MemoryMiner

After way too many late nights, MemoryMiner 1.5 is finally out the door, complete with all the localizations. I’d blogged earlier about how time consuming it is to keep all the localized versions in sync, and I wasn’t kidding. My arms hurt!

At any rate, I’m really proud of this release. Punk Kid (AKA Bobby Anderson) did a bang up job with the UI overhaul, even though he still has plenty of little nits. I have to keep reminding him that rendering what he comes up with in Photoshop ain’t easy.

Here’s the RSS feed listing the changes:

http://www.memoryminer.com/SWUpdate/MemoryMiner-AppCast.rss

Time for a little breather, so that we can get started on the next phase.

No rest for the wicked.

I’m in Nice spending time with Schnicolas: friend, colleague, and our resident annoying Frenchman. Last time I was in Nice was back in 1984, so I’m sure the price of a Pan Bagnat has gone up considerably. We went to have a nice lunch and I got to have the well known “Stockfish” a famous local tomato based fish soup which takes several days to prepare.

With so much fine food from “The List” to go through, it will be hard to concentrate on the tasks at hand, but I’m sure we’ll manage.

Windows screen movies coming up, sometime after I get my Soupe au Pistou.

Greetings from Perugia, Italy where I’ve been working on a boatload of things, not the least of which is getting version 1.5 ready for release. The tricky thing about having an application localized in many languages is that it adds a lot of extra work at the end of the development cycle to bring all the different versions up to date. Not rocket science, just tedious.

We’re nearly there.

Yay.

I spent most of last week in Monterey in my brother’s hotel room. He’s been going to TED for several years, and I’ve experienced it vicariously through him. One day I’ll make it there in person, I’m sure. This year, I managed to see most of the conference presentations on video. I was thrilled to learn that in the future, a “real time virtual TED” will emerge, a result of the overwhelming response to the posting of a subset of conference videos last year.

I can only imagine how thrilling it must be to watch presentations by people whose work you so admire and then being able to chat with them in such a comfortable setting. Here’s an example of a talk by Peter Gabriel:

Peter Gabriel and the Witness Project

A few weeks ago, I got word that MemoryMiner was going to be in the gift bag at the TED Conference which starts in Monterey on Wed. It’s a huge honor, given the people who attend. I think some very interesting things could come of it. We’re getting really close to having all the pieces fit together for the MemoryMiner Platform.

Stay tuned.

I’ve been invited to speak at the next meeting of the CocoaHeads (Silicon Valley group) meeting next week. I’m honored Over the years, I’ve recevied tons of developer help from others, mostly from the cocoadev mailing list, but occasionally by bugging folks on iChat as well. Over the last year or so, I’ve been doing my best to return the favor to other developers, and I’m genuinely happy to do so whenever I can.

I’ll be talking about integrating Cocoa applications with REST-based web services, and using our experience with using Ruby on Rails for the server portion. Here’s a link with all the details:

http://theocacao.com/document.page/420

See you in Cupertino!

OK, I know it’s cheating, but I’m busy!

Here’s a link to the second Ziff Davis guest post:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/?p=302

Today, I was interviewed on the “Web 2.0 Explorer” blog created by Alan Graham on Ziff-Davis. I get to write a guest blog or two this week as well.

Who’s feeling important?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/wp-trackback.php?p=298

It’s always a blast to speak with educators about MemoryMiner. I’ve said it countless times, but it bears repeating: I love teachers, and think that as a society we can’t do enough to support them. I feel this all the more now that I think about my (almost) 3 year old son, and the challenges we’ll face assuring the best education we possible can for him.

Here’s a podcast that was recorded on the show floor at Macworld from last week, then edited in waiting lounge at SFO:

Moving at the Speed of Creativity

If you’re a K-12 educator, please visit this URL to learn about the MemoryMiner school grants program:

MemoryMiner School Grants

Still catching up with the posts I should have made during the week, but better late than never.

On Thursday, Merlin Mann (of That Phone Guy fame) and crew came by our booth to film a segment on MemoryMiner for the very amusing MacBreak program on TWiT (This Week in Tech). I’d heard of Merlin before, but never met him in person. He’s a riot. Halfway through the filming, it was noticed that the wireless mic battery died, so we had to reshoot a portion of it.

You can download the segment here:

http://www.twit.tv/mb57