The Slakinski Log

Before we start, lets first start with a picture:

This shows sales over a 4 year period. The 3rd blip right at the end was iPodderX going away and was suppose to turn into Transistr.

When iTunes 4.9 was announced, August and I were right there for the announcement. Later we went on TWiT to talk about it, we did our best to stay positive, hiding our fear in talk about fish cheeks

We already moved iPodderX from Podcatching client to into a standard RSS reader for feed reading and podcasting. But when we decided that, we put ourselves right into the mix with NetNewsWire and NewsFire which where very popular applications that did podcasting and RSS reading very well as well. It was easy for those applications to add good enough Podcasting support. From what I know, no one ended up using iPodderX to read news feeds.

As sales were dropping like a rock, day jobs were becoming demanding, and stress on august and I’s friendship also became very strained. We decided to stop working on it and move on to other things for a bit. August has been doing great work with his FoggyNoggin software creating very useful mac utilities, and I moved over to the web,  now working full time with Mahalo.com!

I’d like to also note now the RSS application space on the desktop has changed drastically. NewsFire and NetNewsWire are now free, RSS is now in the browser (the browser itself and web apps like google reader and bloglines) and all handle RSS enclosures (what makes podcasting possible)

One last thing to leave on, iPodder (not releated to iPodderX) who is now known as Juice hasn’t been updated in eons and no other development has been made with any of the other podcatchers. We were not the only casuality.

If you have questions feel free to comment and I’ll be happy to answer them.

 Check out what August has to say regarding all of this.

Update: Talked with Andrew Grumet who now works for PodShow and this downloads chart looks very similar to ours.

On twitter ages ago I wrote pyFlickrFan.  I thought I might have turned it into an app like what we did with pyPodder into iPodderX. August and I were even talking about it on and off.  Then the last keynote happened and it sounded like Apple was building all the functionality into Apple TV.  So the project sat dormant on my machine running every once in a while.

So I decided now to release the code incase anyone else wanted to check it out.

And here is the source

ps: Thanks to Dave Winer who came up with the concept and original FlickrFan app

Today I posted a message in the Google Group for Mahalo Development that talked about a new set of tools for 3rd party developers.

Along with Mahalo Social we deployed a new Special page to handle feeds for that data. We are providing them in Atom, RSS2 and JSON formats (we just added JSON a couple of days ago)

I wrote up a quick example for reading in your links that you have submitted to Mahalo via Python using the JSON output format

import simplejson, urllib2
f = urllib2.urlopen('http://www.mahalo.com/Special:Feeds?group=people
                            &un=rslakinski&action=links&type=json');
data = f.read()
links = simplejson.loads(data)
del(data)
if len(links) > 0:
    for link in links:
        print 'Title: %s' % link['link<em>title']
        print 'Description: %s' % link['link</em>description']
        print 'URL: %s' % link['link<em>url']
        print 'Submitted On: %s\r\n' % link['link</em>pub_date']

If you read the post, you’ll find out how to get a list of a users friends, fans, who the user is a fan of and links posted by the users friends!

Great job Veronica and everyone else on the Mahalo Daily Team!

I was working on an RSS feed generator for something at Mahalo and whenever I do such things I go through the RSS 2.0 Spec again to see what elements I should add to make the feed as useful as can be for 3rd party developers. I noticed a little used item called which is to link to where people can post comments to the item. Sounds simple, but no RSS reader that I’ve ever come across will use this so I asked Dave Winer why via twitter and then 2 things happened

1) Oddly enough eariler in the day before any prompting from me, Dave added to Scripting News’s RSS Feed 2) He replied to my question with this flickr link: http://flickr.com/photos/scriptingnews/1876196880/ and he couldn’t have been more correct.

Come on guys, if your going to support a spec, support ALL of it!

Wow, thats all I can say. This is the first screencast for Mahalo, and it wasn’t even done by us. Not to mention its also fantastically well done!

Ok this is cool, less that 24 hours after launch, someone created the first dashboard widget! Thanks!

As per that theme song the other day, I’m going to take a new road and if all goes well, never look back! Yesterday I quit my day job to join up with a new startup company that oddly enough isn’t podcast related. I’m not sure what this means for Transistr, but I do know that PopCurrent.com will remain running and be well maintainted still (aka It’s not going anywhere, so keep on popping) but it does mean that I’m going to try something new and fun this year!

Wish me luck!

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I’m starting to think that Ruby on Rails is a cult and quickly becoming a religion. It even has its own list of commandments like “Thou shall not write code until I have a test for it” and “Thou shall not repeat thyself” It even has its own leaders like David Heinemeier Hansson that are listened more closely than any evangelist on TV. I don’t really have a point to this blog post, its just an observation. I’m a card carrying member of the cult and proud of it