infinite sushi

On August 3rd, 2002, I released a small AppleScript utility to posts and manage entries of a weblog. It was very simple and worked only with weblogs that supported the MovableType publishing API. It even sported a very ugly application icon. It was a surprising hit, though, and based on numerous feedback I was able to make incremental improvements. Kung-Log went from 1.0.0 to 1.6.1 in just five months.

I soon realized that I would not be able to improve Kung-Log further if I was going to stick with AppleScript, so in January 2003 I rewrote the application from the ground up using Cocoa. Support for additional weblog systems was added in, and each next version found itself enriched with a new feature. Erik Veland designed a new icon as well, which has been in use till now.

By then, Kung-Log was in wide spread use in the MacOSX community and attracted the attention of ground-breaking internet-focused entrepreneur Joichi Ito. I was at that time a post-doc researcher in artificial neural networks, but had become more and more interested in internet-related technologies. Joichi Ito provided the final nudge I needed to expand my foray into the world wide web. I quit academics and worked at the new Six Apart Japan for a few months. Once it was set up, I switched and worked directly for Joi, in his private company, Kula Co. Ltd. On December 24th, 2003, I pushed out a new version of Kung-Log, but renamed as ecto and included many changes. Several months later, it introduced a basic rich text editor. I also formed a partnership with Alex Hung, who has developed a Windows version of ecto.

While at Kula, I also produced two other software applications, endo and 1001. Writing these apps taught me a tremendous amount of Objective-C, Carbon, and Cocoa, as well as objective-oriented design patterns. At the same time, I was heavily involved with Technorati, spending many hours working on their API, increasing my skills in Perl and PHP and learning a lot about web apps.

Last year, in August, I joined Technorati Japan as a full-time employee. Joi also got more involved in Digital Garage, which is the parent company of Technorati Japan. Due to his busy schedule and his many responsibilities, Joi decided to put Kula in the freezer. This effectively meant that ecto once again had become a side-project for me. Even though development on ecto had slowed down, it never stopped. My work on endo and 1001 made me realize that I needed to rewrite ecto once more to fully profit from object-oriented aspects of Objective-C and Cocoa. I also spend countless hours working on a better rich text editor, based on Apple's own Editable WebKit. Most of this work was in collaboration with iBlog's Sarat Kongara.

Now, five years since the initial release of Kung-Log, I'm at a point where I think ecto3 is in decent enough shape to be public alpha. Because I felt most of the old ecto website as well as the support forum contained too many outdated pieces of information, I have decided to do a reset. All the relevant software web pages has been moved to infinite-sushi.com, a web domain I once registered because I found it catchy. Mike Rohde designed a new application icon and new toolbar icons for ecto3. I'm sure Mike will blog soon about the design process behind the application icon. Before I release the alpha version of ecto3, I need to write some documentation on it, about what has yet to be done and what some of the many changes are.

And in response to the numerous messages I have been receiving: Yes, it's a free upgrade.