As an individual, I have ambitions to make the United States a proud country whose public policy reflects the Americans I know. An overwhelmingly kind and non-violent type of American, who wants to join hands with the rest of the world, instead of raising hands against them.

So many of us, from all political parties, feel this way. We go on about our daily lives, but we are pained by the ways in which our government positions itself as an adversary to the rest of the world. Here’s the deal, world: WE LOVE YOU. We can’t stand what’s going on with our public policy, and we can’t wait for it to change.

Many people like to blame “conservatives” for this negative world impression, but the truth is that many of the so-called conservatives are just as ambitious as I am about building a world-wide family. We’re all in this together, to steal a line from “Brazil.” Let’s not think about whether a conservative or a liberal will fix our problems, let’s think about which person represents the hopeful ambitions of our country.

I personally think that Barack Obama represents our best hope for jumpstarting a change in our relationship with the world. I believe Hillary Clinton is a good person, whose intellect and ambitions are in the best interests of America. But I don’t think she can effect the type of change I need and expect. At this point in our country’s incredibly short yet powerful history, I believe we need to elect a President whose leadership and vision give us a head start in the eyes of the world. A President who causes the world to sit up and acknowledge: “America cares about us.”

I’m ready for the United States of America to take a new leader. A leader who will represent everything hopeful about our unique, positive attitude toward the world. If you’re American, and you’ve got something hopeful to say to the world, I strongly encourage you to consider voting for Barack Obama. If you’re not American, and you’ve got some faith left in us, I strongly encourage you to sit tight and see how much better we can be, when we try.

This run would not have been possible without MarsEdit, the application that makes writing for the web palatable to Mac users. Little did I know a year ago that the application I love so much would be my product a year later. To paraphrase the Remington shaver guy, “I liked it so much, I bought the source code!”

The past year has also been exciting outside of my programmer life. I got married! We’re almost 2 months into our fabulous marriage, now.

In January I responded to what seemed to be a bunk software acquisition deal by challenging developers to sell me their product. I had an amazing response when over 30 people made me separate offers. The application I ended up buying is now marketed as Black Ink, and is the premier desktop crossword-solving application. (Note: MarsEdit didn’t happen until a bit later, and was unrelated to that original challenge.)

Late last year I was engrossed by the sad story of James Kim, who died in the Oregon wilderness after the rest of his family was rescued. His memory is a recurring reminder to value family and friends while we have the pleasure of their company.

The sad news was offset somewhat by the uplifting charitable software sales I took part in. Mike Zornek’s Child’s Play Day helped raise over $10,000 for a charity that helps kids in hospitals have a bit of fun. Jason Harris followed-up with a Holiday Cocoa Duel, which raised over $2300 for a variety of charities, chosen by the participants.

October marked the first iteration of C4, where I met dozens of amazing developers for the first time. I also had the pleasure of meeting John Gruber, whose HIG Is Dead talk had such an immediate impression on me, that I went straight home from the conference and redesigned FlexTime.

That redesign of FlexTime came only a few short months after it was first released. An idea that started brewing while I was developing complex AppleScripts to cue my yoga practice, I worked on it off-and-on for a couple years before finally releasing it in August, 2006. The application was met with a mixture of applause and confusion, which I think is a fairly good omen for an unusual new application. I’m looking forward to getting a chance to refocus my efforts on expanding its functionality over the next year.

Incidentally, this marks the end of my first “real year” of trying to be an indie software developer. That is, producing and selling software directly to the public. I had been selling shareware for several years, but never focusing so intently on it. Shortly before the release of FlexTime I gave myself permission to cut back on consulting and pursue a full-time career in developing my own products. I’ve taken an unusual path to get here, but I’m glad I took the chances I did. I wrote quite a bit about this last year in The Road Less Traveled, written in concert with Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba.

This summary of the past year’s posts is only the tip of the iceberg. If you like what you read here on the blog, but are a fairly new subscriber, you might find some interesting stuff digging through the archives.

As always, thanks for reading! This would be extremely boring and ungratifying if I were writing these words to myself, only to be pondered in the lonely solitude of my office. Your comments and feedback (often more inspired than my own writing) make all the difference.

Chrissa and I were married yesterday in Lincoln, MA. Everything went really well, and the weather even turned out perfectly. Really couldn’t have asked for a better day.

It was great to turn the computer back on today and find not only a number of thoughtful emails, but scattered – well – wishing from some of my Mac developer colleagues. Thanks, guys! We were both touched by these gestures.

