While doing routine software upgrades on both MYSTcommunity and MYSTlore, I figured it was time to change the “branding” to be more similar. Previously, the skin had been an largely unchanged variant of MediaWiki’s “Monobook”. It’s still a derivative, but now far more reminiscent of the one Tay¹ made for MYSTcommunity. I hope you like the changes, because for simplicity’s sake, I’m no longer allowing you to pick a different skin.

Now I’m wondering what to do about the international versions. The English version, while low-traffic, has a steady stream of both readers and contributors, and has developed into the vast resource of information I had hoped it would become. The localized versions, however, are still far too unpopular. Unfortunately, MediaWiki requires a separate installation for each language², so the maintenance effort is absurdly high. If you enjoy the Dutch or German version of MYSTlore, or if you’d like to start off another language version (French, anyone?), please find more readers and contributors!

1. Who hasn’t blogged in almost a year! Tsk-tsk. ↩
2. Or at least it used to — perhaps they have fixed this? ↩

Thanks to Matt Gemmell for pointing towards a new TextMate Blog post:

TextMate development is going strong: TextMate 2 isn’t done yet, but progress is steady, it is starting to take shape, and the end is in sight.

[..]

It feels to me like most of the modules are getting close, say 90%. But as they say, on the horizon, mountains look small. While I use 2.0 for my own work, day-to-day, and the basic infrastructure is pretty solid, much of the front-end still needs work, and for now it’s all lacking the spit and polish of a finished app.

Terrific! And in other editor news, elastic tabstops, arguably one of the most important (and long overdue) innovations in text editing of the decade, are starting to gain traction. (Thanks Denis!)

It looks like I will be able to implement elastic tabstops in Visual Studio after all, since VS 2010 should allow me to set non-uniform tabstops on different lines.

For better or worse, I’ve been using Visual Studio a lot in the recent close to two years, so I’d love for this to happen.

CocoaHeads is a group all over the world¹ meeting up every month and discussing Cocoa (and Cocoa Touch), Apple’s primary development framework for the Mac and iPhone platforms. Alexander Repty (perhaps best known for his neat Lab Tick utility) took the initiative in launching a chapter for Bremen. We² met for the first time on Thursday. About a dozen people came (we were hoping for four, maybe five), and it turned out to be a great two and a half hours in a café.

Like In The Old Days

It struck me when explaining this event to someone else how oddly this must come across: as more and more social activities of our everyday life — both leisurely and professional — takes place over the Internet, with chat rooms, discussion forums, blogs, and other fast-paced media, here comes what amounts to a perfectly old-fashioned hanging-out over coffee and cake. I first met Alex in #macsb (for Macintosh Software Business), an IRC channel on FreeNode focused on running independent Mac development studios. It’s one of the stranger coincidences in life: despite being an international chatroom hosting only several dozen people, we actually grew up less than a mile from each other. And yet, we never met in person until Thursday.

So why, when you can use CocoaDev to look up API commentary, Stack Overflow to discuss problems that have you stumped and Twitter to follow what others are cooking up, would you really need to attend anything in real life³ any more? It is perhaps downright antithetical to the stereotype for a software developer to do.

Truth be told, the benefits are hard to describe exhaustively. As far as resources go, the Internet is absolutely unparalleled. And yet, because we aren’t forced to interact socially, we tend not to. Forums and even twitter are far from real-time anyway, and as for chatrooms, we tend to lurk for minutes or even hours, only sticking our heads in when we feel like it. A café doesn’t give us that option, and while it honestly isn’t something I’d want to experience every day, it is a refreshing contrast to the usual. So, immediacy places a role. Those who are there are actually… there.

There’s a quality to actually meeting that perhaps roughly matches what Rands calls The Pond; a shared, mutual breeding place for ideas that just cannot with our current technology be replicated or even closely imitated with telecommunication. I’ve witnessed this myself with the occasional work from home (or elsewhere) I do; sure, everyone’s reachable, but that’s a stark contrast to everyone being around. Got a problem and can’t figure it out immediately? In the office, you’ll ask your neighbor to take a look (and, typically, just the advantage of two additional eyes solves things fast). Elsewhere, you’ll hesitate to instant-message around, call anyone up or even write an e-mail, and will for no good reason be more inclined to solve things yourself.

Finally, perhaps the decidedly low-tech nature of this — though, to be far, some did show apps that they’ve written or are working on around — is simply a refreshing change.

I had never been to anything like this before — I’ve been to expositions, and I’ve done demos for current and potential customers, but conferences, not so much. One reason? I had regarded the very idea of meeting up in person as somewhat outdated and superfluous.

Now, not so much, because clearly, the benefits of socializing with others who share your profession go way beyond the obvious intoxication and “networking”.

Post Scriptum

I thank (again) Lexx for organizing, and everyone else for attending. For those in Bremen or nearby, we plan to meet the second Thursday of every month. If anyone wants to join in or perhaps even present something, please do!

1. Though Africa is feeling rather lonely right now, and South America even more so. ↩
2. To my own astonishment, that includes yours truly. ↩
3. It feels funny to stress this. ↩

Today, Germans (and, among others, Belgians) voted in the 2009 European Parliament election. Far, far too few people, I say. Turnout in my electoral district was 41.8% — and that’s considered high in comparison to estimates for other districts. Ouch.

