Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

A former co-worker forwarded me a link to this application, HistoryHound. What a brilliant piece of software. It's one of those "It's so simple, why didn't I think of it?" kind of applications that I am sure I will be using a lot. It allows you to search your browser history by content. And it can keeps an index of any long size, independently of your browser's history.

I just bought a $20 license to the program. You should too, if you're a Mac user. You'll like it!

I'm working on some programming, and I need to get some stuff from the WebDAV website, webdav.org. And the darn site has been down for at least the last couple of days. I can't reach it, and it doesn't seem reachable from other places I've checked.

Maybe they will get it fixed over the weekend. I sure hope so.

Happy Thanksgiving to all who do that kind of thing!

As predicted, a few tools in Watson are no longer fully functional. This is unfortunate but very much expected due to the ever-changing landscape of Web services. Still, a good part of the program is still quite functional.

In fact, I recently read that Watson's Amazon.com tool integrates quite nicely with Delicious Library via drag and drop. A lot of this has to do with the support we had put into Watson for integrating with other applications, including your browser and Spring. If Delicious Library hooks up with PriceGrabber, we may find similar compatibility between the two applications as well, either through luck or through design.

I've read the True Story of Audion that has been circulating recently. It's interesting how similar Panic's and Karelia's stories are, and yet we are still here, even if our original flagship applications are not. I was impressed that they released Audion free of charge from now on. I had considered that with Watson, but I didn't want to alienate the people who had recently paid for the software... it was hard enough having to wait so long before we could let the cat out of the bag about the deal with Sun, so close to the day when we could no longer support the program.

But a few months has gone by, and though Karelia can no longer support the program, or even keep copies of it, the program is circulating around on the Internet. So why not follow Audion's lead and do something similar?

So ... as of today, Watson (bumps and bruises and all, but still in decent shape) is now freely available. But the catch is, we can't make a new version that doesn't require entering a registration code; we don't have the source to Watson anymore. But we can give out a registration code that anybody is welcome to use.

So here's the deal. Get a copy of Watson from a friend, or look for it somewhere on the Internet, as Karelia can't provide it directly. (The latest version, for instance, is available on the Yahoo! Watson Users Group, but if somebody wants to host a mirror of it, I'll post the URL here.) Then launch it and choose "Register Watson..." under the "Watson" menu.

* Enter your name and (optionally) your organization.

* In the E-mail address field, enter:

nobody@karelia.com

* And in the Registration field, enter:

BNVQTTW 4P3SMC7 R7L8S3V 1XGKGG7A

(Or, select the text of this message and drag into the registration window.) And that's it! Remember, this is unsupported software.

Update: Unfortunately, the Watson Users Group was set for manual approval, and that was quite a deluge of requests to join the group. We're trying to process all the requests, but in the meantime, I've changed the group to open membership -- hopefully no spammers will join in the next few days -- so if you have tried to join but haven't gotten in, try joining again now.

This applies only to people reading the "Watson" category of this weblog. Since Watson is no longer a sold/supported product, I am no longer going to be updating this thread. Occasional mentions of Watson (including this new one) will continue in the "MacOSX" category, which can be read as part of the general Weblog page or feed, or in its own Web page or RSS feed.

As I've gotten back into Cocoa development over the last few months, I haven't spent much time using the Cocoa-specific mailing lists. A lot of newbies, and a lot of noise, so it's hard for somebody who has been around the block with Cocoa to use it to get answers to the inevitable hard questions. Plus, the time spent waiting for anybody to respond can be frustrating.

So I've come up with an idea, and we'll see if the experiment works. I've set up an IRC channel that experienced cocoa developers can join to post and respond to non-newbie questions. With minimal chit-chat, and no RTFM questions. (There's an existing "#macdev" channel that I found, but it's a lot of chatter, and very little content, especially Cocoa content, from what I could tell.)

We had a few people start late last week, and already we got some useful questions asked and answered, and a few bugs fixed in an open-source framework. But it needs to have an optimal number of people involved ... too few, and you're not likely to get a response; too many, and it starts wasting everybody's time trying to keep up.

So ... if you are an experienced Cocoa developer ... meaning you have been writing Cocoa application(s) for several months, perhaps you have completed or shipped a program already, and you know how to look things up and search Google and the mamasam archives before bothering other people, then come on by, introduce yourself so we know who you are, and then be on-hand for asking and answering hard questions. We're #cocojox at irc.freenode.net.

OK, not quite that bad. Just a period of blogging silence. A lot of people had a lot to say after November 2nd; I, on the other hand, was stunned and silent, both in the weblogging context and also in my real life. But life goes on.

One thing I'd like to do is reorganize this weblog a little. Maybe take my personal rants to another weblog and keep this site computer-oriented. (I've gotten a lot of negative comments from some very negative people whenever I post anything resembling an opinion around here. So maybe this should be the last time I do so!)

Another thing I want to add is a section on Cocoa (RSS feed). Geeky Content for Geeky Mac Developers. This is just a new category that will show up as part of the standard weblog page or feed. I'll be talking about technical concepts and issues that affect Cocoa developers for Mac OS X. (Note this is distinct from cocoa.karelia.com, a repository of open-source snippets.)

People who are just interested in Mac-related, non technical, non General topics, can read just the "MacOSX" category here. (Or subscribe to its RSS feed.) The "Watson" category, like the program, is now officially retired, though I may still talk about the program in the "MacOSX" category.