macelleria

Milen & Chris are The Cosmic Machine, the developers behind the brand new app (and still in Beta), EventBox. EventBox attempts to unite all your favorite social sites (like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Pownce and RSS feeds) into a single awesome-looking app for the mac.

Who are "The Cosmic Machine"?

The Cosmic Machine is a limited liability partnership between me (Milen) and my friend Chris.

Is this your first attempt at writing software for the Mac?

We've written other small applications but nothing has been publicly released before, so in a sense, it is our first serious project.

How did you get the idea of EventBox?

It is a kind of strange story. Chris' brother (http://de-online.co.uk/2008/11/08/eventbox) asked him to create an application to view recent Flickr and Facebook photos. In the time, I was more into Digg / Reddit and Twitter. So Chris said that he will be working on this during the summer and I thought a little about unifying both applications - that's where the idea of EventBox was born.

I've read on your site that you are planning on expanding the number of social sites supported. Sites like delicious, lastfm and orkut are indeed needed. How about other popular sites like MySpace, FriendFeed etc?

Currently, we receive a lot of requests from users about more social services. The truth is, we will eventually support most of them, it is just a matter of time. If more people request service X, we will do service X. We've got del.icio.us, last.fm and Orkut on the list. I guess many more services will follow as time passes.

How about the UI? When will we peek at the HUD interface that will make EventBox more compact and streamlined?

When we started designing the UI, we basically had two choices - whether to use CoreAnimation (Leopard's new advanced graphics technology) or just plain Cocoa. It was a bet which we didn't know whether it would pay off - and we think it did. Everything in the main events view is custom and we have full control over it, we can do nice animations, dynamic content sizing, etc. The HUD interface was  in the works and partly working - we've just disabled it for the meantime until it is finished. I cannot give any estimates for the HUD but it is one of the main visible features being worked on as we speak.

Tell us more about Newsgator syncing. I'm an avid user of NetNewsWire and I consider it the best RSS client out there. Is EventBox ready for a huge number of feeds, because NNW is doing a fine job speed-wise maintaining large libraries of RSS feeds.

Our RSS reader is rather simplistic at the moment - but it does the job. NewsGator have an API which allows 3rd parties to sync with it, so you will be able to have NNW, NNW for the iPhone and EventBox all stay in sync. Chris is also looking into support Google Reader but since it does not have an official API, we cannot say with certainty whether it is going to make its way into EventBox or not.

Any plans for an iPhone EventBox companion app?

Internally, EventBox was designer to be portable across the Mac and iPhone. Our current plan is to firstly finish the Mac version, polish it, fix bugs and basically bring out a solid 1.0. Then we can focus on the iPhone companion app.

How hard is it to combine different set of web APIs to a single application?

Our architecture is plugin based - so the answer is, pretty easy as far integration between the services and the main app goes. The different APIs all have their own quirks but there is nothing that cannot be fixed. There is one very annoying move made by the web sites which provide these services (there are a few exceptions) - they restrict what you can do with the API in order have an advantage over a native application.

What apps occupy your dock?

Transmit, Skype, iCal, iTunes, CSSEdit, Xcode, TextMate, Activity Monitor, Terminal, EventBox.
Chris has a very busy dock but I don't remember exactly what apps he has.

That's about it. Feel free to supplement anything else you might want to communicate. Thanks for your time!

We've just slashed the price of EventBox to $15 during the beta period as a compensation to our early adopters. We're looking forward to adding more features to EventBox and pleasing all of our customers.

There is a 14-day trial period so I suggest you download EventBox and try the app for yourself!