In Why Podcasting Will Fail Hadley Stern writes that he thinks podcasting is a passing phase. He may be right.

I don’t agree. While it might continue to be refined and evolve, go more commercial and may even level out in a way, in essence it’s just using the enclosure element of RSS as a delivery mechanism for audio.

So podcasting can deliver everything from an audio blog to radio on-demand, music, church sermons, news reports, or just someone screaming for five minutes. It has a multitude of uses and I believe it’s here for the foreseeable – until something better comes along.

Update: This has been followed up by Chris Seibold in Podcasts are Here to Stay (and that is a Scary Thought). I agree.

… No, not me!

I released Feeder 1.0.3 today. If you were to look at the list of changes you’d find nothing earth shattering, but the first item on the list is the reason I released this version now. The change was to strip out nasty control characters that could be pasted in from Dreamweaver, invalidating the feed.

I received a support request where FeedValidator was complaining about an early end of file in a feed. I checked the file in vi (then remembered I have TextWrangler, which can also show invisible characters and is free) and saw these ^@ (null) characters at the end of every chunk of text. Since these null characters are invisible, you can’t see them in the GUI – the cursor just gets stuck for a tap as you try to arrow-key over it. Otherwise, you won’t see anything wrong.

From a developer perspective, because text strings can be of variable lengths, strings in the C programming language are normally null-terminated – i.e. the text is followed by a null character (binary zero) to signify the end of the string; the size of the string field in memory can be much bigger. Variable-length strings can be handled another way by specifying the string’s length somehow. Maybe Dreamweaver has got the length one character too many, or maybe it needs this character for its own purposes.

Rant Alert!

In any case, this is really annoying! Applications shouldn’t put strange invisible characters on the clipboard and make it available to other apps. On the Mac, when an app puts something on the pasteboard it can supply a variety of different formats (e.g. RTF, Plain Text). It’s then up to the receiving application to use the richest or most appropriate type available. An application can also use its own proprietary pasteboard formats which only it knows about and uses. If Dreamweaver needs these null characters, that’s what it should do.

Additional Thought: I listen to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code podcast, and I’ve heard him mention problems with strange characters in the OPML files used on iPodder.org. Like RSS, OPML is XML. I wonder if Dreamweaver is one of the culprits. It might not be the only problem they’re having, but I bet it’s one of them. If you’re getting weird errors validating a feed or in your OPML files, a good text editor like TextWrangler will be able to show these invisible characters. Look for things that start with ^

Rant over! Big thanks to Paul Figgiani at The Point Podcast for reporting this error and helping me to fix and test it, amongst other things. If you’re interested in getting tips on making really professional, high quality podcasts, Final Cut Pro and Macs in general, you should check out his show.

Looking at Reinvented Software’s news page or feed, you may think that all I’ve done since the 4th of March is read the MacUser review of Feeder over and over again (did I mention the 5 mice rating?), but you’d be wrong.

A day in the life of a full-time software developer can be long and varied and little of what you do is actually developing software, but what comes with it.

A lot of time is taken up by support requests, especially the first month after releasing something. Usually these aren’t bug reports but questions, compliments, feature requests and occasional misunderstandings. With Feeder in particular I get a lot of questions about how people can best work with RSS feeds on their site, glitches with podcasting software and so on. I enjoy doing this stuff, it’s great to connect with people and find out what they’re doing, but it can really gobble up hours of the day.

The other side of things is taking care of the site and back end systems. Behind the scenes I have a system which integrates with PayPal and Kagi to accept payments and generate registration codes, send out lost codes, etc. Last week, despite me making no changes whatsoever, my server decided to stop talking to PayPal, which meant me doing everything manually until I could get it fixed. It turned out to be problem with my hosting company’s network, but it all adds to the workload. Incidentally, I’ve also got a front-end system called ReRegister (shown in the screenshot) so I can work with my online database in Cocoa comfort. Mostly these things save me time and allow me to stay in bed while the money pours (er, drips) in, so I shouldn’t be too huffy when things go wrong.

Anyway, in the meantime, all that feedback I receive – or at least the valid stuff – is being sifted into x.x.x bug release versions, converted into hints and tips on my site or added to a list of new stuff for the next version of Feeder, which I’m desperate to start soon, but haven’t had the chance. Ironically, releasing Feeder 1.1 will cut down on the support work that is keeping me from starting it. A month ago I foolishly told a lot of people it would be out in a month. Well guess what – it’ll be out in a month.

I’ll be writing a bit more about the future soon. If I get a chance 😉

For some time now, I’ve been thinking about starting my own blog, or rather I’ve been thinking about not starting my own blog. Friends have convinced me that somebody will read it. My only remaining concerns are whether I have enough time to write anything for it and manage comment spam. We’ll have to see.

Besides, there are reasons to blog regardless of who is reading. I love writing, and the older I get the more I love ranting. I also enjoy other developers’ blogs and since working on Feeder I’ve gained a real interest in podcasting. I don’t think I’ll ever be a podcaster myself, but the whole concept really excites me. Whether it’s a podcast about something or a podcast about nothing it seems much more free and intimate than traditional media and, of course, you don’t need no stinking transmitters. When professional journalists and broadcasters snipe at bloggers and podcasters for being amateurs, you get that sneaky feeling they’re just a little envious.

My intention is for this blog to be mostly about Reinvented Software, things related to Macs and other such geekery, although I’m sure it won’t be limited to that. Eventually I will get around to tweaking the design of the blog into something more personal, but WordPress 1.5’s Kubrick-based theme is good enough for now.

To get this whole blog thing started, here’s a quick introduction to me.