Don't Feed the Geeks
Thursday, October 26, 1995 by Dave Winer.
Where's my watch? 
I've been looking everywhere. What time is it? My watch is gone. It's a nice one. If you see it, please let me know.
Don't Feed the Geeks
Hey -- there seems to be a rule in the Macintosh world. Don't feed the geeks! Look at PC Week. Lots of geeky stuff. Look at MacWeek. Hmmmm. Seems there was a price to pay for the Macintosh launch motto -- The Computer For the Rest Of Us. Sure, that worked in 1984. But nowadays geeks rule the world.
We need a new Mac book. Not MacWeek. MacGeekWeek!
Or at least one week. There's so much news to catch up on. MacWeek never reported the free release of Frontier back in May. So there's no reason to expect they'll report the following news...
Dateline CyberSpace
UserLand Software announced a new alliance. "We are very very important people," began Dave Winer, president of UserLand Software, a corporation headquartered on the worldwide web. "But this is a really silly way for me to talk," he continued. "I don't actually talk like this," he concluded.
It reminds me that when I was a kid I had a penpal in Scotland. We exchanged letters. I told him about my friends and my hobbies. I told him what I don't like about my parents. His letters always seemed stiff and rehearsed. Then one came with an ominous sentence. "Sometimes my mother writes these letters for me," he said. Gullllp. Ooooops. Oh well.
Why can't I just tell you what my software does, why it's important, and leave out the fluff? Do I realllly have to get my mother to write for me?
It seems sometimes that the press just *has* to have a pompous strategic statement, puffy meaningless quotes from analysts, in order to take something seriously. I won't cater to this silly idea. Get with the program man! (and woman!).
The actual news
You already know that Clay Basket the-website-builder is in public beta, freely downloadable from the "Yabbadabba Site".
Clay Basket is an end-user product. If properly configured, anyone in an organization can use it to build and maintain websites using a well-proven data interface, outlining.
And Clay Basket has the *nicest* back doors into the scripting world thru its glossary and inline macros features. Geeks feed the poets. A nice system. A platform! Yes.
The geeks can use AppleScript or Frontier. But I just sweetened the deal for geeks who use Frontier.
Last year Apple made a big switch to a RISC processor called the PowerPC. Wisely, they made it so that the PowerPC can run programs written for the older processor, the Motorola 68000. But the old programs don't run much faster. When a program goes "native," or gets converted to PowerPC code, things get much, much faster.
For some programs, like word processors and draw programs, this performance improvement doesn't mean as much as it means for processor-intensive programs like picture editors and compilers. And native conversion turns out to make a huge difference for scripting engines like Frontier and AppleScript.
I just ran an old script, written a few years ago, in the native version of Frontier. I was shocked. Laughed out loud. Did it again! Expletive deleted! Zip zip zip. It's so damnnnnnnnnn fast!
Yesterday I got a build of the native version of Frontier that had the last known deal-stopper bug out of it. So in the spirit of rock and roll, I decided to let the Macintosh scripting community have it.
In other words, I decided to feed the geeks!
So, tell your favorite Mac wirehead to check out the "Native Frontier Beta" page.
Unix and Windows wireheads might want to have a look too. ;->
And tell the editors of MacWeek to get with the program.
Thanks!
Dave