The Apple Developer Program (ADC) is the official channel for developers to gain access to Apple technology and support. There are 3 programs, Online (free), Select ($500/year) and Premiere ($3k/year).

The Online program is meant to provide access to SDKs and other developer tools. The Select and Premiere programs offer more benefits, but more importantly seeds of upcoming versions of Mac OS X.

Seeding is very important during any major update, such as the upcoming 10.4 to 10.5 transition.

This year, unlike past years, Apple provided developer previews to WWDC attendees but NOT to those of us that did not attend.

In the past, a week might pass before developers unable to attend WWDC received their seeds.

Those of us not attending WWDC this year can read blogs about 10.5, see press coverage including detailed walkthroughs, and hear about bittorrents streaming everywhere.

But no seeds for us it seems.

Who knows why? Perhaps to force more developers to attend WWDC, prevent illegal leaks of their software, or perhaps they’re just too busy.

Word from Apple by way of developer relations – we have nothing to tell you and have announced nothing - stay tuned.

Considering that Apple’s Mail application in 10.5 is starting to encroach on MailTemplate’s functionality, my frustration has grown to the point I needed to vent.

Apple statement is being heard loud and clear. No soup for you!

My statement back, get off your asses and treat all your developers equally if you want a thriving ecosystem.

With 4 months till Macworld 2007 I hope September bears fruit.

Last night I reinstalled my MacBook Pro, elminating the BootCamp partition in the process.

After getting everything setup I fired up iChat today to get ready for a video chat and was surprised that iChat claimed the iSight camera was in use by another application. But no other application was running though.

After a few minutes of troubleshooting I remembered that BootCamp 1.1 updated the driver to allow the iSight to work under Windows XP.

After reinstalling BootCamp 1.1 (even though I wasn’t going to use Windows or Linux) the iSight came back to life.

Corny, I know.

Over the next couple weeks I am going to be migrating a number of sites under this single installation of Mephisto, kicking the tires and patching as I go.

I hope to create a unified service for technically challenged users to publish professional sites for their small businesses.

The first task is to prove that Mephisto is up to the task.

Made the jump from the long-in-the-tooth Typo to Mephisto.

Typo is an excellent blogging platform, but Mephisto has a much more flexible approach in my opinion. More CMS. Less Blog.

For me at least, the code base is easier to understand (read: hack), and the beginnings of a multi-site feature are already present.

I have been wanting to play with hosting numerous sites under one distributed Rails application for some time. Typo didn’t give me much hope of achieving this in the short term.

The more I looked at the architecture in Mephisto, the more I fell in love with it. So much so, that I contributed a couple patches to the project after an hour of playing with it this weekend.

So, long live Mephisto! (until someone claims its dead, of course)

Update: It may be a couple days before I can fix any broken file/image links.

As I launch into some serious development work using Cocoa for a Mac OS X application, it reminds me of the insanity that is 21st century programming.

Sure, the word insanity is a bit strong, but honestly it is insanity. After years of innovation and advancement, developers are still required to write a pile of code in order to handle the simple act of deleting a row from a table UI element.

I am not referring to managing the underlying data. Just the act of hitting the delete key and triggering an event requires either subclassing the standard UI element supplied by the OS and writing code OR adding superfluous UI elements, linking them to a menu item which will then trigger the event.

Its insane I tell you.

Why can’t you just hook-up the UI elements “delete” outlet to the controller action you wish to have handle it?

You know like Steve-O showed in that infamous demo when OS X launched years ago?

The state of application development is still in the stone ages when programmers each recreate the wheel every single day.

No wonder Rails got the hype it did with its DontRepeatYourself approach to development.