Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Power Users and Developers — and Mac Music Heads — should come to the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference in Santa Clara, CA on October 25th to 28th.

I'll be there again this year. I'm not talking technical this year (since I've been doing more Java than Cocoa for the last few months); instead, I'm on a panel called How to Run Your Own Software Business along with four notable developers. We will be exploring a broad range of topics in this expanded, ninety-minute session. What I contribute will be based upon my personal experiences building Watson and starting Karelia, dealing with suitors for an acquisition, and re-building a company and new product afterwards. No promises, but I might have some more hints about the new product that Terrence Talbot and I are working on, depending on our progress between now and then.

It looks like the conference will be really cool this year. Stewart Copeland will be there. Maybe I'll get to meet him, or at least be in the same room with him. Lots of "Cocoa Craftsmen" will be there. There will be some previews of Tiger. Lots of stuff about Music. What more could you ask for?

Of note is the hefty discount that they have made for Apple Developer Connection members (Hey, isn't it free to become an ADC member at the "online" level?) and employees of Apple Computer. Derrick Story has the scoop.

If you will be at the conference, please stop me and say "hi"!

I took a quick trip from California to Nevada yesterday to help identify and persuade potential voters who want to take their country back. What a blast! Four of us drove up from the San Francisco Bay Area — from a state whose electoral votes are all but a given — to Nevada, a state with only five electoral votes that could go either way. So Nevada is turning into quite the political battleground — in fact, it's apparently so close that it's now tied for the #1 contested state in the country. It could be 2004's Florida, so to speak. So the state is filling up with volunteers from both sides (unfortunately) of the political divide.

If any of you readers of this weblog are in California and you want to actually make a difference in the election — and to paraphrase Moby, not to wake up on November 3 and regret that you didn't do enough — this is something you can do that will have significant impact. Nevada needs ground troups. If you want to know how to get involved, contact me and I'll be glad to help you get set up. (They especially need help the weekend before Election Day; there's also a couple of big events in Reno next weekend and on October 13th.)

If you're outside the area but you still want to help, money talks of course.

(And of course, if there are readers of this weblog that like enjoy what our current President has done for our country and are offended by this post, feel free to move along to the next article.)

Yesterday I posted about the fate of Watson. I thank all of the readers of this weblog (There appear to be more than the three that I previously estimated!) who posted or sent comments.

Now that Watson's life span is coming to an end, I thought I'd mention a little bit about what is going on at Karelia. Things were pretty quiet around here while I was working with Sun for a few months on the Java port of Watson, aside from the occasional support update to Watson. But lately, I'm working on a new program.

This time, however, I'm working a little differently. I've partnered up with Terrence Talbot, a talented developer whose whose work you've seen in Watson. He wrote the Epicurious tool originally as a third-party contributor (along with the now-defunct NewsBlaster). Later he wrote the Amazon.com and the Weather tools for Watson, and add some other functionality to the application as well. Anyhow, this time we are building an application together.

Of course, I can't tell you what the new application is. It's too early in the game. What I can tell you is that it will (a) be very cool, and (b) be very useful to a wide number of people (I think), and (c) have lots of opportunities for plug-ins. And because of "once bitten, twice shy", the plans are to build this program initially for the Mac, but then build a Windows version shortly afterwards. If this program gets "sherlocked", we need a backup plan.

One thing that is very important for me is to try to come up with a way to thank Karelia's loyal Watson users. So we are brainstorming ways (logistical and technical) for holders of Watson licenses to get a sweet deal on this new application, when it comes out down the road. More on that later.

There's been some discussion on the Watson Users' email discussion group about the future of Watson and where Sun is going. I am sad to say that it looks like Sun doesn't seem to be focussing on getting the port of Watson released any time soon.

Of course, this wasn't the plan. The intention when Sun acquired the Watson technology was to have a port released by this time. But as all of us are familiar with how public companies behave when pressure is put upon them by Wall Street for profitability; it seems that the release of the Watson port is not on Sun's critical path right now.

I'm saddened by this for many reasons. First of all, I hate to see the end of Watson's support period come in a very short while. The agreement with Karelia specified that all support of Watson cease. Most other kinds of applications would continue to work indefinitely even after being end-of-lifed, but due to the ever-changing nature of the Web, some of Watson's functionality will begin to deteriorate in the near future, and I won't be able to help due to the nature of our agreement.

Here's another reason I'm disappointed that the Watson port isn't released yet. I worked with Sun on the Java port, and I was very pleased with how it was turning out. Yes, it was written in Java, but it really shined on the Mac. Philip Weaver, who worked on the UI, did a phenomenal job making it work well on the Mac.

Mostly, though, I'm disappointed because this means that the Watson community of users (myself included) will no longer be able to fully make use of this program which I spent so much time perfecting. The people that stuck with Watson and encouraged me to keep working on it after the whole "Sherlock" debacle will always have my gratitude.

If you're upset with me and Karelia software that this whole thing happened, I understand. Selling Watson was a business decision, and sometimes things don't work out the way that we planned. I have always had my virtual email door open to your comments. And Sun has an email address set up for comments about their "Project Alameda" port of Watson which is alameda@sun.com. I don't know what kind of response one would get from contacting them, but it might help them to know that there are Watson users out there who really want to see Sun's version released.

But, in this world and especially this industry, change is the only sure thing. So, I'm working on a new project. I'll be talking a little bit about this in a post to follow in a day or two.

... to catch up with a minor change on the UPS web site. Enjoy!

Today, a couple more Watson updates.

• Movies, to 1.7.5.7. This brings back the movie previews that were los after a recent structural change at the source Web site.
• Weather, to 1.7.5.8. This fixes a few locations that were previously not working.

Watson's TV tool got another update today. When TVGuide.com re-did their site a few weeks ago, searching went away ... for a while. But it's back, so now searching is back in the Watson tool as well.