Currently playing song: “Glass Enclosure” by Bud Powell on The Complete Blue Note and Roost Recordings (Disc 2).

I’m currently in our hotel room on the 29th floor of the Copley Marriott. We’re staying here on Lisa’s points this weekend for Kate’s wedding. I’ve been dialed in all morning, trying and failing to get to my work email via the web. Fortunately the presentation I’m working on is mostly offline in a notebook—a paper one, not a laptop—so it hasn’t stopped me much.

It’s hard to work, though. The view from the windows is amazing:

July 19, 2001: Apple: How to Bury an Important Announcement. A year ago today I was blown away that Steve Jobs announced baked in support for SOAP and XML-RPC in Mac OS X and tried to explain why. I think it’s still the most read story on my page ever, though that statistic is hard to measure now that I’ve switched to shorter news items rather than one update a day.

A few months later Mac OS X 10.1 came out, and the next Monday I had released my first script to use SOAP, which tied together Manila and the text editing app in Mac OS X. Since then I’ve glued iTunes and Manila together, written an entire front end app for Manila posting, and diversified into output formatting for OmniOutliner. Today I announced glue for Amazon web services. It’s fun to think about how a lot of the last year has turned on that one “wow” moment watching the MacWorld keynote.

Mark Pilgrim wraps up “30 Days to a More Accessible Weblog,” the longest running and most useful targeted discussion of why standards for accessibility matter and how to implement them that’s ever written. I’m glad he’s through, because I’m about 20 days behind in implementing his recommendations and the backlog was growing. Still, we owe him a big big big round of thanks. Someone give that man a lot of money.

On a related note, I’ve forgiven Mark for winning our category in the 2001 Scripting News Awards. In the last month he’s done more service for the weblogging community than I will in a long time.

The AmazonHandler script is an AppleScript glue script for the Amazon web services released this week. It uses the built in SOAP capabilities of AppleScript and requires Mac OS X 10.1 or higher to operate. It requires my SOAPXMLRPCHandler script library. Both scripts are available from my scripts page.

I’m working on a sample script to illustrate using Amazon web services from AppleScript with my glue. As usual, it’s simple to request the information, and the glue script I posted works for that; now I need to demonstrate wading through the copious information that Amazon returns to make it really useful.