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.