What's it all about, Alfie?

I've been reading a bit about Apple's first quarter earnings call today, and I am just stunned. The numbers and the graphs are all impressive, but it's the real scale that's blowing me away. Here's this (supposedly) niche company that had profits in the first quarter greater than Google's revenue. Amazing. Really.

And in my book, it could not happen to a better company. iBooks Author. The iBooks Textbooks. The hardware, and the tools. Simply amazing. Catering to the creative person in all of us has certainly made them incredibly wealthy. And the stories of what they did for their people, and the citizens of Japan after the earthquake - that's a company that's not just about making a buck.

It's good to see good karma generating good outcomes.

This morning, the Google Chrome team released 18.0.1017.2 and the release notes indicate it's got several nice things like the latest V8 javascript engine (3.8.7.1) as well as several nice-to-haves like popup window fixes and flashing window fixes on the Mac. Nice to see the improvement in the V8 engine, as that's where so much of the work is going these days - heavy javascript on the client for thin client deployments.

Hope they keep up the good work.

Today at their little press get together, Apple released iBooks Author and I have to say, I'm a little envious of my teacher friends that get to use this to make their notes and ideas come alive. When I was back at Auburn University, I taught Electrical Engineering, and every class I taught, I always made really extensive notes to make sure that my lectures all "worked", and fit in the time for each class. Sure, some were a little long, but not too many, and after the first few weeks of teaching, you get to know how much you can cover.

The beauty of iBooks Author is that I could do this same thing on my Mac, give it to the students, and then there's never a reason to take notes. It's all there. Sure, it's maybe not as polished as some books, but it's there, it's free, and students would eat it up because it means never making mistakes in the copying of examples, all the things I might skip through in class would be laid out there to everyone to see.

Plus, it's possible to put multimedia in the books, and I could put simulation results, visualization movies, all the things that I had to hope they'd get form doing this on their own.

I got iBooks Author today because I'm convinced that even if I don't do a lot with it, I want to do a lot with it, and that's the important thing. Who knows? Maybe it'll get me back in the classroom.

This morning Boing Boing had a link to this wonderful explanation of the creepiest aspects of the SOPA/PIPA legislation that's working it's way through the House and Senate. As with the other Khan Academy videos I've seen, it's excellent - what's new is only the subject matter. And in this case, the essential points of this very bad legislation.

What amazes me is not that this was written - government is pushed by money, that's a given. No, it's that they made it like so much other legislation with regards to illegal activity - an accomplice is as guilty as the perpetrator. But in the world of computers, you can easily force an accomplice without their knowledge - posting to a blog, posting in general.

That's the thing that I think the law hasn't caught up to: The ability for someone to implicate another so easily. It's got to be understood that there's a difference between supporting the activity, and supporting the mechanism of the support (posting). But I have no belief that they'll get this right in the next 20 years. It's just not their technology.

So I'm sad to say that I'll live in a time when the law makers are hopelessly out of date with the technology I make a living from. Sad.

Without question, the best multi-protocol IM client for Mac OS X has got to be Adium, and today they tweeted that a few days ago, they released a release candidate for 1.5. This is just one of those amazing programs for the Mac that Just Works and while it's not on the kind of release schedule that, say, Google Chrome is, it's stable, works well, and I've never had a problem with it. Just amazing.

I've been running the different 1.5 betas for a while, but it'll be nice to see official 1.5 support as it means that it's mainline. Nice to see.

This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 18.0.1010.0 was out, and the release notes have a few nice things like PDF rotation and a few Mac-specific fixes as well. Good to see these user-experience additions and fixes, but I'm still waiting to see if Google tries to put in something that again opens up the wild development in browser technology again. Can't imagine what it'd be, but that's part of the fun!

This morning Google Chrome dev 17.0.963.26 was released and the release notes indicate the the biggies this time were a new V8 Javascript engine - 3.7.12.12, and a few Mac-specific Lion bugs were felt with. In all, a nice update, but nothing major, which is nice to see. Again, stability means it's nearing a big release, or we are getting to the point that browsers are feature complete. It'll be interesting to see what the Google Guys come up with next.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 17.0.963.2 was out and there were just a few updates, but it appears that it's a standard bug-fix release. Interesting to see if this means we're nearing the end of this release cycle and about to jump major versions again. It'll be interesting because it's not been that long for this cycle, and there haven't been that many significant changes. If so, it might mean that we're nearing the end of the real development for Chrome. That would be interesting to see.

This morning I saw that after a significant period of silence the Google Chrome team released dev 17.0.963.0 with some interesting release notes. I like that the V8 Javascript Engine has been updated to 3.7.12.6, several WebKit rendering bugs fixed, and even better fonts for PDF docs. Nice update.

It's been an interesting lapse in releases, not that it's bad, per se, but that it seems they were doing other things, or these additions have been more significant. If other things, then it's certainly understandable, and if these were especially difficult, or a change of people involved, then that's easy to understand as well. It'll be interesting to see if they come more frequent, or continue to slide.

This morning I saw that Growl 1.3.2 was out in the Mac App Store. There were several fixes, and I have to hand it to The_Tick, and the rest of the Growl crew on IRC - they have put up with a lot of grief on going semi-pro, and have done a nice job of handling the complaints.

I'm pleased with what they have done with the new code, and a few bucks isn't a lot to get quality software, so I can't blame them at all. It's got to pay for itself. Anyway, nice update to the sticky notifications, and the other fixes.