Living Code

My most recent article at IBM developerWorks is up (part of David Mertz’s “XML Matters” column), discussing the intersection of Atom Syndication Format, Atom Publishing Protocol, and Microformats:

Up And Atom

Actually, it’s been up for at least a week, but I was out of town at JavaOne (and too tired to post), then off the grid completely taking my daughter’s school to camp. I’m still getting caught up, but nearly recovered.

I think I’ve figured out why my new blog is not being picked up by Planet Python too: the planet software has only recently begun to support Atom 1.0, and that version hasn’t been officially released yet. There should be a 1.0 release of the planet code soon, and hopefully Planet Python will upgrade then and all will be well with the world.

I guess that’s one downside to developing my own blogging tools to support open standards: I may not have to implement deprecated formats or protocols, but if others are still stuck with legacy systems it can still hurt.

My posts have been infrequent, in part because I’ve been working on lots of things to talk about. I’m in the last stages of putting together info on creating NSStatusItems (tools which show up in the menu bar across all applications in OS X) in PyObjC. I’ve also got some cool Quicktime and iSight tools coming soon. And I’ve renamed ZenPaint to DrawingBoard, but it’s working and just waiting for a little GUI cleanup before I post the first binary and source.

Two of my back-burner projects, better blue-screening, and easy lightsabre effects, have been done by others recently. Inspired by the same BoingBoing piece on rotoscoping your own lightsabres as I was, but Naked Software actually sat down and wrote the code. It’s pretty slick, too. For blue-screen effects (and many more), check out Sam Kass’ Quartz Composer Compositions. Very neat stuff, Tiger-only though [Update: now Leopard]. Some of the compositions require a newer system with a higher-end video card than my three-year-old PowerBook.

But to be honest, the real point of this post is not to tease with coming attractions, but to point out my first paid publication. My friend David Mertz asked me to collaborate with him on his XML Matters column for IBM developerWorks, and my first column went live last Friday: Beyond the DOM.

I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember, with poetry notebooks and 200 pages of a novel gathering dust on my bookshelves, so finally getting around to finishing something and having it published leaves me pleased as punch. And more will be forthcoming.

Northern Voices, that is. The local blogging conference is tomorrow and I’ll be there, along with my friend and co-worker, Michael. While I find the idea of a conference about blogging to be a bit odd, it’s a good chance to meet some of the people in person who I only know from blogspace, like Ted and Julie, and a chance to catch up with Tim and Lauren, who I almost never see even though we live in the same town

Various small improvements. Switched the template so code doesn’t run off the edge so easily. Fixed whitespace, which I forgot to do after switching the template (thanks, Xavier, for pointing that out!). All the code for the renaissance examples is available via cvs from the SourceForge Living Code project, in the somewhat predictable cvs module, renaissance_examples. As some of the examples grow, I may only publish the highlights in the blog, and put the remainder in CVS. We’ll se how it goes.

Coming attractions. I’m researching how to build the Renaissance projects so they can be distributed (I haven’t forgotten you, Jorjun, I’m just still figuring it out myself). I can do it now (thanks, Bob!), but I want something more straightforward to build. Hopefully later tonight.

Now that we’ve got a brower for Renaissance files (see previous post), I wanted to create a markup file to show off most of the widgets and options, but realized there is no markup for tabbed views, so I’m going to try creating new tags from Python, and show how to do that. When I’ve got the tags which represent Cocoa widgets that do not yet have Renaissance representations working, then I’ll put together the demo gsmarkup file.

Then back to the Small Nerd examples and a couple of other applications (ports of existing tools, nothing terribly original yet).

It’s been nice to hear from people who are enjoying this series. If there are specific things you’d like to see, let me know, either in the comments, or at dethe(at)livingcode.org