Probably won’t be posting much if at all over the next couple weeks. It’s been a very happy May, and now it’s going to be a very relaxing May.

But being from the bay area, I found myself back in San Francisco for a few days and needing accommodation. Right next to the BART, clean rooms, courteous staff, what more could I ask for?

Not being reamed left and right with nickel-and-dime bullshit.

Honor-bar fridge: No personal use.
Each local telephone call: $1.
One two minute domestic long-distance call: $9. (!!!)
Wall-tethered internet access: $15/day.
Reminding oneself to finally remember to call ahead and check on this bullshit: slight comfort, at best.

I will not rent rooms from nickel-and-diming bastard hotels.
I will not rent rooms from nickel-and-diming bastard hotels.
I will not rent rooms from nickel-and-diming bastard hotels.

Oh yeah, The Westin. They ripped me off in Chicago, too. Hopefully I’ll be more careful next time.

“I drank from a faucet, and I kept my receipt
For when they weigh me on the way out, here nothing is free.”

Death Cab For Cutie – Why You’d Want To Live Here

The best (i.e. worst) part about the Argent was the sign on the honor-bar fridge. They meant to say “We can’t let you use this refrigerator for personal items, because we don’t make any money off of that.” Instead, they insulted my intelligence (and all 666 other guests – no joke), with the statement: Please do not place your personal items in the Refreshment Center, as they may spoil. They might as well shut off access to the bath and bed, as my skin might melt off in a freak chemical accident, too.

No way to to treat a customer. We pay the big sum of money up front, so we don’t have to pay the bullshit money as we go.

The shortest path is only useful if it’s both possible and expeditious to follow that route. On paper the shortest path always takes the same amount of work. We drag the stylus against the straight edge. Nothing hinders our progress in two dimensions, except for the possible breakage of pencil lead.

In real life, everything gets in the way. So the shortest path is only useful to the extent that it provides a line of sight. Something we can aim for, even as we twist and turn in ridiculously off-course directions to reach the destination.

Something I’ve been meaning to do for a number of years is to learn how to sail. This year, late in the summer, I finally got started with that endeavor. I joined Boston’s Community Boating, Inc., where kids can learn to sail for a mere US$1, and adults can buy a year’s membership for less than US$200. Learning to sail must be a lifelong process, and I’m just a newbie. But even after a week on the water, I was impressed by one of the fundamental facts of sailing. You can sail in almost any direction except for straight into the wind. I find it amazing that you can actually harness the power of the wind blowing straight at you, and turn it into energy that propels your boat sideways, or even sort of towards it!. The bad news, of course, is you can’t always sail straight towards your destination. If you want to travel towards the wind, you’re out of luck:

When you’re sitting out in the middle of the Charles River collecting sailing experience and a sunburn, this is a pretty profound lesson. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line, when a straight line is impossible!

Fortunately for sailors, there’s an easy workaround. It only takes a little bit longer than a straight line, and it has the major advantage of being possible. You simply achieve your destiny by traveling away from it until it is achievable by a straight line:

The cool lesson from this fact of sailing life is that by merely changing your position in any direction you may alter the viability of your goal from the impossible to the possible. If this little observation were only true in sailing, it would hardly be worth mentioning in my blog. But some version of this “wide angle shortcut” applies to almost every obstacle you’re liable to encounter in life. In fact, if you think about the ways we reach our various destinations, it’s almost never by straight line. We’re accustomed to twisting and turning, yet when we step back and aim for a goal, we’re foolishly obsessed with striving for the shortest path!

Let’s say you’re walking through the woods and you come upon a steep incline. The best thing to do might be to climb straight up, but in all likelihood you’d be better off going around. Going up and over might even be impossible. This concept becomes truer and truer the more limitations there are on your mobility. Take railroads, for instance. Railroad track must be set on fairly level ground. Trains can’t just jump over a mountain. So when the early railroad pioneers sought to lay track across the American continent, they had to compromise. Big time. In fact, choosing to take the longer path was an act of brilliance. A good example of this is the Rocky Mountaineer Railroad, which connects Calgary and Vancouver. Let’s see. How can I represent this without violating some copyright. I guess I’ll do a crude representation:

The red line represents the shortest path, but the green line represents the shortest possible path! The path the railroad had to actually take to stand a chance of reaching its destination. You’ve got to contend with mountains, my friend. So the next time you face a formidable problem, when something stands in your way and pushes against you with all its might, consider taking a different route. An oblique route. It’s how the greatest thinkers in history have reached their destinations, so it’s probably good enough for you, too.

