This is good news. Follow the link above to find out about the changes happening to RubyCocoa. It has jumped from 0.50 to 0.90 and the changes are good. And with RubyCocoa being included in Leopard and with Apple giving it support, RubyCocoa is on its way up.

I’ve been involved in another project for awhile and I wanted to tell you about it. The project is Agenda Redux. Basically, we are creating a new version of Lotus Agenda for the web. My friend Sonjaya Tandon started up the project and ask me to be a part of it. Recreating something like Agenda is something I’ve wanted to do for awhile, so I had to be a part of it. Sonjaya used to work on Agenda when he worked for Lotus and we worked together in Park City. Plus, we’re doing it in Ruby on Rails, so that’s bonus. I invite you to google Lotus Agenda and find out what it’s about. No personal information manager since has been able to do what Agenda could do. People still use it and go to great lengths to get an old text based UI application running under Windows, Linux, OS X, you name it. That’s how good it is. Check it out and follow the Agenda Redux project. We’re still in the early stages, but things are moving along nicely.

We interrupt the current “All PackRat All The Time” theme for this blog for an announcement. This Wednesday (March 8th), I’ll be driving down to Provo to give my Ruby Cocoa presentation to the BYU Ruby Users Group. I’ll probably have some repeat visitors from URUG, but it will interesting to meet some more Ruby people interested in Cocoa.

For some reason, the folks down in Provo seem to be a little more interested in non mainstream technologies like Ruby, NeXT (in its day) and hence Cocoa, etc. I wonder why that is? As a University of Utah alumni, that bothers me a bit. Are the Utes turning out Java, .NET lemmings? The answer is probably another post, but you can look at Alan Kay and his talk entitled “Are Computer Science and Software Engineering Oxymorons?”. He gave this talk at the University of Utah last month and I found it quite interesting.

While preparing for my URUG presentation tonight, I found that my ICal Ruby module now longer worked under Tiger. I found the that the location of the files had changed and that the .ics files had changed into XML. So I’ve corrected this and put a new link up in the Developers section of the infiniteNIL website. The old version is still available as well.

I’m giving a presentation on RubyCocoa at URUG tonight. Basically it’s the same presentation I gave at O’Reilly’s Mac Dev 2003 conference, but brought up to date. I’m looking forward to seeing what the Ruby guys think about Cocoa. I think they’ll find it exciting.

I’ll be giving the same presentation at the BYU Ruby group in February.

Last night we had the inaugural URUG meeting at Ben Galbraith’s house. Jamis Buck of 37signals fame is the founder and we had a good discussion about various aspects of Ruby and what we want to do with the group. Between Jamis and Ben, the group has some great connections, so hopefully we can get some great speakers like Ben has been able to do for UJUG. I will probably be giving a presentation on RubyCocoa at some point.

37signals released Backpack today, which is their personal information manager web app. It looks pretty good. You should definitely check it out if you’re looking for something to help you get organized. Not only that, it is written in the amazing Ruby on Rails. I wish it had some of the features of the old Lotus Agenda, but maybe that’s a good thing

Jamis Buck works for 37signals and is one of the developers on Backpack. He lives down in Provo and is starting a new Utah Ruby User’s Group, which I’m excited about. The first meeting should be this month, somewhere in south Salt Lake, which I’m very happy about. Finally, some cutting edge technology in Salt Lake. Now, we need to get a Cocoa developers group going.