Notes From Andy

This is Steve Gehrman's idea, not mine. From an interview with The Apple Blog:

TAB: How do you find Apple’s bug reporting system? Is it as effective and efficient as their end user products?

SG: It’s nothing special. It’s just a web form. It’s actually not that great as it’s not as easy as just sending an email. You can’t easily just paste in a screenshot for example. It’s also kind of slow and requires you to upload a system profiler report, and you have to fill in the OS X build number. I wish it was a client app that would just find that info on it’s own.

Me too. I bet it would make me more willing to submit bug reports — maybe even enjoy them the way I enjoy blog posting with MarsEdit.

Steve Gehrman is the author of the very highly regarded Path Finder.

At 6:30 AM there was a small line for the iPhone 3GS at the 14th St. Apple Store. I don't know if any of these people camped out all night like they did at the 5th Ave. store.

I'm signed up to get a new iPhone at this store, but that's not why I went out there at 6:30. I just happened to be up, and since I live half a block away it was just a matter of throwing on pants and shoes.

I was about to climb back into bed after posting this, but I just discovered the store is actually opening early today, at 7:00 — which was two minutes ago. Maybe I should head back out there and get my phone.

There are times when I'd like to find out the CocoaBuilder URL corresponding to a message I'm reading in Mail. For example, say I'm composing a message to cocoa-dev and I want to refer to an earlier thread that was relevant for some reason — maybe to say "this was already discussed to death <here>", or "I'm trying the code so-and-so posted <here> and I can't get it to work".

Another example: I might be doing something in my code based on what someone wrote on cocoa-dev, and I want to paste a URL into my comments for attribution and/or explanatory purposes.

Or maybe I want to include the link in a blog post, or in a tweet.

For whatever reason, I'm looking at something in Mail and I want to get the URL for it. If it's very recent I might just go to CocoaBuilder.com and page backward in time until I find it. But if not, I'll have to enter search terms and poke around until I find the thread I want.

It would be much more convenient if there were a little app sitting in my Dock that I could drag the Mail message to. The app would construct a search that is likely to find the message I want and it would take me to my web browser to show me the search results. (Instead of using CocoaBuilder's search feature, I would prefer to use Google with a site:cocoabuilder.com option, but I think this violates Google's terms of usage.)

Why would I be looking at the message in Mail? Why wouldn't I have searched for it in CocoaBuilder in the first place? The reason is that Mail does very fast substring searches against a local index, whereas CocoaBuilder only does keyword searches, has more latency, and can't search based on email addresses since those are stripped out of the archives. Searching in Mail can be much faster if you're pretty sure you have the messages you want in your mail archives.

I've had this idea for a while, but the reason I felt like posting it now was a recent thread on cocoa-dev. If this app had existed already, I could have used it to help me link to that thread — well, except for the fact that I wouldn't have written this in the first place.