The first day was very successful. Donovan and I hacked on a PyObjC app that performs multi-document searching and allows for saving of the group of files to be searched over. It's also multi-document, so more than one search can be going on at the same time.

All this work has given me a lot of ideas for Thumbscrew, like:

• Ditch threads. Since they can't be killed cleanly, I'll use a subprocess, which involves...
• Make the Thumbnailer helper class a standalong app that will be called via NSTask to do the work, communicating with Thumbscrew over an NSPipe.
• As a side goal, I've got the Thumbnailer class mostly rewritten in ObjC as an exercise, but I found that the Python bindings for CoreGraphics were heavily simplified (to the point where it's hard to unravel exactly what steps go into CoreGraphics.CGImageImport, for instance). This caused me to consider rethinking the way I do all of my image processing, so that I'd be using all the straight Cocoa wrappers of CoreGraphics. This, heh, actually has another side benefit: Once my app is completely written using Cocoa, I could easily port the application to any language that supports it via a bridge of some kind. Like OpenMCL, or even, ObjC.

The sprinting went on well into the night; several of us came back to the Cafritz Center after dinner, and worked until midnight. The proud few who stayed around were myself, Ted Leung, Kragen Sitaker, Donovan Preston, and Phil Frost. Bob missed his earlier train, so didn't arrive until 1:30 or so.