PyObjC combines Cocoa, the greatest set of programming frameworks ever, with the flexibility and power of Python.

These are the slides, with notes, from a Blitz Talk I gave at C4[3].

I'm at the C4 conference, and one of the questions asked of the panel was what they used for email, hosting, version control, and the like. The panel had good answers.

Here's what I'm using.

Talking with Wolf Rentzsch after the CAWUG meeting today, I mused about the upcoming Snow Leopard release, which is mostly internal improvements relating to performance, and few user-facing features announced so far (the chief being Exchange support).

Considering that it's the "other" DVCS often considered along with Git and Mercurial, I thought I'd give Bazaar a try.

It's not working out so well so far. I guess I'm too used to Hg; I found its workflow agreeable.

I'm working on a few programs using PyObjC. Some of the neat cool stuff will be Leopard-only, but there are some utility programs that I'd like to have working on Tiger as well.

It'd be nice to do all the development with Leopard running.

I've always thought that Emacs was an interesting editor (development platform?) since it is extensible in the same programming language it's written in: Emacs-Lisp. Not only that, but you can extend it at runtime, right while you're using it.

I've wondered: What if the same thing could be done with a Python program on OS X. You could even start with a minimal program, and add functionality to it while running it, saving the intermediate results to disk so that the next time you start the program, you start up with all the state and functionality that was there before.

At the very least, it'd be nice to have a robust Python interpreter running concurrently and inside of the program under consideration.

HAS commented that I could track changes to the player state of iTunes using NSDistributedNotificationCenter.

I've gone ahead and made changes to the iTunesBriged code to show how to do that. Now, whenever iTunes changes state, whether it's via the iTunesBridged application or by directly manipulating iTunes, the title of the Play/Pause button changes and the current track name is listed in the text box.

As mentioned in that comment, Notification Watcher is a great app for observing distributed notifications. It made it really easy to figure out what iTunes was sending and what data was in the userInfo.

Thanks for the comment, and the idea!

Get iTunesBridged source downloads, which can be cloned with Mercurial or downloaded as a tarball.

Thanks to Dave Dribin, and his analysis of git vs. Mercurial, I decided to give Mercurial a try.

It turns out I rather like it! I'd been keeping a lot of my work in Subversion, which is a pretty good centralized source code management system, but the usual way of using it seemed so heavy: branches and tags and all kinds of operations took big URLs.

Well, Jason gave me a bit of a challenge on his Twitter, and so that got me to doing something I'd meant to do for a while.

I've wanted to mess around with the new Python bindings, and so I booted up Leopard and settled in with XCode. My goal was to duplicate a demonstration of Scripting Bridge that Wolf had done at PSIG, except in Python.

Mike Lee over at Delicious Monster has come up with an idea that I heartily approve of. A campaign to raise donations for the Madagascar Fauna Group.

Viral internet conservation combined with interesting ways for independent software developers to make a difference.

It's a great way to help improve the world we live in. Join Club Thievey. I did.