In addition to the obvious, well-known disenchantment with politics, I blame a lack of understanding how European politics affect its member states — many didn’t have the necessary education to understand the (somewhat nascent system), and on top of that, you hardly ever see the effects directly. As one voter put it succinctly: EU politics are quite abstract.

Duty

I helped with this election, as I did with the one in 2004. When you vote, they hand you a list to sign up as a helper; very few people (in my district, anyhow) ever do, but back in 2002-ish, I once did. There’s little I do in the way of voluntary work for the community, so it seemed right.

There’s two parts to this job. Voting took place between 8 AM and 6 PM, so we split up into two five-hour shifts. Every voter passes by you before they get to go to the booth; they either hand in their notification letter (which you get from your municipality a few weeks earlier), or an ID. One helper ticks them off in the list of eligle voters; one (me, as far as today is concerned) simple counts voters; one hands them the slip with checkboxes¹. There’s supposed to be four people, but so few people volunteered that we only had three in the second shift, though with the low turnout, we really could have done it with two. (I do realize this is a means of mutual verification. )

And then, at six, you shut the doors (symbolizing that voting is no longer allowed), then reopen them because counting is public (though, typically, nobody ever does show up). Next, you empty the ballot box, count all slips, compare them to the amount of ticked off eligible voters, and compare again to the amount of counted votes. Then, you start to count by party, sum that up, and compare again. Finally, you make each one package for the major parties, and another for all minor parties combined.

There’s candy, coffee, and of course a huge amount of smalltalk — especially when as few people as today show up. At times, nobody came in for twenty minutes.

Pirate Party

I am disillusioned, if not frightened, by the politics of the major parties when it comes to protection of privacy, the long overdue modernization of copyright and patent law, and other matters. And lo and behold: not only is there a party focusing on exactly these matters; it also happens to have an amusing name and is largely staffed by people from my very industry, IT. So, this time, I decided to make a voting choice that’s statistically unlikely to make much of a dent, but perhaps just enough to at least express, nay, shout out, the existence of serious issues.

And hey, in Sweden, their country of origin, they’re already the third largest party by membership count. I’m not kidding. This isn’t a fringe group, nor is the name intended to suggest a lack of interest in serious solutions. If anything, it is one of the few parties interested in revolutionizing the way we think of protecting that which we create. It’s a huge challenge, but it is one that, when major parties have addressed it at all, they did so by listening to the lobbies of the content industries, rather than to individual creators.

As developers of software, composers and performers of music, designers of graphics, websites and typefaces, actors and more, we owe it to ourselves to find something that’s actually compatible with the new ways of obtaining and distributing media, free from the shackles of tradition and commercial greed.

1. With a whopping 31 choices this time. ↩

Color me skeptical.

• It runs risk of essentially becoming a 21st-century version of the ‘groupware’ concept. And we all know how well that worked out for, say, Lotus Notes. Anyone who hasn’t should read Groupware Bad, for it is one of the most insightful articles on some of the things that went wrong with 1990s-era software development. Granted, Wave is a lot more user-centric than previous attempts at this (which were tainted with corporate/”enterprise” orientation) — but the complexity of trying to solve too many problems at a time remains.
• I’ve seen it suggested by several people that “this is why Google didn’t buy Twitter”, or “just like with Gmail and Maps, Google gets this one right”. But Twitter, Gmail and Maps all have something Wave does not: they’re just the right amount of simple. (Arguably, Twitter takes simple to the extreme.)
• The complexity also means it’s non-trivial to comprehend and dive into. Yes, you can start off just creating a new “wave” and not use most of the other features, but do you even understand at that point what a wave is? Is it a document? Is it a conversation? Definitions include: “In simple terms Google Wave can be thought of like an ajax spreadsheet over XMPP.”, “a web application and computing platform designed to bring together e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking, with a strong collaborative focus, mixed with spellchecker and translator extensions, which are able to work in concert, in real-time.” and “a new model for communication and collaboration on the web.” None of those strike me as explainable to someone in plain English over coffee.
• It’s technologically impressive, and I’m glad they’re implementing almost all the features in HTML 5 (one feature, as mentioned in the demo, requires Gears, though it has been submitted for standardization consideration), rather than Flash, Silverlight or worse. But whereas Google unsurprisingly considers the fact that it’s all a Web app a good thing, I for one would much rather work with something native. Technology aside, the browser by design limits the way I can interact. A native app could provide a status item in the menu bar, could notify (say, through Growl) of new or changed waves, etc.

On the positive side:

• The use of XMPP should make native clients very feasible.
• Anything that pushes HTML 5 further into the mainstream is good. Flash and Silverlight cannot die soon enough. JavaFX thankfully hasn’t really ever left its womb.
• Firefly references.
• Google’s t-shirt designers manage to make a drop shadow look like sweat. I will pretend to assume this was deliberate.

Others’ views:

[P]ossibly the most Microsoft-y thing I’ve ever seen come out of Google. This is not intended as a compliment, by the way.

Tweet by Jeff Atwood

I don’t understand what it is. It seems not just technically complex but also conceptually complex. Communication systems that succeed are usually conceptually simple.

Post by John Gruber

P.S.: I cringed when everyone ooh’d over the collaborative text editing demo. Not just because everyone should have realized that this has been possible long ago, as proven by SubEthaEdit and similar apps like Gobby — but also because I really wish such technology would be more standardized by now. There is no good reason IDEs (Coda aside), for instance, still don’t have such a feature.