Good Times: The Introduction of Applescript
August 10th, 2007 by Bullshit MancusoThere was a long period of time in which Dave Winer hated all things Apple, and the reason was Applescript, which came with System 7 Pro and annihilated Luserland Frontier as a commercial scripting tool. (Weird but true: Before it was about publishing, blogging, outlining, twitting, kvetching, or litigating, Scripting News was about scripting.)
A commenter on Fake Steve Jobs remembers this time fondly:
My favorite Whiner moment took place back in 1993. Dave had been tirelessly pitching his complicated scripting system called “Frontier” [to] 3rd party developers. Juust then, Apple announced it was developing a much better system-wide scripting environment called “AppleScript”.Dave freaked and threatened to sue. So someone on the Applescript team printed up badges to wear at the Apple Developer’s conference.
They read “Applescript: the final Frontier.”
Dave was not amused.
August 10th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Hey… I just noticed that this is the second “Bullshit” piece. And a nice piece of BS it is…
Yes. Scripting. Apple killed many a start-up by integrating some cool idea into the OS. It’s the curse of start-ups. Can you out program the borg.
But Dave won in the end… to this very day he has used the same scripting language for all his work (blogging, programming, hacking and prototyping new ideas). Frontier has survived and been open sourced with the most readily available incarnation being Dave’s “OPML Editor”.
Of course, he wants it ported to a mobile device so he can avoid having to learn a new scripting language. It isn’t in the cards. Is it.
Dave dreams big.
August 10th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
PS> Dave’s at Gnomedex and very bored. They probably aren’t letting him interrupt every speaker. Hopefully, they will give him an award and no one will get hurt.
Last year he and Steve Gillmor ripped Blake Ross (co-founder of the FireFox project) a new asshole for a lack of openness to developers by the Firefox team… a team Blake had since left.
Blake and Dave subsequently made up in their blogs. Proving that Blake Ross is one hell of a guy… and that Dave (like many a wife beater) can fake an apology with the best of them. It wasn’t really an apology just a noticed stating that Blake now understood what Dave was trying to say…. and hat Dave now understood that Forefox is an open project… Dave was just “clueless” to how it all was governed and being run.
But that’s how Dave gets software fixed. Public humiliation works.
August 10th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
What did he win? Dave’s web sites run on Apache, his blog comments run on WordPress, and he yanked almost everything he used to publish with Manila offline. Though he continues to use it for toy apps like Twittergrams, the second any of them needs to scale he will either kill them or beg for a programmer to port them to a real platform.
August 10th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
He still controls his “publishing empire” from a Frontier-based editing tool. He writes a blog entry that is sent to his blog and a copy is sent to the Wordpress site (using the Metaweblog API) and he has a local copy of the writing. He can easily re-edit a post and update these two publishing sites.
His use of Apache is still driven by a local instance of Frontier. Frontier copies updated static content to the suitable Apache folder.
He’s still deeply rooter in a Frontier tool for feed reading, podcast catching, editing and who knows what else. After spending 20 years building and using the “Outliner” that drives Frontier/OPML Editor he probably can’t spend more than 60 seconds in any other editor without going crazy.
Doc Searles also is tied to the OPML Editor for all his web writing: with personalized support from Dave. I’m not sure if Scoble has left Frontier yet and uses other tools. I suspect he posts to his blog from OPML but he might have switched to MS Live Writer or some other Metaweblog compliant tool.
As the web adopts Atom Publishing protocol Dave will slowly go crazy as his life’s work falls behind and no one will help his tools stay current. He’ll wage open warfare against the Web being taken over by IBM (Sam Ruby, James Snell) and Sun (Tim Bray). Go figure.
August 11th, 2007 at 12:39 am
AppleScript wasn’t the only folks Winer threatened to sue. Anyone remember when he was going to sue some open source folks who wanted to make a clone of his product?
http://web.archive.org/web/19990204041912/www.ntlug.org/bronco/
It’s funny though, Zope ended up probably eating too much of the open source developer mindshare of “imagine if your scripting language had really great, basically transparent, bindings to a hierarchical persistent data store?” Bronco / Casbah didn’t stand a chance.
And now where the hell is Zope, really?