Cool, I didn’t know you could just grab entire articles from the IntarWeb and publish them wholesale without even giving an attribution link!

That’s what Rixstep has done?

Scott Anguish, one of the nicest guys on the Intarweb is more than a little upset because Rixstep has repeatedly refused to remove his content which has been ripped of wholesale. What’s worse…

Scott writes

My copyright has been violated by his reproduction. Yes, the DMCA would allow me to get it taken down, and I am exploring that route. But given his track record, I see no way to stop him from doing this. He’s published incorrect and horrible stuff about me, Aaron Hillegass, and others, before.

It is imperative (and the reason I temporarily pulled things down) that long-time readers of Stepwise know RIX stole this.. I do not approve of his doing so. His use does not fall under fair-use, or commentary. He’s simple theft.

I’ve worked 13+ years on supporting developers by maintaining Stepwise (which truly is a labor of love) and I don’t want this theft and misrepresentation to damage that effort.

Rixstep gets traffic by stealing content, misrepresenting the opinions of the authors and doing the whole “keeping it real” thing in the face of millions of new Apple converts.

I must say it’s an interesting marketing step, calling Apple’s customers idiot fanboys while trying to flog them a replacement file manager. It really motivates me to buy it.

Scott Anguish is a pillar of the NeXTStep community. Anything that offends him and, in his own words “makes him sick” should motivate everyone interested in the Mac and especially Cocoa.

The 7th Ironcoder contest was announced today (for some definition of today - damn those pesky time zones). I think this year I actually feel confident enough to take part, even if I accomplish not very much For those who have no idea what it is, each contest selects a theme and Mac OS X API, then gives you 48 hours (real time) to write an app that has both theme and API centrally featured. Check out the Ironcoder site for more info, or take a look at the entries for Ironcoder 5.

Here’s a quick preview of the product I’m currently working on. It’s called Rickshaw and it’s designed for people who like the convenience of sending (large) attachments via e-mail. Using Rickshaw your attachments are stripped from the mail as it is sent and uploaded to your designated server. The attachment is replaced with a URL that allows the recipient to just download what you sent at their leisure.

This product is primarily aimed at people who have to work with large files and need to send them to multiple recipients - avoiding issues with mailbox quotas, mail server file size limits or file type restrictions and so on. More details about how to use the product will follow, but here’s a quick video showing it in action.

Enjoy! (also available as a QuickTime movie)

There’s been a lot of traffic on the MacSB mailing list and on various blogs (e.g. Panic and Atomicbird) about how Apple is handling the release of Leopard in the same way as they did with Tiger, and about how indie developers get the short end of the stick because we don’t see Leopard until our customers do.

I think this is all just jitters.  The people who rush out and by Leopard on day 1 are all early adopters - they have the “bleeding edge” gene anyway, and will understand if it takes a week or two for their favourite app to work correctly.  Sure, things will change between the last seed and what’s shipped, but it’s not going to be anything major.  And yes, your apps might break within the first few days of Leopard being released.  But realistically, if you’ve run your app on the seed at all, I find it hard to believe that it will take long to get it working against the release version.

The other main concern is that developers who get the software as part of their ADC membership don’t get it the same day the general public gets it.  Yeah, that’s a bummer but it’s not really that big a deal.  Chances are good your software will work as intended, and if it doesn’t, it’s only a few weeks’ wait.