Eight minutes sucking glass with the gas-station vacuum … $1

Identical TomTom Go 300 on eBay … $305

Shipping & Handling … $15

Getting your life back to normal after some eff-wad messed it up … priceless!

Paying for it with PayPal funny-money instead of VISA … extra-priceless!

The resumption of normalcy was not nearly as expensive or time-consuming as I feared it might be. Ten days from damaged to repaired. I was also glad to see that my replacement came with a box and accessories that were not in my car at the time. So at least I know I’m not buying back my stolen unit! (Though that would have been fun in its own way).

I really couldn’t have predicted just how great the collection of attendees was. I had a great time meeting as many of them as I could. Given the final attendance of 98 people, I think I probably managed to meet 80% of them over the course of the event. Not bad! I wish I could have met everybody but I guess that leaves some interesting people to talk to next time. I really appreciated that a few people took advantage of the photo I posted and came up to introduce themselves. I was impressed by the mix of students, indie developers, and employees of large and influential corporations. Apple employees numbered at least 7 or 8, and two guys from Microsoft attended and have been blogging about the experience. I was expecting one person from Apple who didn’t end up making it, though his lonely name tag and T-Shirt sat at the bottom of an otherwise empty box. Hopefully I’ll meet him next time!

So how can I parlay my fun and exciting exciting weekend into a blog entry worth spending your precious time to read? I figure you sad suckers who couldn’t find the time, money, or initiative to get to C4 this year are feeling pretty down right about now. At the very least you deserve an editorial summary of the speakers’ main points. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can provide that. I didn’t take notes. Well, I took a few, very few, but then misplaced the sheet of paper. So instead of accurately conveying the actual points of speakers I heard, I’ll present a verbatim transcript of my memory. Everything that made it from the stage, through the air, was processed by my lethargic brain, drunk on Jamba Juice, and somehow got recorded to memory. Except for comments. And intermissions. And especially bathroom breaks.

Live from Chicago (recorded earlier), it’s C4 as heard by Daniel Jalkut, October 21-22.

Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch (web link): Hello and welcome to C4! C4 stands for “Code, Culture, Community, Conspiracy.” The first three being key components that make developing for the Mac a unique experience, and the conspiracy, well… it sounds cool. Hybrid theory? Forget about it! Hey, I can reimplement BombApp.app in zero lines of Cocoa code, because this QuickTime movie crashes everything I try it on! So about this conference: developers need a place to meet up and exchange ideas apart from WWDC, and without corporate sponsorship. Let’s see how this goes, and let me know if you have any feedback!

John Gruber (web link): The HIG is dead. Not dead like meaningless, but dead like hopelessly out of date. It can’t possibly keep up with Apple’s implicit standards because Apple has abandoned some fundamental traditions of the HIG, such as uniformity in appearance and behavior across all applications. The web is proof that they’re at least partly justified. People aren’t stupid, they know a button when they see a button, regardless of how it’s drawn. Would I prefer a consistent UI personally? You bet! Any chance of that happening again? No way. The genie is out of the bottle and developers have two choices: constantly monitor the state of the “implicit UI guidelines” and synthesize your own standardized interpretation, or else go out completely on your own and invent something unique yet beautiful. The new HIG guideline is simply: does this look good?

Brent Simmons (web link, presentation link): More and more desktop applications on the Mac are “web-enabled.” These products run from the obvious features of web browsers to more subtle nuances like iCal’s shared calendars or Seasonality’s presentation of web-based weather information. I know a lot about web-enabled applications, because I wrote two biggies: MarsEdit and NetNewsWire. WebKit is freakin’ awesome even if it does crash every once in a while. You should use it, and here are some practical code samples for how you might get started. WebServicesCore is the super-suck. Don’t use it. Did I mention WebKit is cool? NSURLDownload is also great for almost any kind of simple download you can imagine, with some caveats. SyncServices is cool if you can use it, but useless for cross-platform syncing. If I would have known syncing would be such a major feature in NetNewsWire, I probably never would have started the project. Here are lots of great tips on syncing.

