Mac programming collaborative bookmarks?
Wednesday 7 February 2007 - Filed under mac + programming
I usually like the link selection I get from the Joel Reddit, which usually has good software-related essays at the top. It seems to avoid links to uninformed rants about consumer electronics or industry politics, for which I have no use.
I’d like a social links site for software professionals on the Mac – does one exist?
Or am I missing the point of these sites, and there’s a feature in each of them to get only the links I want?
I’m curious – how do you get your mac-related links?
Update: From the comments and some emails, I heard three main ways. A few people just rely on the feeds they check regularly, trusting that if something’s interesting enough, eventually someone they read will post about it. This was basically my strategy.
A few other people plugged Scott Stevenson’s Cocoablogs.com, which I remember seeing a while back but overlooked when I wrote this post. He’s doing a good job of collecting interesting links and highlighting blogs you might want to check out – keep an eye on that site. To paraphrase Scott, he wants cocoablogs to be the ‘anti-digg’, a site where you can guarantee someone actually read the article before they recommend it to you. I’d say that’s a good idea – I don’t have patience for mob voting.
Finally, another suggestion was to follow the ‘cocoa’ tag on del.icio.us, something else I should have thought of – this is nice and social like digg and reddit, but it seems less likely that someone will tag an article they haven’t read, so I think it’s a stronger vote.
Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions!
2007-02-07 » mike
7 February 2007 @ 3:58 pm
Interesting idea.. I looked at my bookmarks – http://www.cocoadev.com/ and http://osx.hyperjeff.net/reference/CocoaArticles.php
7 February 2007 @ 4:07 pm
Something like macdev.reddit.com sounds pretty cool. But in the meantime, Scott is doing a pretty darned good job of aggregating interesting links:
http://cocoablogs.com/
I basically get my “links” from CocoaBlogs, Daring Fireball, and a variety of direct delicious feeds from people I trust to find cool stuff :)
7 February 2007 @ 5:25 pm
Yea, I was going to suggest cocoablogs as well.
7 February 2007 @ 6:58 pm
To answer the last part of your question “how do you get your mac-related links?”–
All my information is managed in DEVONagent and DEVONthink Pro Office and I’ve never looked back.
Maybe this will help you maybe it will hinder you — but there are a lot of motivators that pushed me this direction.
Manual aggregation and social bookmarking is a great way to find popular content. And often that’s what we care about — e.g. implementing the SyncServices API for the first time that several people have done before… If that were the whole picture I’d stop typing now and toss out a URL or two. But much like GTD apps, when you’ve tried them all and none of them cater to your workflow, you write your own.
Regardless of how hot Cocoa Blogs becomes, we’ve come to grips with the fact there is no one-stop shop on the net for information… So what can you do aside from hoping someone else has already social bookmarked what you’re looking for or hoping the aggregator didn’t gloss over something that would be important to you but dismissive to them?
There actually are things you can do to kill your own dinner instead of waiting for enough food to arrive to the table that simply looking up will find. I liken this to RSS feeds of other peoples’ aggregated content. It’s perfectly fine, but I can’t place any faith on relying on any single source to decide what I might find useful. No offense to Scott, I think his investment is wonderful and nearly everything that comes from him I find worthwhile (for me if not at the very least the community at large) — the question really is, maybe what is worthwhile to me is different then what is worthwhile to Scott — maybe I find more or less things worthwhile — maybe I like his Cocoa threads but I don’t want to be bothered with the Rails discussion — maybe I work in an unrelated field, yet I want to find relationships between some essence of Mac Development and this unrelated field. And this is often the case with different skill level developers too. You get a lot of content aimed at the Cocoa veteran and at the beginner, but not a lot in-between (it’s often hard to classify content that is not either extreme of course). We still depend on the Internet to largely find us 10.4+ developer content as most of the hardcopy is playing catch-up.
IMHO innovation, new ideas, and relationship discoveries come from largely unpopular on-topic information, connected queries, data being in the same search system, and reliable searching that focuses on a specific data-set (not the whole system, not the whole ebook) in an advanced way (aka more advanced than a pure search index like Spotlight). If I can’t auto-classify information, conduct fuzzy searches, example connected node graphs based on topics generated from interested words, conduct layered filtering on information, I don’t have a lot of hope in unearthing non-obvious stuff. Maybe this is a jaded remark considering that prior to using said products I didn’t have that capability, but I think it just shows that using it means I can’t just go back to not using it.
If you tune your system upfront, it carves a lot of time away from sifting through unfiltered content yourself when we know most filtering of searches is simply blatant busy work.
I think manual aggregation gained its popularity due to the inadequacies of search engines providing you popular content first when you’re digging for that rare gem, ‘web site optimization’, adword influence, spam side by side real links, link portal dead ends side by side the former, similar pages, etc. And then in the end I have a bunch of isolated searches that I must discover relationships to. Most of us do this in our head or with data-disconnected assistance tools like mindmappers, notepads and otherwise, but this internalized process due to disjoint datasets is hugely time-consuming… Probably a lot of truth why Scott feels he must move to the DF RSS subscription model above and beyond the excellent work he has done on the tutorials which are extremely dull to produce if you are a programmer and not a tech writer.
If I can automate something I manually do in an effective manner, I’ll go for the (automated) solution that lets me focus on real work everytime. This is about letting the computer do the first line of filtering so that you are left with a much smaller data-set with more useful content to scrutinize and hence less time doing busy work.
Maybe this is like killing an ant with a sledgehammer but I recognize I’m spending an awful lot more time working on my work and playing with my kids then pruning all the data that comes into my system with no programmatic assistance.
Example search set window (http://flickr.com/photos/mgrimes/368352517/)
7 February 2007 @ 7:00 pm
Wow, Mark, that’s quite a detailed answer – clearly you’ve given this a lot of thought. I’ll probably try out DevonAgent, but I can almost guarantee that I’ll find an excuse in the end not to pay $49. (Sadly, I can’t say my time is worth more, not with the stipend I get).
Thanks for the pointers. You brought up a very important point about content that’s interesting for beginners being useless for more experienced devs. There ought to be a way to find the balance!
7 February 2007 @ 7:22 pm
Thanks to everyone who pointed out cocoablogs also – I have to admit it’d fallen off my radar. I’ve reached my procrastination limit for the day, so I’ll have to revisit this tomorrow. I’ll update the post if I find an answer to my question.
8 February 2007 @ 5:17 am
I’d also be interested in a similar “best of the web/mailing list” feed for Mac-using academics, especially scientists. I imagine it pointing to things like the announcement Gerben would no longer be publicly maintaining gwTeX, Apple’s many academic initiatives an schemes, numerical programming (esp. on OS X), ports of specific tools in astrophysics, bioinformatics, other Mac-heavy fields, etc. There’s a plurality of MacBooks at every conference I go to now, and I get the feeling such a site would be really popular. Of interest to you, Mike?
8 February 2007 @ 1:10 pm
Michael, the “MacResearch” site – http://macresearch.org/ might be what you’re looking for, although I have to admit I don’t subscribe. Their focus is on people who do research on their macs – actual computation on the mac, and not the broader audience of people who do research and just use macs.
Maybe there is room for a site like you describe..
18 February 2007 @ 3:15 pm
Yeah, I guess that’s what something like what I was imagining. Thanks for the pointer.