words by patrick

It’s been almost 2 months since my last post, so I thought I’d make a status update on what I’ve been up to.

I finished my 4th year of my program, with one more to go. Next year I’m going to get to take some awesome courses, included another Advanced Artificial Intelligence course and more importantly, my final project / research project. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do for that. Being partial to Mac OS X, I’d like to do something that I could write a nice Cocoa interface for. I’m kind interested in doing something with OCR (Wouldn’t it be great to break all those stupid captcha image fields?), AI, Neural Nets, or HCI (Mmm, pie menus). If you have suggestions please let me know.

This summer is shaping up to be pretty awesome. Although my Google Summer of Code application to write unit tests for Adium was accepted, I had to turn it down as I was offered an internship with Apple. As honoured as I would be to get a chance to work with the Adium team, the opportunity to work at “the mothership” is one of that no CS student can turn down. It is certainly a huge opportunity for me, and I hope to do my best to impress, learn and produce at Apple. That being said, I’m taking off for Cupertino, CA, on Sunday. I’m very excited to meet all the other interns and start work.

Further, I’ve also been lucky enough to receive a WWDC Scholarship. I don’t know how much of the conference I’ll be able to attend while working, but I’ll certainly be around. It sounds like a couple members of the Adium team are going to be there, so if a meet-up happens, you can count on me to get some photos.

That’s all for now, more updates to follow.

There are a bazillion rumours floating around on the internet about what is going to be announced at WWDC next week. Everything from an Apple cell phone to Core 2 Duo “Mac Pro” machines, to the “iTunes Movie Store” and more. Hardware always seems to attract the rumour-mongers, but after getting more involved with programming for OS X I am finding myself much more interested in the obvious: Leopard, the next generation of Mac OS X. This might also be because I recently bought a MacBook, and thus don’t and won’t really care about hardware for a while.

There’s a lot of big, big things Apple could do Leopard, since they stated they want to slow down major releases. In my mind, slower releases is akin to having bigger major releases. That said, I’m thinking Leopard is going to pretty big and special so that it has a longer life-span.

Here’s my short, crazy unrealistic wish-list:

• Xcode 3 will be open-sourced, and will be able to benefit from the community just like WebKit already has.
• Leopard will FTFF (”Fix the Fucking Finder”, for the uninitiated) but it will go further than that. The entire OS will receive an slight appearance overhaul, and improve the oh-so-elusive UI consistency that is lacking in Tiger.
• Part of the new UI will have BeOS style window title bars. Okay, I know this isn’t likely… but they are just so much nicer and more efficient.
• Quartz 2D Extreme will be turned on. And it will kick ass.
• Leopard Light - Apple will offer a stripped down Mac OS X that can run nicely on older/smaller systems.