Well, it’s been several weeks in the making, and it’s finally time to unleash it to the world: Introducing Statusphere 1.0.0.0.0.0, a super-awesome wicked bad-ass app I wrote to randomize and rotate iChat and Adium status messages.

Allow me to elaborate:

There are individuals in this world who like making their AIM status messages—a.k.a. “Away” messages and “Available” messages—stupid quotes or one-liners or random tidbits of nonsense to delight and entertain, enlighten and inform, insult and harass, etc., their buddies who, for whatever psychiatrically-studiable reasons, like to digitally stalk their friends by obsessively reading their statuses.

I, obviously, am one of those individuals.

My problem: My indecisiveness often forced me to settle with the default “Away” away message, since I couldn’t pick which one-liner—from the many quotes, jokes, facts, etc., that I have accumulated over the years—to set before I needed to leave my computer and attend to the other matters of life (what few of them there are).

I also like to use status messages to convey my “mode”—if I’m writing, for instance, I like my status message to be a quote (funny, witty, insightful, whatever) about writing. But I had the same problem: which to use?!

Often, I wanted to use many—they’re all good; why be forced to pick one?

To solve this dilemma, I wrote an AppleScript to automatically set a status message for me: I create a text file containing a list of the messages I’d want to use—one per line—and then the AppleScript would randomly select one and set it as my status. I took it a step further: The AppleScript would then randomly pick and set another message from the list after a certain interval (ten minutes, twenty minutes, etc.).

I just kept working on the thing until my buddy Dan Kuehling pointed me in the direction of Xcode/Interface Builder, which can be utilized as AppleScript Studio, a tool to create a GUI front-end to AppleScript applications.

Several obsessive days and 755 lines of code later, Statusphere was born: a feature-full GUI app that makes it easy to rotate and randomize status messages in both iChat and Adium. What was supposed to be a little script to solve an annoying problem of mine turned into a user-friendly solution ready to be packaged and enjoyed by the masses.

So today I release it publicly, for you, the masses, complete with several pre-compiled status message lists, and a price tag of $0.00.

Here’s the feature run-down:

• Adium support!!! (OMG!) - check it in Statusphere Preferences
• Rotation interval selection
• “Set Random Status” button to set a random status without turning on the rotation mode
• ‘Current Status’ box to see what status message is currently being displayed in iChat/Adium
• ‘New List’ button/feature
• ‘Skip’ button, to skip a currently-selected status message if you don’t like it or something
• Message list editor (the little button next to the message list location box) to edit your message list text file directly in Statusphere
• Countdown timer until Statusphere displays the next random status
• Preferences panel to set what apps to control (iChat, Adium) AND an option to specify how you’ll select a messages list on startup: either choose a list file, or set a default one
• Preference option to refresh your messages list from the messages file at a certain interval
• ‘mini’ window that launches when you turn on the rotation feature, and shows you your current status and when the next random status will be set, and allows you to skip the current status

I’m sure there’s more stuff, too, I’m just too lazy to write it all.

So without further ado, I present Statusphere 1.0.0.0.0.0! Download it, give it a whirl, and ping me with any bugs/feature requests/whatever.

2.0 is already in the works, and it’s gonna be “da’ bomb.”

As much as a piece of software can be “da’ bomb” without getting me sent to Gitmo.

Enjoy!

1. He’s against gun control laws, so citizens will be able to defend themselves better because everyone will own a gun.

2. He wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, which will help decrease unemployment by creating an influx of unwanted babies and thus more social worker and orphanage management jobs.

3. He wants to encourage home-schooling, so students won’t have to worry about making friends or taking showers, and the country’s over-paid teachers will finally have to get real jobs.

4. He wants to eliminate federal programs that help the poor, causing all of them to freeze or starve to death, eradicating poverty entirely.

5. He’s a rich white guy, and that would automatically make him a good president, right?

6. While the rest of the developed world is moving towards more socialized, economically-balanced government involvement, he wants to go in the opposite direction, reversing decades of progressive advancements — making us the hip, rebellious, non-conformist country that will get all the girls.

7. He wants to eliminate federal regulations on business, allowing them to employ children, cut back on safety procedures, and lower workers’ pay so struggling business owners can finally afford the yachts for their summer homes in the Hamptons.

8. He places ultimate faith in the power of the free market, implicitly relying on trickle-down economics, an approach that worked so well for Reagan and Bush.

9. He wants to give local government nearly all authority, allowing them to return to enacting policies like the federally-squashed Jim Crow laws without the feds getting all up in their grills.

10. Most people really don’t know what Ron Paul stands for, so you can say you support him without sounding like an idiot.

11. He wants to eliminate the IRS and essential taxes, forcing government officials to raise money from lemonade stands and janitorial jobs, teaching them the value of an honest day’s work.

12. His political ideology is one step to the left of fascism, so he probably wouldn’t have been friends with Hitler.

13. He’s Libertarian, which sounds almost like “liberal.”

14. It’s a lot easier to pick the radical underdog candidate than it is to actually study the issues and pick the best candidate.

15. He’ll never win the election, so you’ll always be able to say “if Ron Paul was president, things would be better,” since no one could ever prove you wrong.

I have a long post over at my personal blog detailing some facts about myself (I’m a drug addict!) in which you may or may not be interested.

Check it out if you’ve got time.

From now on, Pourhadi.com will be my official business-y site, and DanPourhadi.com will be all personal stuff. Update bookmarks and RSS accordingly.

The server crashed.

The RAID backup system failed.

The website is gone.

Hooray for redundancy.

I’ll be spending most of today trying to fix this place. Check back again soon.