Cocoa Blogs
Andy on Dec 12th 2006
Scott Stevenson has created a new site, Cocoa Blogs, which is about… blogs… about Cocoa. It’s also about how brief and precious life is, and reminds us all how our time would be better spent posting more stuff about Cocoa. At least that’s what I got from the clock in the upper right-hand corner.
Anyway, I’m not writing about Cocoa Blogs because Scott needs my traffic or because he even listed yours truly, although the latter certainly helped. No, it’s because Scott stole my idea.
And by “my idea,” I mean it was an entirely different idea, which I stole from someone else, and also that the idea was very obvious, but, legally speaking, not to someone of reasonable skill in my profession, so I should have probably patented it. It did include the words “blog” and “Cocoa,” which is probably all that matters to a patent attorney and a jury of my 87 year old peers from Massachusetts.
The idea was spawned about a month ago, when I sustained head trauma and temporarily forgot how painful basic web application development is. I decided what the world really needed, more than peace, universal healthcare, or even Jelly Bellies, was a site cross between Digg and Technorati. For Mac development blogs.
I’ll pause while you catch your breath.
The basic theory is that, at the heart, it would be directory for Mac development blogs. Users could submit their or other people’s blogs for inclusion in the directory. Once a blog was in the system, it would take advantage of the fact that just about every blog has an RSS feed. It would pull stories and put them in an incoming queue (think Digg). Users could then vote on stories, and the most popular would go to the front page. There would also be all the required social site features, like friends, comments, spam, and an overabundance of twelve year old boys with no sense of perspective.
I abandoned the idea after I started up a Ruby on Rails project, spent several days getting basic user support working, and realized I had just spent several days getting basic user support working. Um… isn’t basic user support something that’s supposed to be implemented by the operating system? Or, the application framework at least? After realizing that I had a good bit of work to do before I got to anything remotely interesting, something shiny caught my eye, and I wandered away after it.
Buttons followed after me, but was injured in several humorous altercations.
Filed in Macintosh, Programming | One response so far
Mathieu Tozer Mar 14th 2007 at 05:32 pm 1
Hey there,
I know, comments on an old post, but I’m developing a Rails app at the moment (more of an exercise in rails) which isn’t quite as complex as your original idea (no users, thus wiki style, no friends, no auto RSS feed aggregation, maybe article voting) but still interesting in that it will hopefully become an index of Cocoa resources. A bookmarking app, essentially, with a Cocoa focus. If you’re still interested in something like this send me an email and maybe you could share some ideas. Basically I wanted to make something which would save me from random google searching error messages and framework names and getting back heaps of irrelevant results related to other technologies, when I know perfectly well there’s an article out there related to Core Data and multithreading techniques (hello! I just read your blog now for the first time!) but not finding it. Whereas if your article was tagged core data threading in this index it would have appeared straight away.