Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

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.