Weks is an Indonesian expression for surprise or confusion. Contrary to popular belief, it is not a correct way to misspell "weeks."
This is the webpage for Zachary West, a computer science student at the University of Central Florida. You can easily contact me via e-mail or AOL IM. I have an insane cat named Gordon and a ridiculous obsession with video games, anime and science fiction.
I prefer to program in Objective-C (of course with Cocoa), but I'm also well-versed in C and PHP. I've programmed in countless languages over the years, but consider the previous three to be my favorites.
I am a big fan of open-source projects, and focus a lot of my efforts on things which fall under the GPL.
Prowl is a Growl client for devices running iPhone OS (the iPhone and iPod Touch). Events generated by Growl on Mac, while using the Prowl plugin, are forwarded to devices running Prowl over the Apple Push Notification Service.
A multi-protocol IM client. Powered by libpurple, though I try to stay out of that entanglement and focus on the Cocoa programming. I've touched a significant amount of the Adium code-space.
Major sub-projects of Adium I'm involved in include:
Using Matt Gemmell's MGTwitterEngine, I added Twitter as a service to Adium. It supports all the usual timeline actions, and provides a very nice, Adium-expected way for Twitter to work.
I rewrote a lot of the group chat display code in Adium, improving the multi-user-chat experience. Along with a significant amount of improvements to how Adium handles group chat bookmarks, I improved the in-development IRC service to be a first-rate service in Adium.
Using the Sparkle+ (or Sparkle 1.5) profile information submitted by (elective) Adium users, this creates elegant graphs to display statistical information. This has been running for a few years now, so the information is worthwhile to look at. This accidentally exposed the Macbook Air before its introduction in 2008. Generally, we hide specific revision information (mostly to keep result counts down), but since this was an entirely new product name, it showed up when someone loaded Adium.
I've largely held a maintenance role for the main Adium website. I generally handle the back-end programming such as setting up or writing the scripts that power the website and trying to maintain order in the third-party applications we use.
I completely rewrote (only saving the SQL) the original Xtras site to make it faster and significantly easier to use. This is one of my more forgotten Adium projects, because over the years not a lot has been done to improve it. I still have a personal TODO list for it, hopefully one day I can get it all up to par.
Tries to combat spam by requiring unknown users respond to an arbitrarily-chosen challenge. Several networks, such as MSN and Yahoo, are plagued by spim. Although this particular plugin doesn't use a really-advanced spam detecting system like a Bayesian filter, it demonstrates how a third-party plugin can implant itself deep inside of the Adium messaging system to modify how and when messages are displayed.
An incredibly minor Dashboard widget I wrote many years ago at the constant prodding of a friend.
My Twitter username is zacwest.