MacMania 3.5

Psst: it hasn't been formally announced yet, but go check out the site for what's being called MacMania 3.5: Baltic Blast. Is that the coolest itinerary ever? Copenhagen, Estonia, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Helsinki, Stockholm, Sweden, Berlin, and back to Copenhagen. Eleven days, ten nights, and plenty of good Mac and digital camera goodness. And here's something that's so new it's not even on their site yet: add two more of your favorite Mac writers to the list of speakers. How can you say no?

Dashboard widgets!

I believe that Erik Veland is violating his agreement with Apple to have posted these Tiger Gadgets/Widgets, but I don't think that I'm violating anything to point to them. If you're interested, grab 'em while they're still up.

DAs? Nope. HC? Yes!

There's a common meme running around the Mac Dev blog world in the last day or two (for example, Jim Roepcke's weblog and John Gruber's weblog) that Dashboard is just the 2005 equivalent of the old Desk Accessories that we all knew and loved decades ago. They couldn't be more wrong.

Dashboard ain't about little apps that Apple creates and ships with the OS. Dashboard ain't like DAs. Dashboard is like Hypercard, and that's something much more interesting altogether.

It's about all of us, programmer and non-programmer, scripter and non-scripter, being able to, for the first time, create little useful applications on our own Macs, using simple code and markup (i.e., HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; i.e., not AppleScript) that we probably already know something about, and then being able to share those widgets with anyone who has Tiger.

It's about programming coming to Mac users, down to a level that hasn't been seen since, well, Hypercard. It's about making programming as easy to do as, well, using a Mac. And that is cooooool.

Now are you starting to understand why I'm so damn excited? ;-)

Mostly Crap, All of the Time

I was going to make fun of the latest BS from Drudge (breathlessly rehashing yet another Hillary as Veep slimedump from some GOP crapmeister), but Wonkette beat me to it: Daydreaming Heats Up, Idle Rumors Flourish.

There was a WWDC Weblogger Dinner?

I got an off-blog query asking if I was actually miffed about not being invited to the O'Reilly party on Sunday, and the answer was no, not really—it was more just joking around. But now there was a WWDC weblogger dinner that I also wasn't invited to! Harrumph!

If I hear tomorrow that there was a party tonight just for JavaScripting Mac women, then, watch out, baby.

Dave, you're wrong

Dave said today:

I like William Grosso and point to him often, at least in part because he might be the only O'Reilly author who reads my site

He's definitely not the only O'Reilly author who reads Dave's site. But if an O'Reilly author who blogs reads Dave's site, and Dave doesn't read their site, does it make any sound?

Naderwatch #7

NaderWatch #7, in a continuing series...

From the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, a new Florida poll:

Kerry 43%
Bush 43%
Nader 5%

Kerry 46%
Bush 44%

Dashboard!

Damn, I wish I was at WWDC, if only to be asking questions and hearing more about Dashboard. It's the first time, to the best of my knowledge, that Apple has ever shipped anything that let you leverage the JavaScript you already know to do way cool things on your Mac. Yummy.

Translating iPod

This is a fun (and possibly useful) idea: an audio phrasebook for your iPod. Talking Panda has common phrases for Spanish, French, and Japanese, at only $10 per language. Check it out. Via Paul Music.

pre-WWDC thought

James Duncan Davidson, in a bit titled Two Nights Before WWDC 2004 writes about (among a bunch of other things) a party he's going to:

Sunday night: The O'Reilly event. If you have an invite, you know what I'm talking about. If not, sorry.

Y'know, I spent way too much of high school fretting about the parties I wasn't getting invited to. Twenty-five years later, nothing's changed.

Anybody but Bush

These are things I know/believe to be true:

• Bush has gotta go. He's doing harm to my country, and I want him out as of next January.
• The Green Party got their act together and nominated someone for president who's running a "Safe States" candidacy.
• California is, by all the polls I've seen, an extremely safely Blue state.
• I've never voted for a winning presidential candidate in my life. Hell, even when I voted for someone who won a plurality of the vote, he still didn't make it into the White House.
• Given the previous point, I've had to wonder from time to time if I'm not a curse, and that I should avoid voting for the guy I really want to win.
• I'm a big fan of 3^rd parties in general. I think that we need more options, not fewer, and neither of the two major parties (in either theory or practice) represent my personal politics.

So, given all that, I may well be voting for David Cobb for President this November. Anyone wanna try to talk me out of it?