Aaron Hillegass (web link): Between 1973 and 1983, the world saw an awesome number of technological advances in computing. We went from personal computers being non-existant through the development of the Internet, relational database systems, and the Mac in just 10 years. Since then, we’ve been in a slump because people are not solving real problems anymore. Delicious Library is a great example of a fake problem. People have bookshelves, they don’t need a virtual one! Wil, you’re an amazingly talented developer, but your talent was wasted on this product. OmniGraffle was great! Too many Mac developers are obsessing over the fake problems of the consumer software market, and the obvious problems of the multimedia and business markets. These markets are already dominated by Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft. Think outside the box! Thousands of real problems need to be solved, and rich people are willing to pay you lots of money to solve them. Talk to people with money and figure out the problems they need solved, then do it.

Gus Mueller (web link, presentation link): Adding an embedded script interpreter to your application is cool because it makes it easy for users to add their own crazy features to your app. Even if you end up writing the script for them, you don’t have to muddy your app’s feature-base with their nutty idea. There are lots of languages you might use, but I chose Lua because it’s super-fast and easy to embed. One major advantage to using a script language in development is you eliminate the compile and link delay. I love that! Lua is used for application development by several . notable . developers. Here are some examples of how easy it is to embed Lua in your app. In fact, let’s add a simple Lua plugin facility to TextEdit that allows arbitrary text processing. Neat huh? [presentation link forthcoming?] The main downside to using Lua is practically nobody knows how to write it, but I just post lots of sample scripts to help my users figure it out.

Steve Dekorte (web link, PDF presentation link): The way most people go about thinking about multiprocessing is wrong. The heavy-duty “system threads” that most people use to distribute computing tasks are extremely expensive, and therefore only suitable for scales of hundreds of tasks. By adopting the actor model of concurrency, objects maintain a queue of requests and only operate on themselves. This eliminates the locking mechanisms required with preemptive system threads, and requires much less state management memory. The actor model of concurrency scales comfortable to the scale of tens of thousands of concurrent tasks. Anyway, Io is my language for easily adopting the actor model. The increasing number of cores in hardware has major implications for computer design going forward, because an increasing number of cores will be competing for access to the same memory across the same bus. And, now listen very carefully Daniel Jalkut. Yes, that’s right. I’m talking to you. Wasn’t that Jamba Juice tasty? Now I know you’re not completely getting this, even though you’re interested as hell, so just look at the pretty graphics. Cores blah blah acting technical stuff like hardware actor objects blah and the world is saved from almost certain doom. Any questions?

Brian Fitzpatrick (web link): First of all, I work for Google, and what I’m about to say is all under NDA. That is, not definitely agreed-upon. I’m impressed and awed to see that so many of you have heard of Subversion, let alone are using it. Subversion’s growth over the past few years has been insane, and we’re totally psyched. Not in a taking over the world way, but in a providing the best source control system money can’t buy way. Now that we’re more or less at feature-parity with CVS, we’re looking to to the future for ways we can make it even more compelling to current users and users of other source control systems. One of the improvements we’re looking at is the possible removal of “.svn” directories for working directory management. These are terrible for performance and the main reason we used them was to enable “detachable subtrees.” Not worth it. We also know about some of the ways Subversion sucks for Macs in particular. Trust me, I’m a Mac guy. The bundled document problem is on our radar and we totally get it. Daniel Jalkut! Wake up … it’s not time for Gino’s East yet. Stop daydreaming, ya nerd! See? You can’t even remember the last improvement I mentioned, even though you were totally excited about it only two minutes ago. Man, this is sad. Sad, sad, sad. How am I gonna wake this guy up? Did I mention that we’re looking into off-line code commits? Ah, that did the trick.

Panel Discussion (Moderated by Drunkenbatman, including speakers above minus Gruber plus Paul Kafasis). Apple could do lots of things to make life easier for developers. We know they’ll never do them but it’s fun to dream. Lots of us would like to have better access to existing bug reports – it would help save us a lot of time. Oh no you didn’t. You did not just bring up DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. Cocoa vs. Carbon. Cocoa vs. Carbon. Cocoa vs. Carbon. AppleScript Sucks. AppleScript Sucks. AppleScript Sucks. <Applause>. AppleScript Rules. <Very light applause>. DRM sucks. No, your DRM sucks. DRM. DRM. DRM. DRM. Actually something like an iTunes Software Store would be pretty cool. DRM. DRM. DRM. Can we change the subject? Yes, it’s time for dinner.

Once again, major kudos to Rentzsch for putting this event on, and to all the speakers who made it such a memorable (for some definition of the word) occasion.

As inspiring and as much fun as the scheduled speakers were, the unstructured social time both between sessions and in the evenings were just as much fun, and probably just as educational. I can’t express how grateful I am to all of you who showed up and helped to make this a weekend worth raving about for weeks to come.

