Take for instance, MacPorts – a fantastic way of running some F/OSS on OS X.  Doesn’t work.  Experimental support is built in to nightlies… which I guess is getting there.  Little Snitch simply disappeared.  Programs with ktexts – kernel extensions – like SoundFlower and SteerMouse are also dead in the water.

Other more commonly used programs die as well.  MS Office can’t update.  The Aptna IDE is a non-starter.  In fact, you’ll find that a large percentage of your software works in a large percentage of the way you expect but… wait… what’s that?  Why does this particular function no longer work?

Granted, Snow Leopard won’t be out until September probably, so there’s plenty of time for programmers to get their code up to date.  As one of those programmers, I can tell you that it’s going to be a bit of a battle.  I’m running into major roadblocks with Twistori Desktop and the ScreenSaver.framework package that differs a lot from Leopard->Snow Leopard.

In fact, none of your screensavers on Leopard will run in Snow Leopard.  Just an FYI.

Anyway, that’s enough of a rant.  I keep going back and forth between downgrading or not.  I need to start developing heavily in Snow Leopard to make sure that Multiplex and Twistori Desktop are ready.  However, I also need to push solid releases sooner than Snow Leopard will be released to our Leopard install base.

Hmm… what to do…

So there are a lot of links in the first two sentences, but Amy and Thomas (who are now husband and wife) are really incredible people, and were a joy to work with.  Amy is the founder of Slash7, and a force to be reckoned with when it comes to usability design on the web.  Thomas is the man that wrote the JavaScript library scrip.taculo.us – which is immensely popular.  They developed Let’s Freckle together, along with recently publishing their first e-book on JavaScript development.

So they had gone ahead and developed Twistori, which people f-ing love.  Problem was, their users wanted to be able to put in their own keywords, do searches, etc.  So we developed what we hope is an evolving answer – Twistori Desktop.  It allows users to create keyword “clusters”, do instant searches for keywords, and has theme support built in.  It ships with a few themes, but we’re hoping some people will pick up the reigns and get to developing their own themes shortly – we’ll be releasing a *cough* “SDK *cough* shortly, which is simply a CSS/XHTML/JS template that can get developers started.

I’ll write more here later about the integration of Objective-C and WebKit, which is simply stunningly cool.  I’ll be presenting on the subject at an upcoming meeting of Philly Cocoaheads, and will post the slides here after I’m done.

Go try out Twistori Desktop – discounted price, and a nice two week trial!