmet does a good job. Now he can add a nice full screen mode and the voice command and reading for 2.5. I was hoping Hijack would win; that I would have bought. :(

By: Blake Chaffin

Blake Chaffin — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 19:53:01 +0000

Funny that you mentioned that- MyDreamApp was the topic of some discussion at C4, but I think it was all off-camera :(

By: Tyler

Tyler — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 16:53:33 +0000

Interesting Discussion here in the comments. Think about this:

Aaron Hillegass says: “Thousands of real problems need to be solved!”

The three winners of MyDreamApp.com are:
1. Atmosphere – A dynamic desktop picture thingy.
2. Portal – A sync app.
3. Cookbook – A cookbook application. In cocoa. With an itunes-store-like recipe online-database. A fucking cookbook program!

Who will use this? Who will shell out real money for this? What a waste of time, effort and talent… *sigh*

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 23:09:10 +0000

Threads. I’ve been working in a threaded environment, and I did not realize until I read this article that my solution to thread concurrency has been to use actors. It felt right, and I think that it is the right model. I wish that I could have been there at C4. One of this days someone will spring for me to go to a coding conference…

By: Blake Chaffin

Blake Chaffin — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 20:37:57 +0000

Daniel the Blogstarter strikes again heh.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 19:34:20 +0000

Philippe: Whoah! Hold on a minute while I update my database capacity :)

Seriously, remember when I said you should start a blog? It’s so you can post things like this on it, and then point back to it!

By: Philippe Casgrain

Philippe Casgrain — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 19:20:30 +0000

About Subversion…

That was the only talk where I took a transcript (I rely on you and the DVDs for the other ones). So here’s my transcript, straight from VoodooPad…

Near future
Merge tracking
Stop manually tracking merges and branchpoints
Cherry-picking made easy (1.5 or 1.6)
Think ‘p4 integrate’

perforce does not scale, locks the tables when doing big integrates
blocking on read

Merge info tracked in a revision property

Distant future: NDA (Not Definitely-Agreed upon)
don’t hold your breath
Distributed features
cool but useful? Important?

central watering hole for a community
offline commits are the most useful aspect
speed is important as well

Flexibility: support central and distributed behaviors
A much better working copy

.svn in bundles
faster: no need to parse the entire directory

may not be necessary if centralized store
currently, can move a folder to another place and still do version control

stop requiring full urls in working copies
replace svn:externals
server broadcasts behaviors to clients (.subversion directory)

Going against subversion’s nature
Subversion is a time machine, but it can only go forward

we’d like to see ‘svn obliterate’

what does this mean?
[cvs2svn: apples from apple sauce]
obliterate without breaking working copies or mirrors (svn 1.4)

New FS backend
extra from fdb and fsfs (Google has a new one)

Indexing and searching

Be truly “timesafe”

Support concurrent writes of the same transaction: should speed up commits

ACLs?

Native symlinks: non-Win32 supported, but not Win32

Typed properties

Signed changesets

API stuff

Have a signe, consistent, elegant, smple OO interface
No tortoise for Mac!!!

And something for the subversion hackers..

Rewriting in C++
Better build system
Better testing framework

Request 707: opaque collections: versioned bundled directories. Great feature, but not in there

WebDAV: allows auto-versioning, but is slow (esp. in Finder)