It occurred to me that most people at the conference won’t know me when they see me. I don’t make a habit of pushing my own photos. No Flickr feed to speak of, etc. So here’s my rare act of self-publicity. Maybe this picture will encourage you to come up and introduce yourself.

The photo is sort of a rough approximation of what I look like right this moment. It’s what my MacBook Pro thinks I look like, at least. I actually have green eyes, not blue. And I’m not quite as pale as that. But it does hide my blemishes well!

See you in Chicago!

It’s easy to get caught up in this mentality. Of course! If people see my product there is a 10-40% chance that they’ll download it. If they download it, there is a 1-4% chance that they’ll buy it. This all adds up to … between 1 and 16 sales per 1000 visitors. Obviously, the only thing to do is increase visitors.

But that’s only looking at one side of the equation. There seems to be an obsession on increasing the quantity of visitors instead of improving the quality. I’m guilty of it, too. Maybe it’s because we have better tools at our disposal for measuring sheer numbers.

Of course I get excited when a mention on some popular blog or in a news publication sends a bunch of visitors my way. They show up on Mint, and it makes me feel popular. So I pat myself on the back and keep working. I have also enjoyed watching my Technorati rank slowly increase. It’s something. A metric that tells me I’m doing something useful and should continue. But when hundreds of 5-second readers surge in from Digg or some other general-tech news source, is it really doing anything for my blog or my business? At least the Technorati ranking has the secondary effect of improving my appearance in niche categories. So getting a lot of traffic from whatever source can help inflate my numbers and increase the odds that somebody actually looking for what I’m writing about will see it and be encouraged to come visit. But what does Digg do for me?

I suppose it’s easy to argue that more eyeballs is always a good thing. After all, some goofball who couldn’t care less about Macs or software development might nonetheless recognize my name when sitting in a meeting where a committee is trying to decide whether to give me thousands of dollars. What? It could happen!

But in general, the dialogue of my blog and the sales of my software are directly related to the quality of my visitors. So it’s a lot better if Merlin Mann notices and points to my app than if it gets mentioned in some Windows-user forum as something they’d “like to see” on the PC. What am I going to say to bunch of PC users? I’d rather open a coffee-shop or write music than develop for your platform? Lo siento. No hablo PC, Señor.

Digg is like an international tech freeway. Lots of people are traveling on it, passing through thousands of sites per day. Maybe they snap a few pictures as they speed by at 85 MPH, but they rarely stop to truly take in the surroundings.

There’s a reason the freeways always pass through poor sections of town. Nobody really wants to be on or near them. They’re a means to an end. We use them when we need a change of scenery – whether we’re wandering or speeding through the night towards a known destination. In any case, we’re not in the mood to buy anything meaningful on the freeway. Nobody is. We might pay for a Coke from the rest area snack machine, or be seduced by a Taco Bell billboard, where we’ll stop for 15 minutes to part with at most $5 of our hard-earned cash. The freeway is a trashy marketplace.

When a freeway plan intrudes on a thriving city marketplace, the shopkeepers get furious. They know the freeway spells the death of their neighborhood, and therefore the death of their business. But on the Internet most of are convinced that a freeway running through our neighborhood is a good thing, and I think we’re wrong about that. Dead wrong.

And yes, I see the irony of this post having just below it a “Digg This” icon. What can I say? I still like to be dugg. But it feeds my ego much more than my blog or business.

I just finished reading The Monk and the Riddle, on the recommendation of Paul from Rogue Amoeba. It’s a sort of business philosophy book by Randy Komisar (with writing help from Kent Lineback).

It was a surprisingly fast read. Enjoyable and inspirational. But let me summarize it in one sentence:

The two most recurring themes in the book are roughly “the journey is the reward,” and “how can you change your current work so you’d be willing to do it for the rest of your life?” He describes a malady that many of us are probably familiar with: the “deferred life plan.” This is the rationalization of present unhappiness as a mere means to an end. We’ll work for 40 years at a job we hate just so we can pursue our passion later in life.

Great food for thought, and especially pertinent in the wake of my recent article about the indie life. I tried to examine my own circumstances using these criteria, and it boils down to four basic desires. I want a job where I build cool apps, blog, exercise, and make music. Whenever inspiration strikes me. A tall order, I know. I’m not quite there, but am hopefully moving in the right direction.

What do you want to do for the rest of your life? Are you suffering under the deferred life plan?